“Coming Out Fat,” Essay and Photos, Willie Carver Jr.

Weeks ago, I stood naked in an apartment in downtown Louisville, just a few blocks from the Louisville Free Public Library, which holds copies of my first collection of poetry—Gay Poems for Red States—a collection that often views my experience of life through the eyes of my child self.

Standing here, I did not feel like a child, though I did feel new.

Even though this wasn’t my first time here.

A little over a year before this, I had come to this same location under similar pretenses—to have my body photographed.

And here is what happened: The photographer felt masculine in a traditional way—muscular, hairy, dark hair and pupils. His presence was calm and secure; neither his eyes nor face reflected my discomfort. His studio was set up in the front of his apartment, where someone else might have made a living room. The space was spartan and functional: tiled floor, wooden table, walls covered with beautiful prints of bodies in various states of undress. Thin bodies. Thick bodies. Fat bodies. Bondage, exposure, and careful, curated concealment. The space overflowed with green things growing from planters, none of which were flowering.

He asked questions. I kept saying, “Whatever you think … you’re the artist. ”

I stood in my underwear, waiting for him to ask me to remove them, hoping he would.

He did not.

And in my body was tension caving in like a convex mirror trying to name my limits and definition.

My standing, I thought, put the fatness of my body on display, emphasized it, pointed at it.

My sitting, I thought, suggested I was so fat I couldn’t stand, arguing a weakness, mocking me.

The space—somewhere fun and buzzing with energy—suggested I somehow wasn’t. As if my body would oppose the very beauty or sexiness I hoped to find here and might capture with this photographer.

Even the photographer, named Josh like my husband, was a body in the room with my body. A beautiful body by any estimation—taut, lined, sure. I felt defined against him. I felt fat against him.

And my fat did not feel beautiful.

He didn’t treat me like I was not beautiful. In fact, as I poured my heart in small sips of scattered sentences addressing what the experience had meant to me, he said something along the lines of, “Your body is great. You look like all kinds of bear daddy types I know.” It was perfunctory, certain. His tone said, Surely you know this already.
Like perhaps I was tall and somehow seemed unaware of it.

I could not hear those words.

I came out loud and unflinchingly at the age of eighteen. I have been steadfast, proud, first in line at Pride Festivals. Sat on every queer panel I found. But something was wrong. Has been wrong for years. Something tied to who I am, both as a queer person, a person experiencing gender, and a person with a body.

A man with a body.

A fat body.

When I got the photos a couple of weeks later, just as I couldn’t hear his words, I could not see the pictures. They were behind a link, unopened for days. When I finally clicked it, I flipped through them quickly. There was panic. It was hot. High pulse. Untethered. Like a wave was pulling me out to sea. I could feel it pulling me out, and fat as I was, I would not swim back to safety.

I remember the physical feeling of wanting to put my hands in front of the screen, like I was hiding the images from people, even though I was lying in bed completely alone.

I was hiding them from myself.

And the ghosts standing behind me.

Inside me.

Here are four photos from that collection:

(Photo credits: Josh Tyson, 2024)

I didn’t share them with anyone. Not even my husband.

The photography studio asked if I wanted to share one online with them. I chose one that showed off my shoulders and arms, a photo that avoided my curves, my breasts, my stomach and its copious stretch marks. In other words, a photo that avoided my fat.

(Photo credit: Josh Tyson, 2024)

In it, my cross arms protected the body cropped below them.

As if they were waiting for an attack.

A disingenuous story for a photoshoot hoping to work on my body positivity.

And that story is an old one.

When I received the photos, I was flooded by the memory of the first time I had sex.

This is how stories work—both those we’re working through in the foreground of our mind and those already planted deep in the body. They pull on the strings of other stories. They run and join. They collapse together and gain gravity until they rush into an older river.

One of my oldest rivers was that first sexual encounter. Freshman year of college. And the photoshoot was pulling at it, dripping into it, laying on it.

So I did what writers do. I wrote about it.

This is that story. That underground river.

Soft—

It’s not as if I hadn’t seen him staring when I crossed the stone patio that divided the smokers hovering near the dorm breezeway from the rest of campus. It’s just that I couldn’t bring myself to believe in what seemed to draw his stare. He was an upperclassman with a beard, smoking a cigarette and leaning back against the thin metal railings fastened above the cement. 

And he was watching me.

So I invented whatever reasons I needed to reconcile those intense eyes with my body—

Maybe he thinks he knows me.

Maybe I look like somebody else.

Maybe his eye just fell there.

Honestly, nineteen-year-old, fat, gay, sissy boy from the head of a holler as I was, I’m surprised I even responded at all when, only days later, he positioned the muscles of his hairy calves just so after he stepped into the elevator—me descending from the 12th floor, him from the 8th—so that his skin brushed mine.

“I seen you going to class. We’re both going to Breckenridge. Wanna walk together?”

He asked if he could come to my dorm later.

It was spring 2003. I said yes. I had never even kissed a boy, had never held a hand like my own.

I went to COM 101.

I didn’t ask what class he was taking.

It’s not like I could focus, so I left early. Bumbled back to my room.  A second shower.  Rubbed deodorant throughout my body—down the tense parabola of my stomach, through the wire hair of my pits, in the perpetually sweaty parts of my groin where my legs meet the rest of me. I sprayed off-brand Febreze. I made the bed. Smoothed wrinkles out of the blanket.  I sat down and stood up and thought about the hairs on his legs, how they swept against me with such softness despite the firmness of his calves.

He knocked. I opened. He said, “Hey.”

I let him in.

He took off his gray bookstore t-shirt and tossed it on the floor. His abdomen was strong and flat. Crowded brown curls washed down his stomach and under his belt. He smelled like musk and fresh dirt.

He pulled off my shirt.

He said, “It’s okay. I don't mind fat guys.”

We didn’t embrace each other. We didn’t kiss. We didn’t take the cover off the bed.

I leaned over and he saw parts of me I had never seen. He stood behind me. He entered me.

I thought about my back and wondered if its fat creased and swayed from the movements. I wondered if my neck bunched up the way my great aunt’s neck did when she slept. I pictured the skin of my stomach and breasts and wondered if, from his angle, it all squished out to the side under my weight.

He finished.

He didn’t say much.

He put back on his t-shirt and left.

I showered again, getting dressed behind the curtain. I put deodorant on everywhere. I avoided the mirrors, but I felt the weight of every curve of skin as I walked back to my room.

So much of that river has shaped the meaning of every other moment in my adult life as a fat gay man:

That my body needed apologizing for.

That if I was seen, it would be grotesque. An offense.

That somehow, even if my body needed to come with apologies, I was fuckable.

I was not naïve to the ways of the world. I was eighteen and from the holler, but it was 2003. I knew what the world expected of bodies. But I was also eighteen and from a place where desire for male bodies wasn’t allowed to be spoken about in real, human ways.

Who was there to speak?

There were no gay men—and the women around me were socialized not to want men’s bodies in the way men might want theirs.

So my body was completely out of the question, not a part of the game we were all playing.

And it got an apology. As if it did something wrong, existing there in that dorm room between Introduction to Communication and Fundamentals of Education.

So I learned to apologize.

For it.

With it.

About it.

As loud as I was about my queerness, the apology was ever-present. I held my breath in photos. I scurried to the back. I wore dark things and long sleeves to hide my love handles. I’d go extreme and lose forty pounds and then gain fifty. Twice I lost over a hundred and gained it all back. I bought compression shirts that reshaped me into something needing less apology for its softness, its fullness, its curve.

And I had a lot of sex.

Sex that shaped the apology.

That lessened it.

Silenced it for a while.

Sex that might expose the compression shirts. The love handles. The stretch marks.

I hid. I turned off lights. I drank. A lot. They drank. A lot. I learned to pull my undershirt off with my t-shirt and then flip it inside out again before it even hit the floor. I would kiss whoever it was so he couldn’t see me do it. I initiated sex with clothes on, knowing that once whoever I was with got off, then he wouldn’t be interested in taking clothes off.

I would have forgotten all of this.

Because when I met my husband, his absolute decency and kindness showed me that at the deepest levels of truth he would never not love me. Would never not want me. I don’t feel like I am showing another person my body when I am with him. I don’t feel like I am with another person with him. Love and pleasure—in all their forms—exist in a deeper, older river than bodies.

Hiding my body during sex from him made about as much sense as hiding it from myself during masturbation.

In the last couple of years, however, I have spent a lot of time on stage. Reading. Speaking. Trying to share hope, especially to LGBTQ+ youth.

With that travel has come exposure and the centering of my body. Sometimes literally, in the center of a screen or stage as a hundred look at it.

And suddenly, the apology is back.

I find myself, while I read poems about childhood, wondering if queer teens are let down. If they see my body and think, “Is this what I have to look forward to?” Like I might set the limits of their potential.

I find myself, while speaking, positioning myself in the chair to take up as little space as I can, worried that I will be seen as lazy or unprofessional for showing up in my body.

I find myself, while standing on stages, wondering if somehow queer adults in the room question my authenticity as gay. What, after all, does someone whose body needs an apology have to say about the embodied experience of people whose body needs a thank you?

It was in this mindset that I found myself at a workshop recently. The Hill Writers’ Workshop, where Diikahnéhi Shiloh Delaronde shared stories of their queer body intersecting multiple identities and Caleb Pendygraft talked about the power of closets.

A writing prompt from the workshop asked simply, “What is in your closet?”

This piece emerged from that question:

My body is an object in my closet.

When I came out, I thought I was liberated. But I never really considered what I meant when I said I. Or came. Or out.

Because I would get drunk with every man I fucked so I could feel pleasure from the other side of a liquid, my body filtered through however much beer or liquor it took to cut the strings between skin and there and then. To pull me from the muscle and fat and shape of it. Of me.

Because I shrank it and scrubbed it and filled it and stretched it and lied to it and lied with it and lied from it. Let it be a stand-in.

Let it live in someone else's setting.

Because I burned straight stories until I could step past them and then walked into a queer community and immediately took their stories and built another plot with them, a plot that didn't have room for me.

I didn't know yet that to story is first to unstory.

Because I am comfortable enough in my professional presence to become words on stages and pages and words are lit from suns that have already gone and I can place my consciousness in a stream of nouns and verbs and modifiers tagged for person and time and shadow my fat until I can no longer feel it.

Because my skin is still there, after all these years, silent stretch marks slick with echoes and ghosts, largeness trying to be small enough to hide in the closet, in the dark, desperate for light, hanging on to the colors it has only yet imagined through stories it has been told by others, wanting to hold the warmth until it becomes a language it can use to finally speak.

My body was in the closet.

Who would have imagined? Willie Carver. Loud, brass, a by-some-measures triumphant big gay Appalachian—the wholeness of his form in the closet?

But as the words came to the page, I knew they were true.

I have lived almost twenty years apologizing for my body.

But I lived almost twenty years before that apologizing for my queerness. For my voice. My interests. My love. My emotions. My softness.

But I came out. And I would die before apologizing now.

So there is another softness I left behind, in the closet, tucked away in the place where we keep things we don’t want to see. My body.

But at least one interesting fact about closets is that we store things there because they’re valuable.

I know something about being in closets.

I know a whole lot more about coming out of them.

Coming out is a type of hope. A faith. It is holding a story in your palms, a story like a small bird still halfway in its egg, and telling yourself, “You will fly.” It is when the story the soul writes momentarily, through courage, that overtakes the story that the world has handed to you through experience and scripts so old they have no authors or language.

Faith is deeper than story.

Faith is the evidence of things unseen.

I had faith that I would be a strong gay man despite a world of stories suggesting the opposite. I spoke it, at age eighteen on the docks of Morehead’s Eagle Lake, to my friend Keri: “I’m gay.”

And I grew a life from that story I couldn’t see yet.

This is why I went back to Louisville.

To come out.

This time, I did not keep my underwear on. I walked through the door, then I dropped them to the floor, like it was a holy place.

Because it was.

I opened my backpack and laid out things that I wanted to include in the photoshoot: an assortment of briefs, including a pair of basic dad tighty-whities, a couple of button-up shirts, a tank top.

I did not see myself as beautiful. But I had faith that I was. I knew that I must leave the closet behind and live as though I could see the evidence already.

I would grow the story I planted.

I shared my ideas with Josh the photographer, and I let the artist do the rest.

This time, when the photos came, I did not wince.

I told myself before I opened them, “You are going to see how beautiful you are. You have a beautiful body.”

I looked at each photo until the beauty began to step out from behind the door. Timid at first. I acknowledged it. I saw the strength in my arms, the warmth in my chest, the gravel in my thighs, the welcome in my stomach. I let my eyes linger.

I took the body in fully. Then I said, “Thank you.”

I have slowly begun to mean it. And one day I will say it, not just as hope, but as truth.

(Photo credit: Josh Tyson, 2025)

Bio: Willie Carver Jr. is a youth advocate and Kentucky Teacher of the Year. Awarded by Stonewall, Whippoorwill, the ALA, Read Appalachia, and Book Riot, he writes from Appalachia and believes everyone’s story matters. His novel Tore All to Pieces arrives March 2026.