The Winter Pride Gran Canaria in Maspalomas has kicked off this week with a display of imagination that, with a programme full of performances, activities and "unique" experiences, has once again put the catwalk on a kind of platform where fatphobia is accepted without any problem.
The models hired to promote the LGTBI+ event, which claims to generate 70 million euros in 10 days, suggest that overweight people would be redundant.
"Obesity is often associated with a lack of sexuality, a lack of control and failure, thereby generalising negative aspects that forget the good in others," says Mariana Villafuerte, a psychotherapist and health coach: "within the LGBT community there are the 'good gays', which refers to those men who have a good body, a great job and a lot of success. And there are the 'bad gays', men who do not have the ideal weight, are effeminate and not very successful."
According to professors José Francisco Alonso Sánchez and Jesús Muyor Rodríguez in their study 'Social pressure, fatphobia and body dissidence in the gay community' and presented at the International Congress of Body Image & Health, "prejudice towards fat homosexual men is common due to the tendency (especially among gays) to associate homosexuality with youth, beauty and thinness, thus creating a homoflirtatious, cultured, consumerist and young stereotype that makes people look down on other gays who do not adapt."
The academic researchers point out that "violence and discrimination towards fat gay people is exercised in many ways, from subtle ones (glances of contempt and disdain) to obvious ones such as verbal aggression and contempt. These people are marginalized, because they represent the antithesis of the homo-flirting stereotype, and traits of fatphobia can be seen." Therefore, they propose "promoting other lifestyles and models of beauty to avoid stigma, discarding the idea of inner beauty contrasted with outer beauty."
For Canarian activist and researcher Magda Piñeyro, fatphobia and LGBTIQA+phobia "is a little-known discrimination that is very normalized" because "being a fat and trans person is not the same as being a fat cis person, just as fatness does not work in the same way in gay men as in lesbian women, as it also differentiates us from heterosexual women or men," says Piñeyro.
La The writer -she is the author of Stop Gordofobia y las panzas subversas (Zambra, 2016), 10 gritos contra la gordofobia (Vergara, 2019)- recalls the youth of the activist movement against fatphobia in the Spanish-speaking world. “It started about 10 years ago approximately” with the founding of the 'Stop Gordofobia' movement, of which Piñeyro is co-founder, in a communion of wills and anger from the Canary Islands, Argentina and Chile, together with her colleagues, Laura Contreras, Lucrecia Masson and Constanza Álvarez, "who also started talking about this."
