Skinny Isn’t Sexy, or, Why I Never Had an Eating Disorder premiered in its entirety at the 2004 Fresh Fruit Festival on the lower east side of Manhattan. 

When I met my partner, who is a Women’s Basketball coach, I asked her to tell me romantic and subversive stories about how the players hooked up with the cheerleaders after games.  “Oh,” she sighed, “we made fun of the cheerleaders.”  And this is when I began to contemplate all of the missed opportunities for queer adolescents based on the unfortunate gendered assumption that femininity is inherently heterosexual.

Since body image is such a pervasive issue for adolescents, I felt moved to write a piece inspired by my own experiences as a skinny, wimpy, non-athletically gifted girl.  For years I held a very negative self-image based on the teasings and accusations I endured about my weight and size.  Friends and other “concerned” adults pulled my mother aside and inquired about my “eating disorder,” while peers took advantage of my slight stature by dominating me on the playground and in physical education class. 

I find that discussions concerning P.E. class are more likely to bring up extreme reactions to adolescence than most other topics.  Generally, folks either experienced success as athletes or were persecuted for their non-abilities.  Not to say that we—the persecuted—did not have other abilities, because we did/do and that’s really part of what I’ve been trying to figure out by writing on the topic of body image and sports.  Central to this story is the character of my adolescent P.E. instructor, “Ms. Brown.”  Because of Ms. Brown’s questionable sexuality—which she attempted to hide by keeping a life size poster of Tom Selleck on the equipment closet door so she could remark on how fine he was—she lives in my mind as the quintessential dyke gym teacher.  Mrs. Brown was strong, athletic, and aggressively rewarding of my peers who were athletically inclined.  My guess is, she was of the 1970’s lesbian (feminist?) school that did not reward femme-y girls who collected flavored lip glosses and unicorn stickers. 

A big part of this narrative is my coming to understand how lesbianism and athletics have shaped one another in popular culture lore, leading to assumptions that all female athletes are lesbians, and all lesbians play sports.  With the 1990’s renaissance of broadly defined gender roles, certainly this is not always the case.  Yet, for many of us who grew up wimpy, it is an important part of our experiences. 

Skinny Isn’t Sexy is funny, maybe a little painful, and scores poignantly on the performance field.  This show is in development.  It has been running for thirty minutes, though it’s working toward a full-length show (one hour).  There are no last picks.