I grew up in Kentish Town in North London, now the house of bouji 20-somethings hooked on kombucha. Back then, within the early noughties, it was the fifteenth most deprived area of the country, with child poverty at 40.3%. I used to be certainly one of those kids. I grew up poor and in social housing. I used to be the kid and grandchild of Irish migrants who consequently of poverty, social exclusion and trauma lived with tricky relationships with food, booze and medicines. I adopted a few of their addictions and made poverty shame my very own. Consequently I grew up as, and still am, what doctors call ‘morbidly obese’.

As a teen I did all the things to not be the fat one so I quickly learnt tips on how to be funny. For a very long time, I used humour as a veil over my fatness, that was until I discovered a bunch of radical dykes and femmes in queer nightclubs across London who encouraged me to live my best fag life and own my fatness.

I’m what they call a nasty fatty – I don’t wear black smocks and take a look at to be invisible, I’m not attempting to shed pounds or pretending to be on a food plan, I walk with my head high in clothes which might be marketed towards women, but this doesn’t mean I’ve reached body positive utopia.

I live inside a culture that tells folks I’m a drain, I take up an excessive amount of room, I’ve had greater than my fair proportion. Primetime television is devoted to attempting to heal or cure individuals with bodies like mine. My body is the one which is all the time depicted because the ‘before’ shot. High street retailers design a separate clothing line for us, normally kept tucked away somewhere out of sight or online only. Hollywood only ever shows fatness as being funny so people think it’s acceptable to make fun of us.

Fatness in western cultures equates to temporal failure, a failure that could be fixed and so persons are eager to get me to see the errors of my ways. In my lifetime I’ve been questioned for eating in public, had my food decisions critiqued, I’ve been spat at, attacked, had photos of me taken on public transport. People have done all the things possible not to take a seat next to me on planes, trains and buses. Trucks have veered onto the pavement to try to scare me. I’ve had groups of men chant “you fat gay” at me in the course of certainly one of London’s busiest train stations. I’ve been insulted by cops. People often rub or pat my belly once they’re drunk. Then there are the members of my very own community. Gay men have often been probably the most vicious and vile. I’ve had bottles thrown at me at Brighton Pride. Someone once even tried to set me on fire in a nightclub in Vauxhall.

After I was 21, I began to try to call myself an artist. I made a decision that for this performance I might do something I used to be afraid of: strip. The moment I opened my rainmac to Carly Simon’s ‘You’re So Vain’ and heard the gasps I realised audiences were more afraid of my body than I used to be of getting it out. Since then I’ve made a complete body of labor about fatness, from beauty pageants to BBC documentaries, but something I’ve all the time desired to explore since those early violent assaults in queer clubs is fatness and queer masculinity.

Earlier this yr I put out an open call on my blog to seek out a bunch of fat weirdos who fancied making a show with me. No experience vital only a willingness to place their fat on show. Six months later this gang of strangers is a bunch of my closest friends. We love one another. There are five of us and we come from throughout. Our experiences of fat are very different; a few of us own it, a few of us are on diets, all of us have complex relationships with our bodies. I spent last weekend putting the ending touches to our dance show, Fat Blokes. I selected dance because we’re all the time being told to exercise so I believed for once I’ll do what I’m told. Nonetheless, in the event that they wish to see us sweat, they may even should hear our beef.

After we’re with one another we feel like, for the primary time, we’re all allowed to be whatever Spice Girl we would like, catwalking down high streets of regional towns and cities like them lot off the Boots advert screeching “…here come the ladies!” After we’re together we will’t be picked off, we will’t be decapitated and utilized in lazy news bulletins to depict the so-called obesity crisis. Individuals are too afraid to shout abuse because we’re en masse – for once there’s more of us than them! Together we’re invincible.

The opposite day, after 72 hours of rehearsals in Manchester with my gang of fatties, I get up in our AirBnB filled with body confidence and unexpectedly posted a 7 am nude to Instagram. Feeling myself and warding off the chasers within the DM’s we are saying our goodbyes. I’m on a high and head back to the Essex seaside where I live. An hour after leaving the gang, the identical day I posted that thirsty selfie, I find myself alone in First Class. I’ve upgraded myself because a bunch of blokes thought they were allowed to degrade me. Each huffing and puffing taking turns to take a seat next to me because sitting next to me was “too uncomfortable”. 

My lover texts me to see if I’m OK and I tell him what’s happened, that I’ve been on the receiving end of worse but I’m embarrassed greater than anything. Embarrassed that I caved in, that I moved and paid (and will pay for) the privilege of a simple life. Saddened that people around me deemed this bullying acceptable.

I play it down, I say I’m advantageous but I’m not. I’m crying right into a not very nice Pret sandwich. I don’t want to come back across like this stuff worry me. I feel those of us who live in marginalised bodies do that on a regular basis. We mitigate these experiences, perhaps so we don’t look damaged, to not scare people off, or perhaps we will’t hear “it’s all in your head” or “you’re not even that fat” one more time… because if I were ‘that fat’ I’d deserve it? 

Once you’re fat you unfortunately change into accustomed to this form of bullying and violence. For me, the acute physical violence has left its marks on my confidence, and has little question informed my fear of drunk cis men, but perhaps what I find more draining is the day-to-day microaggressions, the monologues about my body and weight that folks invite themselves to impart. Be it my perceived fluctuation in size that is commonly congratulated, asking if I’m on a food plan or them attempting to persuade me I’m not fat. It’s something that nobody who likes you wants you to be, even in case your Instagram handle is @scotteeisfat.

Nonetheless petty these tears bouncing off my keyboard sound it’s not this incident I’m upset by – it’s a lifetime of getting to play the role of the bullied one – I’m fat-igued.

The painful irony here is that this happened to me the identical weekend I believed I discovered fat utopia, after I was really feeling myself and the way easily it was shattered. I assume that is confirmation as to why I would like to make Fat Blokes, why I would like to bring together this gang of radical fatties. We’ve got to derail this narrative that we can be saved, modified or beaten into submission. We’ve also got to just accept that, despite Instagrammers helping us find body positivity, unless our culture shifts, those of us who’re marginalised will all the time find ourselves back at square one.

Tomorrow I’ll be back on form, on my fat feet, a bit more ready for the following punch. Until then, you’ll find me in bed watching Killing Eve, dreaming up ways to fight back.

Scottee’s Fat Blokes opens at London’s Southbank Centre on eighth November with UK and Irish touring until Spring 2019. Scottee.co.uk