by Ann Regentin
(05/23/07)
It's very strange to find out several months after the fact that an old friend has passed away. Heather MacAllister died last February, in the time and place of her choosing, following a battle with ovarian cancer.
It didn't surprise me that she would go with assisted suicide if she knew she was already dying. Heather lived life on her own terms, and it makes sense that she would leave it in the same fashion. As Riva Lucian, she founded Big Burlesque and The Original Fat-Bottomed Revue, and she devoted her life to body acceptance and queer rights.
I met her while I was still in college, bouncing from major to major and playing Dungeons and Dragons until 4:00 a.m. I hung out with an eclectic crowd back then, and Heather was nothing if not eclectic.
She was also intense, focused. Heather put together the most flamboyant outfits out of thrift shops, and she was already beginning the process of tattooing the least loveable parts of herself, a way of adorning them and making them beautiful. Born with a body that no diet or exercise would change, and blessed with both a razor-sharp mind and an overflowing sexuality, Heather created a kind of force field in which traditional standards didn't count. Even in her twenties, she was a law unto herself.
She seemed to migrate between our Midwestern college town and San Francisco, which made it easy to lose track of her. It didn't help that I was a lot quieter than she was. I found Heather overwhelming and I suspect she found me bland, but I liked her and when I happened to catch her at Whole Foods Market about ten years ago, I was glad to see her. She cooed over my then-baby son and we promised to get in touch, but we never did. Now, it's too late.
Although our personalities were different, our causes are pretty much the same. I've become, in a different way, an advocate for body acceptance, queer rights and, my own twist, disability, all with a sexual bent. My life is still quieter and less colorful, but we ended up fighting on the same side after all.
It seems weird writing an obituary from such a temporal distance, but it can't be helped. I was so out of touch that I only found out about her death when I was reading a recent article in the New York Times online about Leonard Nimoy, who seems to have gone from Mr. Spock to controversial photographer. His book, Shekhina, generated heated discussion within the Jewish community, with people objecting to the nudity and others to the women wearing traditional male garments.
His next book, due out in November, is likely to cause at least as much of a stir because the models are all fat and mostly naked. It was right up Heather's alley, which was how he met her and came to photograph her. A little bit of clicking led me to The Full Body Project on his Web site, which was full of nude pictures of my old friend.
If you want to know which of these women is Heather, look for the photo of them clothed. She's on the far right.
I can think of no greater respect for the dead, in this case, than these pictures of her in her thirties dancing naked for the camera, an in-your-face antidote to the size 0 models and Photoshopped porn chicks. When she lived, Heather did her absolute best to make fat as sexy as possible, learning to love not just her own body, but everyone else's as well. It's entirely appropriate that she continue to do so after her death.
Her efforts in life didn't go unnoticed or unappreciated. Over 150 people attended a memorial for her in San Francisco, and that doesn't include those who showed up in Boston, Detroit, New York and Portland. Heather's mix of compassion, intelligence and fearless resolve made an impact, one way or another, on everyone she met. Not everyone agreed with her or even liked her, but they always had to think about her.
Heather's core message was outrageous. She urged people to love their bodies, not the bodies they wished they had, but the bodies they have now, and it's a message that's timely for me as I'm coming off a six-month round of prednisone. It isn't just the weight gain involved, but the reminder that my body isn't very lovable by the usual standards. If it weren't for its various malfunctions acting up, I wouldn't have needed prednisone in the first place.
Even as I write that, though, I can feel myself getting a faceful of Heather's boa: quit feeling sorry for yourself and get back to your computer! And she'd be right. This is the body I have. Whining about it won't change anything.
Waiting until later to love our bodies is completely useless because there is no later. The time when we might be thinner -- or healthier, in my case -- is undefined, so what do we do while we wait? Hate ourselves? How can we expect anyone else to love our bodies if we don't? Do we really want to be intimate with someone who hates our bodies as much as we do? Would that be any kind of intimacy worth having?
In a culture that sells doubt by the pound, loving an imperfect body is a radical act. Loving that body in a sexual way is downright subversive. Allowing that sexual love to show? I can't think of a word for it, but I sure would like to see more of it. Many of us are, by current standards, fat. Many of us are aging. Many of us are disabled. Many of us are just plain Not Hot, but that's no excuse, at least not an excuse that Heather would accept.
I don't think it's reasonable for all of us to get onstage as Heather did, but the idea of a sexiness that comes from within, that's disconnected from things like body shape, body image, physical function and the myriad other things we're taught that make up hotness, is marvelously decadent. I also think it's often suppressed in pursuit of the generic, to everyone's detriment. In our quest to become hot, we often bury our own sexiness.
In fact, I'd like to propose the possibility that hot and sexy are two different things. Perhaps hot measures our ability to conform to externally imposed standards of physical attractiveness, but sexy is something that comes from inside, not a one-size proposition but something as unique and personal as the individuals involved. Because while Heather may not have been hot, she was sexy as hell in a way that bubbled irrepressibly up from within and spilled out through every pore, a much more potent brew than anything diet, exercise, surgery and a makeover could have produced.
I wish I had found out about her death back in February, but if I had, I wouldn't have been able to say once again that Leonard Nimoy's new book, Full Body Project: Photographs by Leonard Nimoy, will be out in November.
As the article in the Times made clear, Mr. Nimoy's work on Full Body Project is a piece of deliberate size-acceptance activism. Even though he himself is not a fat woman, or even a fat man, he is well aware of the difference between an average woman and a fashion model, and that this difference fuels a multi-billion dollar cluster of industries that make money on empty promises. He's also clear on the damage this does. The Full Body Project is an eloquent counterargument, as well as a deliberate protest.
I'm glad Heather had a chance to participate. I am also ashamed to admit to having forgotten, however briefly, that life is really too damned short, and if you don't live it that way, then it's too damned long. Trying to suppress one's internal sexiness because of a perception that one's external shell doesn't measure up is one way to make it too damned long.
I'm going to finish with part of Heather's keynote speech last year for NOLOSE , the National Organization for Lesbians of Size. I've edited a bit because I know that not everyone's issue is fat. Heather was addressing a fat audience, but had there been women like me, not so much fat as disabled, or women of my mother's generation, whose primary issue is aging, I know that Heather would have included them, too. Her primary focus may have been on weight, but she was smart enough to know that the problem went far beyond that.
So without further ado, here's what Heather had to say about loving one's imperfect body:
"Stop reading Cosmo and watching TV. Get naked in front of a full-length mirror...have sex naked, with the lights on. No lingerie/boxers! Take bubble baths regardless of gender. Find a way to be naked in the sunshine. Swim naked. Slow down. Get pictures taken of your body, nude and clothed, that are flattering without hiding...eat mindfully and gratefully. Move. Sweat. Take a 'physical' risk."
Thanks for the reminder, Heather. It's a terrible shame you aren't around to keep up the good work. And thank you, Leonard Nimoy, for the wonderful photos of Heather and her friends, and for your new book. May it generate the expected controversy, because as long as all women are supposed to look like models or movie stars, we need to keep having this conversation.
