Ozem Pigs

How fat loss drugs and Ozempic mania are altering the gay scene.

I type these thoughts “stream-of-consciousness”, without editing, straight into Substack so forgive me if they chime strangely. I’ve caught myself hating on and feeling jealous of gay scene faces who are now taking Ozempic and starting to look great in event photos.

I’m happy for my close friends of course who are now injecting drugs every day, it’s lovely to see a new confidence possess them. One pal who used to be fat is now enjoying clothes in a way that he never used to, rocking a mesh vest to buy milk. Another has started dancing which never happened before, not just to DJs either, but to everything - background playlists in Costa - lorries reversing.

But with the gay socialite rabble, London’s wearisome Chaucerian pyramid of intellectually limited social media wannabes, the A, the B, and the C gays, all elbowing each other out of the way at weekly award ceremonies - I’ve caught myself scrutinising their fat loss journeys. Why do I care?

The influencers, the minor pop stars, the rainbow authors, the drag queens … They’re all melting away like snowmen at sunrise, becoming little more than coal eyes and carrot noses in their Bicester Village Givenchy. With the right filter and a litre of botox, they’re looking great. Isn’t it infuriating!

It’s quite confronting to spot this mean streak in ourselves, to realise that we took some strange comparative comfort in knowing that certain people were fat, that we perhaps saw ourselves as slightly superior to them. There’s a new mental labyrinth of hypocrisy to navigate too. Fat people who were once rabbiting on about ‘body positivity’ and flaunting how ‘thicc’ they were, more-or-less demanding that we join a supportive chorus, singing and clapping in a circle around their low-key obesity, have now all ditched this mantra and their beloved curves overnight - now that science has shown them an Exit, now that the internet can sell them the self-control they’ve always lacked.

And isn’t it socially dangerous, to let a fat person also enjoy the benefits of being thin - what in addition to their impressive range of fat powers - like Personality, Humour, and Cunning. Now the naturally slim people on Grindr are at a disadvantage as they come up against the Ozempic wave of thin people who can also tell jokes, patiently listen to anecdotes, and read Google maps - because they have years under their belt (if now nothing else) of social subservience. A person who was once fat but who is now thin - now that’s a powerful thing. The equilibrium of the gay scene is being threatened by a new breed of X Men. It’s no longer the simple time-worn seesaw of fat and charming or sexy and boring.

Ozempic, or its cheapy Lidl equivalents, clearly works too. The ultimate evidence to prove this? We are all bitching about it. Gays bitching about you is the ultimate hallmark of success. When I launched my talent agency a few years ago, a handful of gays started bitching about it. I saw the screenshots that friends sent me and thought “Oh joy, I’m onto a winner”

Us old school people who still eat, we’ve taken to bitching about the “Ozem Pigs” behind their backs in DMs and on Whatsapp groups as a way of coping with these new sliding scales. “Oh she’s on the ozempic” we say, as if we pity them. We study their social media posts for signs of botched results, praying for weird side effects. We say things like “Eugh, she has ozempic face!” - “He looks like a hammer head shark!” - “I saw her IRL at the weekend and she looked terrible” - “They’re telling people it’s the gym, but that’s such bullshit”

People on Ozempic can have a tendency to look like that final suck on a cocktail when all of the moisture vanishes from the glass and the ice tenses up and there’s nothing left. They look dry and creased and finished, like the human equivalent of an autumn leaf.

As the non-injectors huddle closer for support, they steal cruel joy from forecasting doom over their friends’ fat-loss journeys too. “Yeah but as soon as you stop, you put all the weight back on apparently”, we say, taking relish apparently in the idea that eventually these people will be fat again - fat where they belong. Or we say “Yeah but it fucks up your liver” - as if our own years of chemsex, Printworks, and Skittle bombs in G-A-Y didn’t already do that.

Clearly these weight loss drugs touch a nerve as we envy those with the necessary combination of desperation and financing to give it a whirl.

I would like to be a bit slimmer but I’m not fat enough to go online and pay for black market drugs, let alone start jabbing my thigh - what is it, 2014? But I partly wish I was a bit fatter in order to justify commencing the process.

I went to boarding school where all of life’s problems were dealt with by paracetamol, salt water gargles, a cold shower or a jog around the lake. It goes against my intense, Spartan, empirical upbringing to open a fridge door and start slamming drugs in the morning. In fact, I haven’t been to a doctor in six years, I am the government’s dream. I haven’t moved any of my hair around yet, I haven’t gone in for botox. I haven’t bought new teeth. I send a blood and urine sample off to the sex clinic once a season, and that’s it.

When it comes to getting laid - I guess I depend on my height, my chat, and some social currency - like free tickets to the theatre, backed up by my Grindr pics. But I do suffer from invalidation and self worth issues, hence my battles with alcoholism and drugs. Nobody who is paying £50 to travel the length of London in an Uber at 6am to do GHB all day with a pensioner is in a good place. If I just slammed myself thinner, the Ozempic way, would that help me find a normal boyfriend, with a well-paid desk job and a bicycle, called Tom or Dan? Are these drugs the missing key to my happiness?

Ozempic culture poses a big question. What if?

It’s like those Lottery adverts. What would YOU do… if you won ten million? Or in this case, if you could fit into terrible skinny fit jeans from the Zara sale?

Ozempic opens up a wider conversation with oneself too. What do you really want from life? And what are you prepared to pay for it? Because getting thin is no guarantee of anything. You still need somebody else to like you. You still need people to see.

Of course, the argument against this is that it’s not about other people, it’s about your relationship with yourself. I’ve never worried too much about my image, not by gay standards. After experimenting in my twink years with bleached long hair, and wearing foil shock blankets with ski goggles to nightclubs, and briefly changing my name to “Jar” on Facebook (sorry everyone), I realised that what God gave, and what my Mum gave me, actually suits me best. I’m a tall Italo-Aussie Brit with a beard and wavy hair, and icy blue mournful eyes, and I don’t have a six pack, or a ski jump nose, or floppy Leonardo Dicaprio curtains, and that’s fine.

But I’ve Googled these drugs a few times now. I’ve caught myself on the brink of filling in a form. But if these drugs age my face, then will that not accentuate the silent insecurities that I am already cradling around my fine lines and crows feet? The sun damage from being an absolute Sitges icon over the years? And if I start taking my appearance that seriously, is that not a slippery slope? Especially with my addictive personality? Where does it end? Baga-luf?

Something that interests me is why is all this stuff happening now? Why didn’t they have these jabs 50 years ago? Why is botox such a thing now? Why are several of my friends doing little Instagram reels where they take us on a trip to Harley Street? It’s social media isn’t it. Before smartphones we lived in a haze of innocent bliss.

But now I’m starting to worry that I’ll fall behind. Just as middle aged spread is starting to announce itself here and there, just as I’m embracing a looser silhouette upheld by more expensive thicker t-shirts, it seems other friends are shrinking and twisting into bits of string. Will I start to look fatter by comparison? Do I need to find new friends who still fancy 9 Chicken Selects after a night out instead of rocking at the bus stop hugging themselves with a lost expression?

And I like eating too. I like going for Sunday lunch. I like cheeseboards. I like bowls of warm bread with salted butter. I do like eating. I am six foot three. This machine needs fuel otherwise I get snarky and start picking fights with teenage girls on Facebook. I like a cookie with my coffee, I like a pastry, I like poppadoms.

And to be immodest for a moment. It’s not like my sex life is suffering with some fat around my waist. I hooked up with a boy last week who was more beautiful than anything I ever could have imagined, he looked like a Parisian socialite’s favourite son, it’s amazing what you can achieve when you’re followed by Bimini.

But the truth is - you are somebody’s type just as you are. So just wait for that somebody, instead of driving yourself insane trying to impress someone who’s not really feeling it.

I’ve struggled a bit with my weight for over twenty years, since I was twelve. The first time that I was aware of being fat was being costume fitted for a school play. We had to take off our shirts and try on various rags as orphans in Oliver Twist. Later at school I heard two girls giggling about me around a corridor corner saying “Did you see Jack Cullen when he had to take his top off? I thought he was fit but when he took his shirt off his belly just flopped out”, and they were giggling, laughing about my flabby body, it was mortifying. Thankfully for me, God was just whacking some clay in the kiln, before making me 6 foot 3. But I’ve been a bit fat ever since puberty. I think I ate my feelings when I was bullied for being gay, or unsure how to process what I was experiencing. I used ‘tuck’ as we called it at school to self-medicate homesickness, and my parents used it to make up for their abandonment, Dad would sometimes send me parcels full of Haribo to school, so this strange unhealthy relationship with sugar established itself in my formative years. I’m a bit dyspraxic too, the distribution of weight around my body is unusual, I have clawed toes and carrying my colossal weight on the balls of my feet, I have a curved back and hips like my mother, I walk with a bit of a bounce that has been likened over the years to a pigeon, a praying mantis, and Barney the dinosaur. So I’ve always felt a bit fat in a sort of impossible-to-deal-with way. Can a daily injection fix all this? I don’t think so. My fat is unique to me, in a way. And sometimes boys fuss over how big and warm I am.

Who knows. All pendulums swing back. Gender is running wild and free, mullets are mainstream, white privilege is fading, Asia is thriving, America is collapsing, and maybe Ozempic culture is the start of fat getting sexy again, like in the 1700s. In a post-Ozempic landscape of people drifting around like possessed broomsticks with sunken eyes, maybe we’ll begin to crave the big cosy cuddles of pizza-guzzling bears. And another important thing worth considering - I had none of these worries while travelling around South East Asia. London and London’s gay scene breeds over-analysis, self-criticism and social anxiety.

But in the meantime, it’s Glastonbury in six weeks and heat waves are ‘acoming. Has anyone got some needles for me? I’ll swap you for guest list to Fold.

Typing this out has really helped me process some of the Ozempic mania being thrust upon us. For those giving the drugs a whirl, I am happy for you - and I hope you enjoy the results. You deserve it! And as for myself, I think I am content in being a bigger person. I like reading and an essential part of reading for me is dunking ten chocolate digestives into a cup of tea. There are boys out there who find that sexy - I await those boys patiently.