CAROLINE SAVOIE | East Texas Reporter
CarosSavo@StoryDustSearch.com
LONDON — Max Hovey was 18 years old when a potential date mentioned getting a nose ring, and, Hovey said, he felt his interest waning right in front of the other man.
“My brain went: I won’t find them attractive anymore, because I see that as being too feminine,” Hovey, now 27, said. “I look back at that, and I’m like, OK, I’ve been a part of this culture myself.”
In fact, today, Hovey has two nose piercings himself. But that moment, he said, captures exactly the kind of internalized bias he set out to examine in his debut book, No Fats, No Fems: A Guide to Queer Empathy and Unpacking Prejudice, out now in the United States.
Hovey said the title pulls from a phrase pervasive on gay dating and hookup apps, a blunt declaration excluding heavier men and those who present as feminine. Hovey — a cisgender gay man who grew up in what he describes as a small, conservative, predominantly white English town — said he chose the phrase deliberately.
“I wanted it to be controversial in any capacity to draw attention to the topic,” he said. “If one person has their attention hooked and their mind changed, I’ve done my job.”
The book, which includes academic research alongside interviews with 21 people from across the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, examines how prejudices around body image, gender expression, race and bisexuality operate inside queer communities, not just outside of them.
Hovey said he writes openly about his own past mindsets as a way of inviting readers in rather than lecturing them.
“I’ve written it not from a place of being like, you need to do this, and you need to do that,” he said. “I’ve written it because I needed this book myself.”
The book took three years to complete. Hovey said the title came to him before anything else, and, once it did, the rest followed. After signing with a literary agent, he said the team faced roughly 60 rejections from publishers before a deal materialized through an editor who had followed Hovey’s social media for six years. That editor reached out after discovering the proposal on an industry website.
Hovey had insisted on working with a queer editor, a condition his agent initially doubted was possible to stipulate.
“We can ask,” Hovey told him. “You can absolutely ask if they’re part of the community.”
The interviews at the core of the book were assembled to reflect the breadth of queer experience. Of the 21 subjects, Hovey said only one besides himself is a cisgender, white gay man. Roughly half are people of color. The group includes transgender, bisexual, nonbinary and lesbian voices, as well as a Muslim nonbinary person from Pakistan.
“Queerness doesn’t just look like this,” Hovey said of his own image. “There are so many different walks of life.”
Among the topics he said he found most illuminating was biphobia, particularly the hostility bisexual women often face from within lesbian communities. He references what researchers call the androcentric desire hypothesis, a theory suggesting many people unconsciously assume bisexual people are more attracted to men, leading to dismissal of women who identify as bisexual.
“The biphobia in the queer community is absolutely horrific,” he said.
Hovey is also candid about what he described as “cannibalistic” tendencies on the political left — the impulse to permanently ostracize people over minor missteps rather than allow room for growth.
“We preach imperfection and tolerance, but one person makes a single little mistake and it’s, “Ostracize them; never talk to them again,” he said. “We don’t give people the grace and patience to learn.”
Hovey acknowledged the book cannot cover every facet of queer identity, and said that tension — the fear of leaving someone out — was the most vulnerable part of putting the work out into the world.
“It is impossible to grow up queer in a straight world completely unscathed,” Hovey writes.
“There’s going to be some form of unpacking that needs to be done somewhere.”
Hovey said he hopes the book reaches beyond queer readers. When the producers of his audiobook, two older straight women, told him they had come away with a new understanding of people they had encountered but never understood, he took it as confirmation the work could travel.
“There’s something for everyone,” he said. “There’s something that everyone can learn from this book.”
No Fats, No Fems: A Guide to Queer Empathy and Unpacking Prejudice is available now. Max Hovey is based in London.