The night before we met, Aubrey Gordon watched as a group of friends, family, and strangers looked at her naked body on-screen. The image appears in one of many affecting, authentic moments in Your Fat Friend, Jeanie Finlay’s documentary about Gordon’s journey from anonymous essayist to prominent voice in fat activism, which premiered last week at Tribeca Film Festival.
For many people, the mere thought of experiencing this—any part of it—is mortifying. But, Gordon might argue, the people freaked out by this likely aren’t fat.
“Being a fat person, there’s not a thing that I can do or a way that I can look that will make people happy or comfortable,” Gordon told me, matter-of-factly, when I asked how she reacted to seeing her unclothed self in a theater. “Other people are telling you all the time that you should be ashamed of how you look, and you shouldn’t show up looking X, Y, Z way. And it doesn’t matter if you’re wearing makeup or not. They’re just like, ‘You’re fat, and you’re here, and you’re not welcome.’”
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That unwelcoming, generalized “you” did not apply to the audience that first night, who received the film warmly. It’s an illuminating and vulnerable portrait of a woman reckoning not with her physical being—by the time we meet her, she’s been there, done that—but with her personal identity, and the fact that people know who she is now.
Gordon’s writing has appeared in numerous publications; she’s been interviewed countless times. Gordon’s second book, You Just Need to Lose Weight, fact-checks common misconceptions about weight, nutrition, and health; it made the New York Times Best Sellers List in January. And as a regular listener of Maintenance Phase, Gordon and co-host Michael Hobbes’ award-winning wellness myth-debunking podcast, hearing that instantly recognizable voice—and transcendent laugh!—coming out of a human’s mouth instead of my headphones was jarring.
But in 2016, Gordon was a community organizer living in Portland, Oregon who wrote a blog under the pen name “Your Fat Friend.” None of her friends or family knew who she was, or that her self-published essays, about the realities of being fat in a world designed to work against you, were going viral. When the work posted to her Medium got picked up—alongside some widely seen Twitter threads—all of the internet appeared stunned by the honesty, clarity, and empathy of her work.
In the stirring “What It’s Like to Be That Fat Person Sitting Next to You on the Plane,” for example, she wrote of how flying is “a microcosm of what happens so often as a fat person. I am watched—and judged harshly—as I try and fail to fit into a space made for someone else.” Behind the curtain of an anonymous woman that we may very well know ourselves, Gordon relayed the tribulations of doctors’ visits; dressed down the casual use of “body positivity;” and asked readers to skip the euphemisms and “just say fat.”
It was through the Your Fat Friend pieces that Finlay first came to know and love Gordon, just like the rest of us. “The thing that I responded to on a soul level was that this was an anonymous voice,” Finlay said, of discovering Gordon’s work for the first time. “It meant that I could focus on the words. It felt accessible, but it was the personalized political thing that I related to—it felt like I was hearing a new voice, and it lingered.”
The British documentarian, whose work includes Seahorse (about a trans man who became pregnant) and The Last Watch (a feature-length look behind Game of Thrones’ final season), had long thought about fatness in her own life; she said it “shaped my identity,” being a fat person whose unrelated health issues have often been misdiagnosed as symptoms of her weight. In 2017, as Gordon was taking Your Fat Friend to new heights and platforms, Finlay reached out about possibly doing a film about the writer.
“The conversations we had were so much easier and more responsive and more holistic than most people are prepared to have on this set of topics,” Gordon said, of the long courting process that eventually led to her agreeing to become the subject of Finlay’s next film. “It feels like most of the time, I’m talking to someone about bad stuff, I have to talk to them for hours processing their own body stuff before they can even hear anyone else [talk about it].” With Finlay, Gordon could cut to the chase—and, as we see in the film, feel comfortable both swimming in a pool and stripping at a hot spring for the sake of Finlay’s project.
But agreeing to star in a movie about yourself and actually making it are very different things. And agreeing to put your real name to your hyper-vulnerable writing is easier said than done.
“I wanted to just be a mirror to people of their own behavior in the face of fat people,” said Gordon, of that initial choice to write anonymously. Reconciling that intention—of creating universally relatable work through anonymizing herself—with the desire to put down the mirror and become a public advocate was a “wrenching” process for her. It wasn’t until November 2020, four years after she launched the blog, that Gordon announced that she was Your Fat Friend; the reveal came in conjunction with the release of her first book, What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat.
From there came new difficulties to contend with, now that Gordon was openly writing and speaking as her own self. These anxieties hardly revolved around how dropping the moniker would affect the work itself. Instead, Gordon worried about the work that required her to show up, in-person, to be perceived. “With having headshots [done] and doing press and being on Zoom with people—all of that felt high stakes,” she said, “in a way that felt like both people will change their opinion of me when they can see me, and that people will change their opinion of this conversation.”
Among the people whose opinion Gordon deeply wanted was her family. Gaining their acceptance was integral in crafting Gordon’s new public identity, for Finlay and for Gordon. Gordon’s mother, Pam, and her father Rusty appear in the film, and their reflections upon their daughter’s success as an activist whose own body is part of her platform make for another compelling narrative.
“One of my biggest fears in this process was that [becoming the public face of Your Fat Friend] would change our relationship, in a way that felt scary to me,” said Gordon. Throughout the film, Finlay’s camera captures Gordon’s parents squirming when hearing their daughter refer to herself as “fat,” as well as reflecting upon their own parenting. One moving scene shows Pam discussing the diets she consistently imposed upon her daughter, then have a difficult moment following an on-camera interview, in which she realizes that she knew those diets were only hurting her child further.
While these vulnerable moments were uncomfortable for the family, Finlay knew including them was an important part of Gordon’s narrative. “What all of us want is for our parents to see us as the adults that we are,” she said. By the end of the Your Fat Friend documentary, Rusty and Pam are beaming and bragging about their daughter in the front row of her readings; Gordon says they’ve all become closer.
What the Gordon family was coming to terms with wasn’t just that Aubrey was becoming a known quantity overnight. Each of them was also reckoning with her reality—the pain of living not in her body, but in a society that doesn’t accept it. That distinction is crucial for Gordon, as the documentary makes clear. Finlay and Gordon have no interest in pathologizing Gordon’s fatness throughout the film; the author has moved past the “how” and “why” and “when” conversations. Instead, Your Fat Friend shows how Gordon's own body is inextricably tied up in her activism.
As a fat person, “you’re already a screen that people are projecting onto,” she said. She regularly ends up in conversations with thin people who may say they want to be part of the fat acceptance movement, only to begin revealing their fears of ending up fat themselves. This, to Gordon, is often laced with anti-fat bias. “At some point, you just have to say, ‘Alright, if you’re gonna be reacting to my body all the time, I’m gonna just cut right through and have a direct conversation about what’s happening here,’” she said. “Because otherwise, I’m left holding the discomfort that’s generated by someone else and that actually needs to be theirs to hold.”
When a fat activist’s platform involves dispelling misinformation about fatness and promoting healthier boundaries for interacting with fat people, of course their body is inherently part of what they’re preaching. Your Fat Friend makes that clear through giving us time to become acquainted with Gordon as a person. She reads from some of her most poignant essays in voiceover, which is illuminating. But more affecting is watching her hang out with family, discover that she’s landed a book deal, and sharing wisdom during podcast recordings. These moments imbue those once-anonymous essays with a new humanity, which gives strong context for her work. (Also, Gordon is simply, undeniably likable; I learned that this is especially true in-person, where our conversation was so engaging that she had to be forcibly removed from it, lest she miss another appointment.)
It’s important that Your Fat Friend offers Gordon a platform to do this, and it does a good job of threading the needle of personal and political. It’s also important to remember that, while Gordon is preaching for a better way of living for all fat people, the demographic with the highest obesity rate is Black women. But the most visible figures in the fat activism movement are almost entirely white women, Roxane Gay aside. The intersectionalities involved with fatness (and anti-fatness) are vast; the economics that can contribute to fatness are misunderstood, but Black women do make less money than most other demographics. Add in factors like geographic location and health disparities, and there’s a whole lot of fat people that Gordon just can’t represent.
Finlay and Gordon do understand this, they said. Finlay said the goal when promoting the film, whenever it’s picked up for distribution, is to ensure that diverse speakers can attend and participate in talkbacks. At the same time, they recognize that there are plenty of biases involved with fatness—which favor some types of fat activists over others. Gordon insisted that “if I was a fat person who had a mobility issue, I would not get this platform. “Any latent bias that people can mobilize to stop listening, to get out of their discomfort, they’ll just hit the ejector seat.”
Ultimately, Your Fat Friend is “a personal story film,” Gordon argued, and her personal story is one of a white person in Oregon. “Because there are so few fucking stories about fat people, this is bearing more weight as a stand-in for an entire movement than it can or should, or than it would be in other movement spaces of communities.
“I feel like my job is not to be like a white lady who’s like, ‘Let me explain how our race [plays into everything],” she continued. “That’s not my look—no thanks. But my job is to use the platform that I have to platform the folks who are [discussing the ways race plays into fatness].” (Recommendations for some non-white fat activists to check out, per Gordon: Martinus Evans and Da’Shaun L. Harrison.)
Finlay sums it up well: “This [film] is like a microscopically thin drill, drilling into a very deep well of emotion that’s held by a lot of folks. But we need more drills.”
Considering the bravery required for Gordon to even use that drill in the first place—her writing as Your Fat Friend opened her up to hateful comments, and Gordon said she was even doxxed once—we should be grateful for another loud, proud voice on this continually fraught subject. This film is the story of how that voice found the confidence and security to unveil itself, little by little, overcoming the fear of being known for the sake of bettering society for a dominant, chronically maligned group of people in our country. What Aubrey Gordon does matters; there’s no mistaking that after watching the film, replete with clips of fans telling Gordon how much reading her writing empowered them, and that listening to Maintenance Phase educated them.
And after revealing her true self to the whole world, of course Gordon doesn’t mind if a bunch of strangers are looking at her naked on-screen—nor should she.
