The Wide Angle: Remembering the Fat Underground

Although this movement without a name - the drive to reclaim, champion and accept fat bodies - is a modern phenomenon, tied closely to the problematic contemporary obsession of body policing and control, it's also a lot older than you think. Indeed NAAFA, the most august fat activist organisation in the USA, was founded nearly forty years ago and is still going strong today.

But there's another strand of fat activism which grew out of the late 1960s, one which was more closely allied to a model that was similar to, and informed by, the Gay Liberation Front and second wave feminism. We're talking about The Fat Underground.

The Fat Underground was a bunch of angry, talented, funny, vocal women, many of them lesbians, living in Los Angeles. They had ties to the radical therapy movement and to radical feminism; they were the first to bring a grassroots sensibility to fat activism; and, frankly, they were visionaries.

Their Fat Liberation Manifesto, for example, drew links between various forms of oppression and was demanding rather than placatory. It laid out policies on dieting and health that have greatly influenced successive generations of activists.

One of their most inspiring actions occurred on 25 August 1974, at an event commemorating singer Mama Cass Elliott, who had died suddenly of a heart attack thought to have been brought on by crash dieting. Fat Underground member Lynn Mabel-Lois took to the stage, eulogised Cass, and accused the medical profession of her murder. Mabel-Lois was joined onstage by other fat women who raised clenched fists, some having joined the group on the spot.

Over the years The Fat Underground morphed into other groups and eventually disappeared, but they're not forgotten. Largesse.net hosts a fabulous online archive of fat rights history materials, and has just released a bunch of podcasts in which members of The Fat Underground talk, sing, rant and discuss ideas that are still as relevant today as they ever were. It's LGBT History Month, so why not treat yourselves to a listen?