The second time, it stung a bit more. While standing in a circle of new gay friends at a house party, I became acutely aware that I was the fattest person in the room. I was well-versed in how to navigate this particular situation. I simply had to become the funniest person in the room. After nearly a decade of perfecting this skill, it was practically second nature. However, midway through a hilariously self-deprecating soliloquy about my time as a high school mascot, I was cut off by someone who said: “Thank God you’re ‘Garrett-sized,’ otherwise you’d be so busy dating you’d never have time to perfect these stories.”

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In my friend group I was the plus-size Kathryn Hahn in any movie starring Jennifer Aniston or Kate Hudson. Not the leading lady, but always good for a laugh.

By age 20, I’d resigned myself to the supporting-character role in my love life. Assuming that no one was interested in me gave me the freedom to pursue other interests: Weight Watchers; the Zone diet; the HCG diet (in which you take “natural” hormones typically produced during pregnancy to suppress your appetite and consume a sparse 500 calories a day); and, of course, perfecting my party routines. I graduated college having been on homecoming court at a university of 40,000 students: chubby, a virgin and single.

Perhaps it was a result of moving to the middle-of-nowhere Connecticut or being in grad school. But in the two years after undergrad, I found the time and the motivation to lose more than 60 pounds. Surprisingly, eating well and exercising actually works! They weren’t the lightning-quick results I’d grown accustomed to as a millennial, but I was satisfied nonetheless. What did seem lightning-quick, however, was the way I was approached in public. For starters, I was being approached. Never before in my life had I been hit on at a bar. And here I was, in rural Connecticut, going on dates with boys.

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When I moved to Washington, D.C., two years later, I entered the Hunger Games of gay dating. Suddenly, my 40- to 34-inch waist transformation felt shockingly inadequate. I knew I wasn’t “fat” anymore, but I felt insurmountably average. And as a gay man, how do you work an average body?

Sitting on the couch with a boy I’d been on a few dates with, the subject of exes came up. Dangerous territory for anyone, but especially so this evening.

“I don’t know, I mean I was with my last boyfriend for a couple years.” he said. “And then he started putting on weight and I just lost interest, so I broke up with him.”

Given that this was our fourth or fifth date, I’d already done what any other 25-year-old would have done — ahem, thoroughly analyzed his social media accounts — I knew exactly what his ex-boyfriend looked like. He was certainly no bigger than I was. If anything, he was more fit. In that moment, the former fat kid who still lives inside me decided that I could never take my shirt off in front of him again. I left feeling the kind of shame about my body that I hadn’t felt since being bulimic in high school.

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I’m far enough removed from my eating disorder to now make jokes about it. But for plenty of gay kids, they’re still in the darkest parts of that struggle. Every time I gain or lose weight, I am made exceedingly aware of the power a thin waist and broad shoulders holds in my community. And while I’m thinner now than I once was, I’m still acutely aware of when I’m the only person in the room without a flat stomach. And I’m aware of how differently I’m treated when I’m out with fitter friends in public. I may have taken more of a leading role in my love life, but I’ve still got to win suitors over with funny first.

At age 25, I live in a wonderful city, I have a job that love and the best friends I could ask for. However, I’m still programmed to believe that I will have true happiness only when you can see my abs through my shirt. Women have been facing body-image issues forever. Straight men with average bodies have had their renaissance with the dad-bod movement. When will gay men have theirs?