OCallaghan - Fat Gay Vegan

FAT GAY
VEGAN

Dedicated to anyone who wants
to do better and be kinder

FAT GAY
VEGAN

EAT, DRINK AND
LIVE LIKE YOU
GIVE A SH!T

SEAN OCALLAGHAN

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Deep down we all want to do the right thing, even though sometimes we get thrown off track by forces seemingly bigger than us.

I follow your Instagram. I love your name!

Hey. Are you that big gay vegan?

Excuse me. Do you write a blog about being fat and gay?

Are you no, I dont want to say it. I dont want to hurt your feelings!

If this is the first time you are encountering me as Fat Gay Vegan you are probably intrigued, or at the very least tickled slightly, by the name. Of all the things I have done during the decades spent marauding around on this fragile planet, being FGV is far and away the one that is set to have the most impact, especially when I consider the sheer number of people it has allowed me to connect with around the globe. I will get on to what it is exactly I do, but before I get to singing my own praises and lecturing you on how to be a decent vegan, I really should give the unfamiliar amongst you an insight into the origins of Fat Gay Vegan.

During a strange time in history before the Twilight trilogy but after the Pete Wentz nude photos leak, I was a prolific blogger on a social media platform where selfiesbefore-they-were-called-selfies were currency and eyeliner was plentiful and thick. Yes kids, I was a MySpace blogger. If you dodged the Fall Out Boy fans and the painfully-slowto-load custom backgrounds and found yourself on my page, you would have been given a glimpse into what made me tick. Long story short is that I ticked thanks to travel, vegan food, the fight for animal rights, a love of pop music and gay stuff like Pride marches and the rise of Lady Gaga.

I spent a year or two writing vegan restaurant reviews from around Australia and the USA that werent as witty as I would have like to have believed, and then MySpace experienced an undignified fall from grace that left vegan bloggers and emo kids in the wilderness. We had a lot of feelings about things and the world needed to know about them.

Even though veganism first entered my life in 1999, it was in 2010, after arriving in the UK for what has turned into a more than seven-year residency, that I was ready to make a bigger commitment to the activist side of myself. I decided to contribute to building the vegan scene in London and I thought a blog would be a fine way of bringing people together, both online and eventually in real life at social events.

I decided to start a blog because I enjoyed the platform as a way of expressing myself, and I had come to realise that getting feedback from readers was a big motivation for me. As such, to get people to come back regularly and take notice of what I had to say, I needed to make my blog a little bit more focussed. My musings over on MySpace swung wildly from flippant critiques of the latest Britney Spears melodrama to tasty vegan taquitos I devoured during a vacation to Berkeley. The blog needed more of an identity so, based on my burgeoning interest in animal rights, I settled on becoming a vegan blogger.

A blog name will make you or break you. There are so many almost-identical names out there in the wild west of the World Wide Web and I didnt want to be just another plant-based somebody or its just me being kooky narcissist. There were already enough glowing, vital and vibrant vegan bloggers flooding the scene when I decided to stick my chubby hand up in the air.

Fat Gay Vegan as a name was a few years in the making. The idea of using words that have often been used to pigeonhole me or hurt me started back during a university presentation. I was tasked with performing a representation of my personality so, in a completely cloying exhibition of self-indulgence, I stood under a single spotlight wearing giant swing tags hanging around my neck. Please dont laugh. Each tag had a different word written on it, words that I felt were weighing me down in life. Gay. Faggot. Fat. Sissy. Vegan. You get the idea. One by one, I lifted the tags from around my neck and dropped them to the floor as a symbolic gesture of freeing myself from hurtful labels. Im actually cringing as I type this.

Skip forward a few years and I found myself joking around during a conversation with a friend about how people viewed me as somehow deficient because I was fat, gay and vegan. Those labels were often used to ridicule me in various situations and I was keen to find a way to reclaim and reappropriate them. When the idea of a blog started to develop, my online personality Fat Gay Vegan started to take on a life of its own as the fun-loving, potato-obsessed good time chubby guy with a heart of gold. Ive lost track of the number of times someone has told me they started following me on social media because of the name alone.

There are a lot of negative social connotations surrounding being a fat person and believe me when I say Ive experienced setbacks and discrimination as a gay person throughout my life. The vegan part of me gets fed up as well with people I know and dont know making judgements and jokes about my compassion as though its the funniest thing they have encountered. Taking these three words that are sometimes used to belittle me and turning them into a positive badge of honour has been wonderful.

Ive created an inclusive online community that has spilled over into real-life events I host, meaning people have come to associate the name Fat Gay Vegan with positivity and compassion. The FGV platform is known for helping people go and stay vegan in order to improve outcomes for animals. Ive learned to love hearing the words Fat Gay Vegan come out of strangers mouths now as they are mostly spoken by happy people looking to share goodwill with me. Words that were once used to make me feel bad or different have become a celebration for me and it feels incredible to have that connected with caring for animals.

There is also something to be said for getting people to say the words out loud in public. Each time my blog name is mentioned in a crowd, it feels like a tiny political act of defiance and irreverence. Ive stopped letting people use those words to hurt me and hearing them spoken back to me in a positive manner helps to reinforce that victory.

Thats me out of the way. I think Ive clearly established myself as Fat Gay Vegan. If you have any questions, Im happy to meet you over a cold pint (you are paying, right?) to sort out any confusion. Ive got a book to introduce to you.

So you know by now that Im not a celebrity chef and Im not a superstar nutritionist. What can I bring to a book about veganism other than overeating, all the ways potato can be prepared and my love of beer, pop music and deepfried comfort food?

I think that I do hold a unique view of veganism from which I hope that others will be able to draw some inspiration. I have lived a vegan lifestyle for almost two decades; Ive experienced being vegan in various countries, and Ive seen this movement shift from the fringes to mainstream newspaper articles, celebrity vegans and giant vegan shows welcoming ten thousand people. You cant go through life interacting with the number of vegan people that I do without learning a thing or two of value to bring to the conversation.

I want to help people and one of my biggest desires is for people to feel cherished and celebrated for their choice to live a vegan life. My dedication to being compassionate towards animals is inseparable from my commitment to caring for oppressed people and challenging discrimination in all forms.