What are you doing tomorrow morning at 8:30?

I’ll be blissfully unconscious as a doctor pokes me full of holes and sucks out mound after jiggly mound of stubborn, unsightly fat from my lower back and abdomen. (Click here—if you dare—to see the hideous disfigurement man repellant mushy goo I’ve spent the last 20 years working very hard to hide from the rest of the world.)

That’s right: I’m having liposuction. Plastic surgery. Body image issues. A vanity crisis. “A little work done,” as they say in more polite circles.

And I’m fucking STOKED about it!


Everybody who makes the decision to fork over a sizeable chunk of money to undergo an invasive—and wholly unnecessary—surgical procedure like this has a litany of rationales for doing so. Here are mine:

• I have worked out with medium to heavy intensity five days a week since I graduated from college in 1990, pushing my once-skeletal 6'1" frame from 151 lbs to a peak of 203 five years ago. I’ve leveled off around 190 since then, and I don’t see myself ever getting any more muscular. Though I keep trying.

• My diet is, for the most part, exemplary. I don’t drink alcohol, I don’t eat crap like Twinkies and potato chips and candy, I barely drink pop, I indulge in fatty desserts only if they’re among my few favorites (like molten chocolate soufflés and Breyer’s vanilla ice cream)—and what I do eat falls into the vegetables/fruits/lean meats/skim milk/egg whites category.

• I’ve been running regularly for 10 years, and I enter three or four serious races every summer. I always take the stairs. If I’m going somewhere that’s under three train stops away, I walk. I ran a frickin’ marathon this year.

• Despite all of this, my love handles (the lipo doctor calls them “flanks”) have sat defiantly on my hips since high school, immovable (aside from their constant jiggling) and undeterred by all my healthy living and obsessive exercise.

So the biggest reason I’m getting the fuckers sucked out for good is that I’ve earned the right to parade around with ripped abs and a tiny waist.


Of course, there are other reasons as well:

• The love handles bother me so much that I almost never take my shirt off in public. I haven’t worn a swimsuit in three years.

• I’m not really keen on being naked in front of other guys. Despite what my reputation would have you believe.

• I’m clearly a victim of the ubiquitous body fascism that keeps gay men—and, apparently, straight men as well—filled with self-loathing and the unquenchable desire to have lipo and take steroids. (Though I am NOT in any danger of taking steroids. I don’t do any drugs, remember? Besides, I like my big balls and smooth skin and even temper just the way they are.)

• And I’m not kidding myself here: A smaller waist will attract hotter men. I hope. And though I’m fully aware these won’t necessarily be quality men, I plan on enjoying their attention to the fullest of my ability.


I have been surprised, though, at the almost white-hot anger this topic has inspired in some of my friends. I had no intention of keeping it a secret—I saw lipo as just another interesting adventure in my never-let-myself-get-bored life—but some of my friends have gotten seriously, voice-raisingly mad at me for even thinking about it. So now I bring it up only when I absolutely have to (as in “I can’t come in to work on our week off because I’m having surgery”) and, if pressed for details, I evasively refer to it as “back surgery.”

As I’ve stated here repeatedly, I don’t go into debt for anything beyond a mortgage—and maybe a car payment when my 10-year-old Neon finally goes to that shady Dodge dealer in the sky. And something as frivolous as lipo is no exception to that rule. I opened what I half-jokingly called my lipo fund four years ago, and I’ve auto-deposited a couple hundred bucks a month into it since then. I told myself that when it got past five grand—the point where I could actually write a check for the procedure—I’d see if I still really wanted to go through with it. Well, I hit five grand early this fall, and I realized I’d been thinking about it constantly all that time. So I researched doctors, made an appointment, got a quote and decided to pull the trigger a month ago. I even opened a credit card with a 0% APR for 16 months so I could pay it off in interest-free installments and keep my lipo fund liquid (so to speak) and interest-bearing as long as possible.


And the buyer’s remorse I thought I’d get when I made my non-refundable payment two weeks ago? Forget about it! I’ve had nothing but buyer’s giddy excitement! The little fuckers that have been fighting my every attempt at 30-inch-waistdom are going DOWN tomorrow. They’re going down HARD and they’re going down for GOOD.

And—if you can stomach it—I’ll give you all the gory details (with pictures!) of my surgery, recovery and re-emergence as Small Waist Man this summer. Just in time for thong season!