Hot & Heavy ─ Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love & Fashion

In this fun, fresh, fat-positive anthology, fat activist and sex educator Virgie Tovar brings together voices from an often-marginalized community to talk about and celebrate their lives. Hot & Heavy rejects the idea that being thin is best, instead embracing the many fabulous aspects of being fat?building fat-positive spaces, putting together fat-friendly wardrobes, turning society’s rules into personal politics, and creating supportive, inclusive communities. Writers, activists, performers, and poets?including April Flores, Alysia Angel, Charlotte Cooper, Jessica Judd, Emily Anderson, Genne Murphy, and Tigress Osborn?cover everything from fat go-go dancing to queer dating to urban gardening in their essays, exploring their experiences with the word ?fat,” pinpointing particular moments that have impacted the way they think and feel about their bodies, and telling the story of how they each became fat revolutionaries.

Ground-breaking and long overdue, Hot & Heavy is a fierce, sassy, thoughtful, authentic, and joyous collection of stories about unapologetically?and unconditionally?loving the body you’re in.

Virgie Tovar is a San Francisco-based fat activist and sexologist. After receiving a bachelor's degree in political science at U.C. Berkeley, she was offered admission to the only human sexuality master's program in the U.S., housed at San Francisco State University. She completed research for her master's thesis on the subject of fat women and femininity in 2011.

Tovar is a certified sex educator who has performed research for the Center for Court Innovation in New York, worked for the National Sexuality Resource Center and is currently a contributor for Good Vibrations Magazine, where she writes on the intersections of body image and sexuality. In collaboration with organizations including the GLBT Historical Society, Tovar has brought events focused on fat activism and positivity to the Bay Area in hopes of ending the official and unofficial War on Obesity.