Welcome to Camp Thunder Thighs
The summer camps of my youth didn’t feel made for someone my size. So when I grew up, I made my own — one where fat kids ruled.
Illustration by Lucila Perini
Editor’s note: This piece is part of a collection of stories on fat travel, curated by guest editor, author and activist Virgie Tovar. It’s the first in a series at the intersection of travel and inclusion, published by Airbnb Magazine.
Summer camp is the stuff of American legend. It evokes imagery of oak-scented cabins, bunk beds, aquamarine swimming holes, sunny days, starry nights, long hikes, gooey s’mores, and new friends. When you’re a fat kid, however, your role in this epic narrative is closer to awkward, wonderstruck bystander than full-blown participant.
This makes sense when you consider the fact that American summer camps in their earliest iterations were about getting boys into the wilderness for fear that they were becoming weakened by city life. In that way, at the core of the institution itself is a fear of “softness,” which is arguably itself a form of latent fatphobia. The terror of fat is in many ways about the belief that fat people lack moral and corporeal rigidity — that we are “soft,” literally and figuratively.
I was one of those awkward, wonderstruck bystanders. I dreamed of being a svelte girl who ran around in khaki short-shorts as her ponytail swung effortlessly in the wind, but those short-shorts didn’t come in my size and I would sooner have stuck my head in a beehive than offer up my thighs for scrutiny.
For me, every part of the bucolic summer camp scene I just described felt like a minefield. Swimming felt fraught because I worried about what others would say about my body. I fretted I might fall and hurt another kid if I got stuck sleeping on the top bunk. I wasn’t supposed to be seen eating anything as decadent as a s’more. And one gets tired of always “bringing up the rear” on trails.
Worse still was the specter of Summer Camp’s dystopian doppelganger, Fat Camp, full of the hollowed-out shell of all these experiences: where the outdoors was seen as a massive gym for exercise, snacks were low-calorie and meant only for the meagerest of sustenance, and the most important races were weigh-ins where you competed for accolades. The idea being: Fun is for later, when you’ve earned it by becoming the right size.
I longed for the camp experience, but in addition to being fat I was also the child of frugal immigrants. So I never went. Instead, I fashioned my own summer programming dedicated to personal transformation. I saw the sun as a sweat-promoting assistant in burning off my baby fat. I saw the long days as extra hours to spend with my Sweatin’ to the Oldies VHS tapes, starring the one and only exercise guru Richard Simmons. I saw my time away from school and homework as a call to double down on my food-tracking. Year after year I would heed the call for a beach body, and year after year summer would end and I’d still be, well, me.
In adulthood, I began to question the idea that I had to wait for my body to look a certain way before I could do things that mattered to me. There had to be some other way. It couldn’t be that only one body type got to bask in the glory of the hands-down best season of the year while the rest of us waded, s’more-less, in the shallow end of the pool, covering our bodies with oversized T-shirts.
I started making fat friends who also weren’t interested in summers spent calorie-counting. I expanded my wardrobe to include bikinis — lots of them. I took vacations to warm places and practiced tanning my back fat. All the while, I wondered what it would look like to reimagine a camp where no one had to apologize for their size, where we had the best snacks, where fat kids ruled.
In 2017 I started hosting retreats for women who, like me, wanted to break up with diet culture. The first one was in Negril, Jamaica, and the next was in San Francisco, where I live. I’d loved them both, but still I dreamed of camp.
Finally, in 2019 I did a site visit to the far edges of Sausalito, California, into the peninsular area known as the Marin Headlands. I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, took a long drive through a tunnel, and just as I noticed I’d lost phone signal I was face to face with a vast expanse of ocean. As I wandered I saw coyotes, hawks, deer, miles of cypress trees, wild sage and fennel, a gorgeous beach and lagoon, and even an eagle feasting on a tiny unfortunate rabbit.
And then I went out to the beach with the ranger who was showing me around. “That’s Elephant Rock over there,” she said, pointing to the horizon. I traced its outline with my eyes. It looked like a giant stone elephant crouched in the massive Pacific Ocean, giving itself a bath. I’d always been afraid of being compared to this creature, but since ditching diet culture the elephant had become a cheeky familiar. This rock could be the mascot for what I wanted to build. This place was perfect.
Camp Thunder Thighs was born.
The last weekend of June this year, I invited 30 women to this little slice of wilderness for a few days of nature, meditation, bunk beds (where no one was forced to sleep on the top bunk), crafts, sunsets on the beach, letter-writing home, a loose-leaf-tea bar, a mountain of delicious treats, and — my favorite — something I call the Vulnerability Fashion Show.
We set up our meeting room to look as much like New York Fashion Week as possible with the limited glamping accoutrements we had on hand. I had asked that everyone bring an outfit they were scared of wearing. It was the end of day two, and we’d already spent hours answering each other’s burning personal questions around the fire late into the night under shooting stars, eaten possibly the best barbecue on earth together, and seen a fair share of each other in our skivvies. Everyone had a full hour to get ready in their cabins before piling downstairs and sitting either side of the makeshift runway.
Before I knew it, the first babe was on deck (i.e., standing in the bathroom/laundry room) as the beat of RuPaul’s “Sissy That Walk” came on. There was some hesitation, a little bit of waiting, but then she burst out, hands on hips, syncopating her sashay. Before she could even step onto the catwalk, almost deafening screaming and cheering rose from every person in the crowd, flanking her on either side. They wore bikinis and crop tops, sequin gowns and mesh, slacks and T-shirts with sassy slogans. Some people sauntered; others strutted. Some stripped down further than they’d planned and some opted to walk twice.
There was a complex story behind why each outfit was chosen. Some people felt vulnerable wearing a bikini for fear that others would make fun of their bodies at the beach; others felt vulnerable wearing their favorite sweatpants to run errands because they worried their neighbors would judge them as slovenly (a fear spurred on by fatphobic stereotypes). Some craved the sensation of the sun on their stomach, but had never worn a crop top in public, worried about their stretch marks. Some longed to wear pants, a departure from the hyperfemininity they felt was foisted upon them in order to seem like a “good” woman. Others wore glittery gowns that were meant to reclaim a femininity they felt they’d been hiding.
For three whole days we laughed and cried. We shared life hacks and tips for self-advocacy at work and the doctor’s office. We sang the Disney songs from our childhood around the campfire. I felt inhibition dissipate and intimacy enter the group. Jeans gave way to shorts; shorts gave way to two-pieces. I spent the early mornings at camp alone, sipping coffee above the lagoon, and thinking about how lucky we were to have found each other.
On the last day, we sat in a circle, and each of us shared something we loved from the weekend. Someone said that she had forgotten to pack her bathing suit, and because she was used to being the only fat person, it hadn’t even occurred to her that she could borrow someone else’s. One of the other campers suggested that she ask around; someone did, in fact, have a bathing suit in her size. She was able to go to the beach that day, and she played in the ocean harder than anyone else. This simple thing had moved her immensely. That is the power of feeling a true sense of belonging. Isn’t that what I was always wishing for, all those summers I spent sweating in my bedroom?
With Camp Thunder Thighs I wanted to build a safe haven for all, like me, who literally never fit into the story of Summer Camp. Maybe we missed out on getting swept up in those childhood camp moments that so many probably took for granted, but maybe when we were younger we wouldn’t have felt comfortable taking center stage in a fashion show or getting seconds in the lunch line. Maybe the magic of connecting to another fat kid might have been lost on us. None of us was at Camp Thunder Thighs because our parents sent us there. We all deeply wanted to be there.
We created our own mythology. We made memories that we could hearken back to throughout the year when things got hard. We retreated from urbanity and headed toward the trees, the water, and each other in search of reclaiming our own unabashed softness. In one weekend, on the coast of northern California, a little camp of big women built the epic thing in adulthood that we’d always sought as kids.
About the author: Virgie Tovar is the author of You Have the Right to Remain Fat and started the hashtag campaign #LoseHateNotWeight. She is one of the nation’s leading experts and lecturers on weight-based discrimination and body image.
About the artist: Lucila Perini is a freelance illustrator based in Buenos Aires. She graduated from the University of Buenos Aires with a degree in Graphic Design, and now works as a designer and illustrator for leading brands in fashion, gastronomy, and lifestyle.
