I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, "Isaac is up in heaven now." It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, "Kurt is up in heaven now." That's my favorite joke.

So in 1586, Mary Queen of Scots (no longer queen by then, she'd been forced to abdicate for her infant son a year earlier) was imprisoned in Chartley Hall. A group of good Catholic men led by Anthony Babington hatched a plot to set her free, topple Elizabeth I, and set Mary on the throne of England and Scotland.

The conspirators communicated with Mary via encoded letters that were smuggled to her inside the hollowed-out bungs of beer barrels. The code they used was what is now called a nomenclature, a symbolic substitution code which included symbols for common words, spaces and one to show that the next letter is doubled.

Obviously, the plot didn't work out. A double agent in the employ of Sir Francis Walsingham turned over the encrypted letters, and the code was broken easily enough. Eventually Walsingham broke up the party, and the Babington Plot was probably the reason Elizabeth finally decided she had to execute Mary.

So tell me, how cool were politics back then?

Queen Mary's Cipher:

I don't ever remember not being fat. There are pictures, of course. Until I was four or so, I wasn't. Sturdy, tall, but not fat. Not even chubby. But I don't remember it. All I remember is being fat.

Fat kids know they're pariahs. And fat kids learn quick how it is to be invisible and conspicuous at the same time. There are pitfalls for fat kids that nobody else in the world knows about. Like when the band teacher hands out matching t-shirts for the Christmas concert, and none of them are big enough for you. Like the first time you have to lever yourself out of the wraparound desk. I used to stare at the skinny kids, the normal kids, amazed by how much room they had left in their seat. I always filled my seat totally.

But in all honesty, I never hated myself until junior high school. With puberty came the loathing, the morbid awareness of my body. From the time I was eleven, my body was my enemy. Disgusting and malformed, I couldn't see why anyone would even want to talk to me, much less love me. Books, books, books, I always had my books. Books instead of friends, books instead of boys, books instead of everything. I wasn't alone when I was reading. But I was alone the rest of the time.

Everyone in the world has been lonely. But I'm not sure whether everyone has been isolated. Ugly word, hateful nasty scary word. Not just alone, not just lonely, but isolated. Isolated is a cold pale desert. Isolated is without hope.

It becomes a vicious cycle, isolated because you're afraid to talk to anyone because you're afraid they'll hurt you because you think you deserve to be hurt because you think you're horrible and so you isolate yourself even more.

And then when you do open yourself to someone you're taking this huge emotional risk Even walking up to a stranger and saying 'Hi' is this great enormous deal, and if you don't get a good response, it's a crushing blow and you pull even farther into your shell.

And then somehow you sort of fall into relationships, just a couple. High school, for me. A few friends, and then a few more. And those friendships are so precious because they're so...rare. Almost exotic, the idea of people actually liking you, wanting you around. At fifteen, I would have gladly murdered for the sake of any of my friends. I would have committed any crime for them, as long as they continued to like me.

But friendship are so hard for fat kids, harder than for 'normal' people. There's no perspective. Everything is life or death, everything is all or nothing. You feel like someone who lucked into a fortune, and you walk on eggshells because at any minute it could be snatched back. I literally used to have nightmares where C. and T. and the others would suddenly turn to me in the middle of a conversation and say "Jesus, what are you doing here? Why are we talking to you? Get out!"

And God help you when you find a lover. You just know that you're driving them crazy because everything matters so much. Every little smile and frown is analyzed in your head over and over because you're just sure that if this doesn't work out you'll never find another man to love you, not ever, not in a million years, because you're horrible, right?

And then when they hurt you, it's like knives in your brain. Because you don't have any skin, no protection, no armor. You try to tell other people about it, explain how it almost killed you, and they're like 'Well, that's not so much, get the hell over it.' But they don't understand that you have nothing to protect you, you have nothing to buffer yourself with, you're all nerve endings and bleeding flesh and losing that friend is enough to make you want to die.

I love the internet. I think it's such a gift to people like me. People without skin. I've talked before about the Tabula Rasa, the clean slate, the freedom to be your own invention. But even more, the Internet provides that critical distance, that little bit of 'space'. To act like our armour...our skin. For people like us who don't have any.

And I can't believe I'm peeling that skin away for you tonight.

It took me so long to learn not to hate my body. Especially during my teen years, when I would have hormone swings twice a day and zits would spring up overnight. My body felt like an ally that had become an enemy. Like it hated me. And I hated it back.

And Jesus, high school. People say 'children can be so cruel', but that's just a platitude. Children are cruel, but teenagers are vicious. And worse, teenagers are indifferent. They're lucky if they can turn their attention outward long enough to care about a half-dozen friends. But care about the secret hurts of a socially-retarded fat girl that they see in a class or two? Forget it.

There's a quote I love by André Dubus that says, "Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people." I usually shorten it to "Shyness is egotism."

And my teen years were a constant cramp of shyness. I was too shy to talk--and nobody cared. I sometimes went a full day without talking to a single person, not counting teachers. Sometimes including teachers. Or worse, those times when for a little while I was happy. Talking and laughing and being silly, and then all of a sudden I'd remember who I was and it was over. It felt like falling down a deep, cold hole.

So I read. I read and read and read. Poetry, novels, sci-fi, fantasy, children's books, anything I could get my hands on. Anything that would take me away from the world, anything that would make me not me. Not Toria, not fat and ugly and smart and isolated. I was Frodo, Weetzie Bat (well, more often Witch Baby), Sara Crewe, Polgara, Paul Atreides, Nora Charles, Reality Tuttle, Moreta, anybody but Toria.

There were no real romantic/sexual relationships for me until I was in college. Then I met D. Tall and red-headed, funny and friendly and endlessly charming. Endlessly irresponsible. And he liked me. And I worshipped him.

I loved him with all the fierceness of a sheltered kid committing her first sin. Endless hours in my dorm room, waiting for him to call, so that I could meet him for dinner in the cafeteria, for coffee at the nearby coffee shop, just to hang out in his dorm room and talk. Once I stole a hat from him and lay there on my narrow bed with it crushed against my face, breathing in his scent in a kind of ecstasy.

He told me he didn't love me 'like that'. He was as kind as he was capable of. He was my best friend and he loved me. Just not 'that way'. But he was also 23 and feckless and reckless and I was always there. Me with my open adoration, my obvious willingness to do anything he wanted. And the sexual tension mounted.

And eventually there came that One Day. Just one day, we said. Just one day in bed, naked and kissing and rolling over and over. Just one day of laughing and touching and everything I wanted, but then no more. 'Just to get it out of our system,' we said. 'Just because we'll always wonder,' we said. 'Just this one day,' we said.

Not just one day, of course. It happened over and over. But then...well, then he found a girl that he did like 'that way'. One he came to love 'like that'.

It took so long. The mounting heat of resentment and betrayal inside me, twinned with a squirming humiliation at how stupid I'd been, how naive, how desperate, how horribly gauche and obvious. And the long, slow months alone, my self-confidence completely shattered, convinced of my own ugliness, stupidity, essential lack of loveableness.

Sex was weird for years after that. I used to fuck men I didn't like. Just because I could. Just to prove that someone wanted me. And I wouldn't let them touch me, not really. I cultivated superb blow-job skills, so that I could get them off early and then would begin the dance of why-you-can't-touch-me. I never had the balls to say 'Look, you got yours, now just go to sleep like a good boy', but that's what I was thinking.

If they touched me, then my walls might come down, and I couldn't have that. If I could manage it, I would never even take my clothes off. Or I'd stay in a t-shirt and panties--even just panties would do it. That symbolic barrier. God, it took so long. I tried it with men and boys and girls, with coworkers and strangers and friends. And nothing worked. I couldn't trust. Even when men told me I was beautiful, in my head all I could hear was 'Ugly girls are good in bed because they're so grateful.'

I met a few men who liked fat girls. Who honestly preferred them. And eventually, I could believe them. They would call me pretty, and I didn't think they were lying. I went to bed with them, of course, but that wasn't the important thing. The important thing was the believing. Was the trust.

And maybe I was just ready. Maybe I'd just healed enough that I could finally take in the things that had been there all along. Learning to accept my body was the hardest thing I'd ever done. Learning to love it was harder. I had a pewter charm on a black cord, a Venus of Willendorf-type figure, so beautiful and serene. I used to reach up and rub her belly with my thumb, like a worry stone. I wore out four of those necklaces in three years. Later, I got her tattooed on my hip. A reminder that would last forever. A reminder of beauty in my flesh.

And still there are days when I hate my body, hate myself, hate my weakness that I can't just lose the damn weight. Times when I feel monstrous and malformed, an object of pity and scorn. But most days...most days I don't feel ugly. And that's a fair accomplishment for a fat girl in our world.