Stavros Louca is a romantic at heart. A funny, kind gay man, he’s on the search to find love.

But weighing in at 190 kg, he’s been struggling to fend off the bullies in the gay community.

“Even now when I attend gay bars and clubs and cruising areas people are picking on me because of my obesity,” he told The Guardian.

“They say how did I get so big, they swear at me, they throw sarcastic remarks.”

In the hopes of getting himself out there and finding love, he decided to enter the Mr Gay UK competition in 2012.

The competition is known for pitting one Adonis against the next, but as Stavros took the stage he quickly became a crowd favourite.

“The other guys were muscly tall, slim, sexy,” he says. “I did get a few reactions from them, like ‘mate, you’ll never get through’.”

Little did they know and to the horror of organisers, Stavros got to the final round.

That’s where the discriminatory tactics came to the fore.

In the last round, he was asked to wear a pair of underpants in size small with no other sizes available.

“I didn’t know what to do at first, there was no way of them fitting, they were tiny,” Stavros said.

But he found a way to wear them; he popped them on his head, to the delight of the crowd. The rules didn’t state he had to wear the underwear on his hips.

The final round was then given to the crowd and of course, Stavros won the competition by a landslide. “It was like being at the O2 Arena, they were screaming ‘Stavros, Stavros!’.”

But, after so much joy, his story ended in heartbreak.

The organisers felt there was no way they could be happy with him representing their brand and went back to their discriminatory tactics. They disqualified him on a technicality, for not wearing the underpants properly.

“What they’re trying to do is say that I don’t exist, that I wasn’t there,” he said.

The organisers called him two days after the event to let him know of the disqualification.

Stavros says the whole ordeal has effected him emotionally and mentally, saying “it was like a knock-back”.

His title hasn’t be returned.
Source: The Guardian