Mo Makani and Elliot Landry
Mo Makani and Elliot Landry shared a sibling-like chosen-family bond until Elliot’s death in his late fifties.
Overview
Born on November 11, 2003, Elliot was approximately eight and a half years older than Mo, who was born on May 5, 2012. Mo related to him as an affectionate younger brother who was neither intimidated by Elliot’s size nor deferential to his age. Elliot was quietly protective of Mo and recognized the strength beneath his gentle manner. Their teasing and fierce loyalty were grounded in mutual understanding of body-related trauma: Elliot had lived with pituitary gigantism, childhood fatphobia, and medical neglect, while Mo managed hypertension, fatphobic medical dismissal, and the strain of being relied upon as a caregiver.
Neither required the other to explain every vulnerability or coping habit. When one struggled, the other could bring food, sit beside him, and wait without pressing for words. Their bond made room for care offered through parallel presence as well as direct conversation.
Origins and Foundation
Mo and Elliot met through the Baltimore chosen-family network around Charlie Rivera, Logan, and Jacob. As large-bodied men who had encountered fatphobia and medical dismissal, they recognized aspects of each other’s complicated relationships with food and medical care.
Their friendship developed through family gatherings and repeated, often quiet, recognition of each other’s struggles and strengths.
Dynamics and Communication
Mo called Elliot “Island Boy” or “Coconut Chef” in response to Elliot’s gentle ribbing; Elliot called the younger man “uncle” precisely because the title did not fit their age difference. Their teasing was affectionate rather than cruel. The names were part of a familiar language between chosen brothers, distinct from the clinical and stigmatizing labels each had heard applied to his body.
Food was another recurring way they cared for each other. They took buffet trips together and brought food during crises, sometimes feeding each other when conversation would have demanded too much. They were protective of each other’s well-being during health emergencies and offered quiet company on difficult days. Their shared experience of fatphobia and medical dismissal made that company possible without requiring either man to justify his need for it.
Cultural Context
Mo and Elliot were both large-bodied men of color who had been treated as medical problems before being treated as people. Mo was Native Hawaiian and grew up on Oʻahu with family meals in which feeding someone until they were full expressed love; the relationship also drew on Hawaiian histories in which physically imposing aliʻi could be valued. Elliot was Black American and Puerto Rican, raised in Alabama, where his gigantism attracted medical scrutiny alongside childhood fatphobia and the surveillance directed at large Black bodies. Their experiences were distinct, but meals and shared tables became central to how they cared for each other.
Mo understood bringing food during a crisis as a form of kōkua, or practical help, that made aloha visible. It came from the family practice of feeding people who were hurting, and it showed that he had considered a particular person’s needs and turned concern into nourishment. Elliot brought his own Southern Black experience of food as care: church potlucks, funeral meals, and a neighbor’s plate wrapped in foil and left on a porch all offered models for feeding someone when words failed. In their friendship, buffet outings joined these different histories of care with solidarity and a refusal to apologize for their appetites or bodies under the scrutiny of diet culture.
Both had encountered clinicians who saw weight before the person seeking care. Mo’s hypertension had been dismissed as an inevitable result of his size rather than addressed with nuanced, respectful treatment. Elliot’s childhood care for gigantism sometimes treated his body as a spectacle instead of attending to his well-being. That history helped each understand what medical dismissal had cost the other. When Mo sat quietly with Elliot on a hard day, his presence carried recognition grounded in experience rather than an expectation that Elliot explain himself.
Their bond also drew meaning from different ways of building family beyond biological ties. In Mo’s Hawaiian understanding, ʻohana could extend through hānai, or informal adoption, and through people claimed by ongoing care. Elliot’s Black American experience included traditions of chosen kinship shaped by love and by the need to sustain families through slavery’s legacy, incarceration, and economic violence. Within the network around Charlie, Logan, and Jacob, their brotherhood grew through repeated acts of care rather than a single defining event: showing up, feeding each other, and sharing comfortable silence.
Their teasing also had cultural meaning. For Mo, playful ribbing could signal the closeness of someone already claimed as family; Elliot was familiar with Black American traditions of the dozens and affectionate roasting. In their friendship, humor allowed intimacy between men who had encountered pressure to limit direct emotional expression. “Island Boy,” “Coconut Chef,” and “uncle” became familiar names for one another, in contrast with terms such as “patient,” “problem,” or “body mass index” that had reduced them to their bodies.