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Sports Are Gay.

Sport is America's biggest, corporately sanctioned and communally endorsed homoerotic outlet. There are other vents of course, from action films (Fight Club is about as good as an example as one could imagine), to hip-hop music, which is replete with hyper-masculinity and consumed mainly by young men. And such outlets have been around for a long while; the Greeks had their Olympics and the Romans had their great public baths. But the coverage, money, and resources given over to modern-day men's sports place them, with an appropriate metaphor, in their own league. This is hardly a new idea or argument, but it is one I want to do my part to propagate. There are a number of counterarguments to this that come quickly to my mind and I will do my best to answer them each in turn -- but I am not a consumer of sports and therefore may miss some important points if I do this entirely on my own. Unfortunately, our society's stigma against homosexuality has apparently made sports writers and other fans reluctant to write extensive articles on how gay their obsession is. Or on how gay it isn't. I was only able to find this paper arguing on the same topic, but from the reverse angle, convincingly trying to define sports radio as an establisher of heterosexual hegemony, not, as I am suggesting, a vent for the release of homosexual Freudian energies. This lack of critical writing leaves me without more fully informed resources to consult. So I present this as an open invitation for debate. Anyone who wishes to elaborate, offer a point, or chastise my thinking, please email me at bj@paganbabies and I will post your additions or make the appropriate changes.

Now the first task before me is surely the easiest: illustrate the queer nature of sports. Whether one begins with the fixation on balls, the routine of "hitting the showers," or rampant ass-slapping, one may pick any arbitrary point and find something gay within reach. What are the universals? The overwhelming majority of consumers are men. They watch other very fit young men, often in close contact, and admire them for feats of athleticism, if not at least for their physical form. Fans establish relationships with athletes founded sometimes on performance and sometimes arbitrarily upon any of a hundred reasons, from the manner with which they carry themselves at press conferences to respective hairstyles. The best athletes in a given sport are romanticized to a level befitting the gods: in Nike ads with choirs of angels; in NBC promos with grandiloquent purple prose voiceovers delivered in baritone; in a thousand magazines with as many beads of sweat upon a furrowed brow, lit from beneath, a black background. I'm not saying the players or fans are gay; I'm saying that, to an outsider, it looks gay. But, more than that, these collectively represent the only acceptable fashion for American men to exercise a homoerotic cathexis. Ironically, it is the very idea that this admiration is a "manly" endeavor which is somehow supposed to render that eroticism un-gay, as though it would be in some way more gay if it were a feminine act to appreciate the male body. Counterintuitively, men seek to reduce the hints at homosexuality inherent in sports by accentuating the maleness of its appreciation. This is because the straight man's fear of gay men is not a fear of homosexuality; it is the fear of feminization or, more generally, of all things female. But this is another argument.

Furthermore, the culture that has grown up around sports is the decided favorite lingua franca for male bonding. Sports is the closest thing men have to a universal language, especially when dealing with strangers in awkward social situations -- it's the man to man icebreaker. And when it doesn't work - as is the case when anyone tries it on me - the initiator often walks away as though denied a date. I think for many fans it begins as a father/son thing; in fact, I've yet to meet a sports fan whose father was not also an avid consumer. But my argument cannot be escaped that easily, because the tradition remains the same, no matter who inducts you. To say that it is fundamentally different because of a familial component is to say a visit to the strip joint is divested of all sexuality when you share the tip rail with dad.

The first question to arise in this discussion is, "Where do women fit in?" Firstly, there is little need for a female version of the homoerotic vent: the eroticization of women permeates our culture exhaustively. It is certainly easier to count the number of unattractive women on television than the beautiful and lightly clothed. Then consider women sports fans. There are doubtless heterosexual overtones in much of that appreciation, but consider the category of person that first enters your mind on hearing "fan of the WNBA." It is of course a flimsy stereotype, but, beside the player's families, who do we perceive to be the only people concerned with women's sports? In another of our innumerable ironies, it is "unmanly" for men to be fans of women's sports, to appreciate female athleticism. Men will give as reason for not watching women's sports the disparity in performance between male and female athletes. But this does not answer for the primary obsession with men, nor does it entail anything about the unmanliness of being a consumer of women's sport.

Secondly, what of sports like golf? Certainly that is lacking in eroticism of any kind, especially homosexual eroticism, right? I would bring up three points -- One: I don't think anyone will deny that golf fits into an entirely different category of sport, probably along with equestrian and jai alai - sports of the older, wealthy constituency. Two: Consider the fan base and principal player component of mainly middle-aged men and the tendency of all people to seek out sexual partners of their same age. And also, golfers represent the traditional image of wealthy men - wealth means power, and power is always sexy. Three: Consider the timing. When do we watch golf and other sports of its category? On Sunday afternoons, after the dionysian, orgiastic expenditures of Friday and Saturday nights spent with groups of men at the local sports bar, watching the basketball game. Golf is the postcoital cigarette; it is recovery.

Again, none of this implies anything about anyone's sexuality in particular, sports fan or no. My intention is merely to raise questions about the collective sexuality of America, to force people to think critically about our cultural institutions rather than accepting them as de facto establishments above questioning. I here choose sports, but EVERYTHING is open: What does Oprah mean for Black America, and is even half of it good? What are the divisions that separate Maxim from Playboy (is it really as silly as nipples?) and Playboy from Hustler? Why is absolutely everybody so unsatisfied with their cellular phone six months after it was the best thing out there? Examine everything. Everything.

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