Sticks and balls

Straight guys are so gay.\nSports are stereotypically associated with straight males, even though we know plenty of sports enthusiasts and athletes who break that stereotype. It’s astounding how many people (both gay and straight) seem genuinely surprised when I “come out” as a wild college football, basketball, tennis and baseball fan – as if a gay guy couldn’t possibly enjoy competitive athletics.\nBut the supposedly “straight” world of sports is a little more flamboyant than we often admit. From “tight ends” to the “long ball” to “pitchers” and “catchers,” it’s easy to queer sports.\nIn isolation, all the penetration metaphors we apply to sports and sexual intercourse – drilling, nailing, pounding, plowing – aren’t necessarily queer. But in the context of men bumping up against each other they take on new meaning.\nA quarterback drills his tight end. On the next play, he nails his receiver down the field with a long one. The running back finds the hole and penetrates the defenders. A few plays later the quarterback is sacked, pounded from behind by a defensive back. In basketball, the point guard penetrates the lane and takes it to the hole. In baseball, the hitter drills it through the gap in left field.\nPhil Jackson, coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, gets it. After a recent loss, Jackson said, “We call this a ‘Brokeback Mountain’ game because there’s so much penetration and kick-outs.” Unfortunately, he assigned a negative connotation to the penetration, and he was reprimanded by the league for his implicitly disparaging comments. Next time, a winning coach should celebrate all the man-on-man penetration his team achieved.\nPenetration metaphors aside, the butt-slapping, hand-checking, grabbing, groping and contortionist crotch-in-face dog piles on the court and the field make me raise a questioning eyebrow. It’s as if sport gives men an outlet to enjoy one another’s touch. Society is so homophobic that these poor men can only experience and take pleasure in physical closeness (even in a nonsexual way) under the guise of competitive athletics.\nThere’s also the drag queen in the middle of the field that no one wants to acknowledge: the “Cinderella” team. How perfectly gender-bending and queer. We celebrate an unexpectedly successful feel-good team through association with a stepdaughter who magically transforms into a beautiful princess and falls in love with a sexy prince. Never mind that a less romantic rags-to-riches story such as Oliver Twist might provide a better metaphor; the male sports world prefers the sequins, glitter and ball gowns of Cinderella.\nIn the end, it doesn’t matter how queer men’s sports appear. The point is that the supposedly solid line marking a boundary between two poles of sexuality is woollier than we treat it. Many straight men waste a significant amount of psychological energy guarding this socially constructed, imaginary boundary as they foolishly attempt to prove that they belong definitively on the so-called “normal” side of the wall.\nFace it, fellas, we can’t help but be a little queer. Relax and go watch men play with balls.