A-dick-ted to football

I’ve never seen so many ostensibly straight men obsess about another man’s penis.

Michael Sam is making serious headlines. Last week the man who will likely become the first openly gay player in the NFL made waves when some people looked at photos of him at the NFL combine and decided he had an erection.

According to one headline, “Well He Was Working Out At The COMBINE With Other MEN.”  This, apparently, served to explain it all.

It makes complete sense — how could any gay man possibly keep it down surrounded by the collective burning hunk of man flesh that is an NFL locker room?

Spare me.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, two days later Sam’s penis once again became the topic of conversation when pictures of flaccid junk were attributed to his particular trunk. Images of a muscular man taking a picture of his dick with an iPad were “leaked” to various gossip sites along with the assertion that they had been posted by an account with a picture of Sam’s face.

Before long, speculation was rampant.

News organizations from every level of relevance and credibility were weighing in on whether or not this particular penis belonged to this particular gay almost-NFL player.
They weren’t, for the most part, concerned with the skill the man does or does not bring to the table. That was swept aside by the present turgidity of his schlong, a concrete point on which the abstract squeamishness surrounding Sam’s open homosexuality could focus.

Because there’s a GAY working out at the COMBINE with other MEN. That’s obviously an issue, right? This isn’t a new problem — in fact, it’s safe to say it’s a tired one.

For decades we’ve been realizing that it’s possible to find competence in people of all races, sexes, creeds and, yes, even sexual orientations. Sam’s existence, his simultaneous capacity to be a high-quality football player and a homosexual man, isn’t a paradox — it’s a statistical inevitability.

Most experts agree 10 percent is a reasonable assumption for the proportion of gay men in the United States. In an organization of more than 1,500 players, we might expect 150 of them to be gay men. Even if players in the NFL were 1/100 as likely to be gay as the rest of the population — which seems extremely unlikely — at least one or two of them are still in the closet.

It isn’t necessary to be straight to be a good football player, and we don’t pop boners at every glimpse of men in spandex — especially not when that man is trying to knock you down.

Stop obsessing over what’s in Sam’s pants and start paying attention to what he does on the field.

­drlreed@indiana.edu