Take Me Out to the Bawl Game
I’ve been meaning to ask you, John Amaechi. I need to have a word with you, Judith Arndt. Could we sit down and talk, Andrew Goldstein? I know you’re screening your calls but I would appreciate it if you would call me back, J.P. Calderon. I understand you have a restraining order against me but I want to ask a favor of you, Ian Roberts.
Could you all do me a favor and stop being so damn athletic? Thanks.
Seriously, professional gay athletes – you’re making the rest of us look bad. It was difficult enough having to deal with the challenges we faced while we were young, with learning how to survive as a gay student in high school. Many of us hated P.E. and abhorred athletics, and thus found other outlets by which to channel our energy. We joined the theater. We became involved in student government. We developed an affinity for music. We pretended to date women. We understood that as long as we survived the twelve or so years of P.E. classes and peer pressure to be athletic, that we would no longer be pressured into impressing anyone once we became a gay adult.
Wow, were we stupid. Un-athletic and stupid.
Now I certainly don’t wish to imply that all gay men experience the same athletically-challenged childhood, for I’m not naïve enough as to assume that all gay men were as terrible at sports when they were young as I was. I realize that I’m most likely projecting my own personal insecurities, in the futile hope that I wasn’t the only 14-year old queer who – the way the French would at the sight of the Red Baron – would flinch at the sight of an incoming volleyball. I would just simply, if not desperately, like to believe that I wasn’t the only closeted gay high school student who faked having polio to get out of P.E. class.
Setting aside the acceptance of personal blame for my own psychological insecurities (this is after all only a column, and not an autobiography), I can’t help but imagine that other people in the gay community feel similar to myself. I have no problem with gay athletes practicing in the privacy of their own home between consenting adults, but why must they come out of the closet and compete in such public settings? The Gay Games, the World Outgames, the National Republican Softball League; must they be so proud of not being a sissified, flabby non-athlete like myself?
Please, think about the non-athletic children!
Approximately a year ago I went with a group of gay friends to celebrate Independence Day by having a barbecue at a park. Food was present, beer was abundant, gossip was assumed, and then, in a manner reminiscent of Pee Wee Herman in an adult theater in the early nineties, someone pulled out that ticking pigskin time-bomb: a football. Not only was I horrified that someone had brought a football to a gay barbecue, but I was doubly horrified to witness that anyone who happened to not be myself was engaged in a very, let’s say, engaging game of football. I had to ask myself: did I not choose to be gay and sleep with men so that I could avoid this very issue?
With the gay man’s eternal quest for perfection as a backdrop (an eternal quest at least as old as John McCain and at least as successful as his presidential campaign), it must be asked: gay athletes – good for the gay community, bad for our gay psyche? The rationale of course to gay men in sports is that it counters the negative stereotype that all gay men are indistinguishable, and can in fact be as masculinely competitive as our heterosexual counterparts. I recognize and agree with this idea, that gay athletics is a vital fraction of the gay community, a fraction so vital that it reaches across all walks of life until it pulls a hamstring. Gay men are not one-size-too-tight-fits-all. We choose the rainbow to symbolize our community, for the simple fact that the rainbow inherently symbolizes the diversity in people. Gay athletes do a huge service to the gay community by demonstrating that we refuse to fit a stereotype, and don’t need the permission of the straight community to be competitive.
Time has passed since the football-at-the-gay-barbecue incident, and while I’ve thought back on that event, as well as other invitations to play sports (Football? No thank you. Basketball? Not interested. Mini-golf? See you Tuesday), I realize that my own insecurities are not reasons enough to ban gay athletics, as much as I would prefer that happen. Gay athletics are an intrinsic part of the gay community, and unify the gay community in ways that neither sex nor alcohol ever will. Well, at least in a way that sex never well.
I’ll still blame Ian Roberts though for making me look bad.
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