Stuff Gay People Like: Gay sports leagues

A 13-year-old gay boy’s greatest fear and embarrassment are four little words: “you throw like a fag.” They can be heard on every middle-school sports field and even if they’re spoken jokingly, they cut a gay boy to the bone.

What stings so much is that for a lot of them, they know it’s true. It’s nature’s cruel curse that sexual orientation may indeed sometimes be manifest in things like athletic ability, long before the kid comes out of the closet and even if he’s years away from realizing that he’s gay. What something like throwing a ball has to do with same-sex interest is anybody’s guess; it’s not like the poor kid is thinking about a fat dick or kissing the studly guest star on last week’s episode of Glee at the moment his foot propels him from the ground or the baseball leaves his fingers. Yet there he is, 13-years-old, and some magical thing happens between the brain and the elbow that causes the hand to twist like its flinging a puff of fairy dust.

“You throw like a girl, Derek! Like a chick!”

Aw, fuck this shit. I’m signing up for the pottery club.

So a lot of gay boys quietly excuse themselves from sports – they may be vaguely intrigued or even have some real talent, but that doesn’t change the fact that the way they run is telling the world something about themselves that they don’t want the world to know. They take up other interests.

There’s something appealing about sports though, too. Athletes in traditional sports are seen as piles of steamy masculinity, and can get away with rough and dickish behavior because in most american public schools they’re a privileged class. For gay boys men who are not flamboyant, athleticism is a ticket to the sweet and easy world of heterosexuality – no one would guess you are gay there – or least a ticket to being something like a sex god among gay men, elusive and rarely attainable.

So when they grow up, a thought occurs to many of those men who bowed out as children: imagine a sports league in which everyone is gay! Each one realizes he could pretty much toss a baseball with a friggin feather boa wrapped around his arm and nobody would say anything about it. “Oh, you throw like the rest of us!” is the worst he’d hear. In the mean time, he can proudly splatter his athleticism across his online profiles to win the sexy allure he missed out on in his youth: I’m athletic! I play sports and I am active! And UB2!

Here he might re-discover the latent interest in athleticism he had all along but never explored out of embarrassment. Masculinity, you see, is only scary when someone is doing it at you, but it can be fun to do masculinity at someone else (as long as it’s consensual). It also feels much safer when the most perfect specimen of raw, unrestrained butchness on your team is actually the lesbian quarterback. You know if anyone messes with you, she has your back.

Stuff Gay People Like (SGPL) is a satirical/cultural column featured in Out Front Colorado. Visit the Facebook Page or view the whole list.

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