| July
1998
Football and gay men
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No one I know has any quantitative data, but there is a general sense that gay men don't care very much about
football [1]. Having said that, of course there are exceptions. I do know 1 or 2 who can sit through a game and quite sincerely say they enjoyed it. But I haven't met anyone who follows the game with any passion, or who are conversant with soccer stars' careers. You don't find gay men turning to the Sports Section to read up on the latest matches the moment they get hold of a newspaper. Gay men don't embrace the sport.
Then again, most straight men don't embrace the sport either. At best, they may follow it on the telly when it's the season, though having watched it, they are equipped to talk about it over lunch the next day, or place bets on the upcoming matches. But obviously enough of them care a hell of a lot for the game for it to be the most popular sport in the world, and for newspapers, especially the tabloids -- now that's another thing: are tabloids straight men's papers? -- to devote pages to every detail. Typically, we take an interest in a sport because we know how to appreciate it. We understand the skills and tactics involved. We know mastery when we see it. This comes mainly from having played it ourselves, or from making an effort to watch it regularly and to find out more about it. In addition, there is the social side. We are drawn to a sport -- either by playing or watching it -- for the company it keeps. We either identify with the company, or we are repelled by it. I'm not referring to something as remote as football hooligans, which most of us encounter only through the TV news, but to the interests of our friends and peers. The thing is, if gay men have little affinity for football, then both factors must be turning up negative for them. In other words, gay men in general don't enjoy playing football, and therefore never quite learnt to appreciate it, and don't identify with the people the game attracts. Take the first one. What is it about football that gay men -- more accurately, gay boys, but I'll come to that later -- don't like? I tried asking around once, but I never got very coherent answers. However, we can deduce the "repulsive" characteristics of football by looking at the sports gay men do like. These include swimming, diving, gymnastics, perhaps cycling and long-distance running (not sprinting). Somewhere in the list should be figure-skating, but even mentioning it tends to create a swarm of stereotypical impressions so thick it obscures any further analysis. So put figure-skating out of your mind. It's irrelevant anyway to Singapore. What are the common characteristics of swimming, diving, gymnastics, cycling and running? All these "gay-favoured" sports have a high content of form and endurance. There's a premium on concentration and the mastery over the self, and the test of success is in many cases the elegance of the result. But even before that, you would have realised that none of them are team sports, and none of them are contact sports. No body-to-body combat. They are also clean sports. No messing around in a muddy pitch. Football is all these things. You have to run after and tackle an opponent, in the process of which you may trip and be thrown onto the squishy field. Does this disturb the sensibilities of a gay person? Football is also a team sport. You have to be "one of the boys", in a way no swimming team or gymnastics team ever needs to be. In the latter examples, the teams are really individually excellent sportsmen collected into a team. But football is less a matter of the individual than teamwork. The degree of integration required is much, much greater. You have to be accepted and trusted. And this brings me to the social aspects of football. But first, we must set our minds to the teenage years, because football is archetypically a school sport. Most people who enjoy watching soccer in their adult years can trace their interest in the game to the fun they had playing football in school, which was part and parcel of learning to appreciate it. Not surprisingly, very few gay men report having enjoyed it. Besides saying they found the physical aspects of the game unattractive, they also often say they never quite fit in. This may be because they didn't put much effort at developing their skills in a game they never really found to their personal taste, which in turn might have led to their being ostracised by their team-mates for poor quality play. Or it could be that the rest of the footballers had certain hetero social attitudes that the gay member could not identify with. The latter problem is particularly likely by their late teens. The problem of hetero or 'macho' attitudes is common to other kinds of sporting teams too, like basketball. It's simply due to the fact that the straight boys outnumber the gay ones in any group. But also, the adrenaline and the competitiveness of being in a sporting team accentuate this (false) facet of masculinity.
But behind all this lies an interesting thought: Gay men's lack of interest in football goes all the way back to their not enjoying the game when young, and not quite fitting in.
Seems like they were already different by at least their early teens. Even before they realised they were gay.
© Yawning Bread
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Footnotes
Addenda
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