I’m going to welcome you into the mind of a stereotypical gay man for a moment. Not that I’m our representative—I’m not the capital G in LGBTQ or anything—but I have similar shared experiences that plenty of queer men can relate to. Many concerning our common enemy: sports. Boy, do we have a history.
As is customary in one’s youth, my parents enrolled me in extracurricular sports programs. I did everything: soccer, swimming, cricket, karate, boxing, cheerleading, horseback riding, rock climbing. You name it, I did it… and then eventually stopped doing it. You see, adolescent boys are the spawn of hell on Earth and when you’re slightly veering off the path of heteronormativity, whether consciously or unconsciously, they’re not afraid to send hungry hellhounds, foaming at the mouth, to eat you alive. It was never the sports that I disliked (except cricket—I’m sorry, it’s just so boring standing outside for hours doing next to nothing), rather, it was the boys I did it with that made it unbearable. If you’ve never been inside a high school boys’ locker room, I envy you. It is an Inferno of B.O. poorly masked by Lynx Africa deodorant, filled with homoeroticism rivalling only that of Ancient Greek Olympians, with slurs thrown around more frequently than any other noun. So, you can understand my apprehension to continue returning to this environment.
After trialling and abandoning at least a dozen sports, my parents concocted a rule: I could only quit after doing a sport for a year. Fair play. I had increased their spending every time I signed up for a new extracurricular I couldn’t commit to, so I now see the merit in that rule. Child me did not. He saw spending another second with those boys as punishment, another hour in the sun hearing chides and comments as torture. I’m sure I was of equal levels of evil to my parents as those boys were to me.
Maybe my memory is hyperbolising the situation—I did make some friends playing sports and enjoyed many weekends playing outside—but I also remember all too well the isolation sports caused me. By no means was I an inside creature. Sure, I played video games on my Wii and made art and wrote stories and started drama between my Littlest Pet Shops—but I also loved my trampoline and walking my dogs and going to the park. My aversion was never towards athleticism nor being outside. It was towards gathering in a group of boys, now men, and redistributing our pent-up hormones and emotions into a ball—or each other. Sports was the first environment where I felt and was made to feel different. Before I even understood my own identity, a label was Sharpied onto my forehead. One beginning with F and ending in G.
I was quite young when I first noticed that, while these boys had no qualms using derogatory language, straight men struggled with expressing themselves verbally. Except ten-year-old me wondered something more to the tune of, “Why don’t my guy friends want to play with my Monster High dolls?” My girl friends never avoided conflict. In fact, we actively made it together when playing pretend. When we had issues, our dolls were the vessels through which we communicated. I don’t carry around a doll through which I speak about my difficult feelings now but having played this way as a child, I’d argue I’m better suited to emotional expression than most men who didn’t. It seems that the only emotion men feel comfortable openly expressing is rage—the roars and chants of the crowd at a football game.
Ah, footy. My only understanding of AFL comes from one of my favourite novels, Timothy Conigrave’s Holding the Man. Ironically, this is not because of my queer history with sports but because I’m from a town in NSW that really doesn’t have any AFL culture. Sure, there are some local clubs and school teams but it’s all about NRL where I’m from. It’s no surprise given my resistance to sport that I haven’t even watched it on TV—but I’ve viewed plenty of NRL games and plenty of tennis and cricket. And by “viewed,” I mean I sat on the couch next to my dad, who was watching, but played my Nintendo or read or did my homework adjacent to him… typical adolescent parallel play activities. I could name every NRL team but could only name the Sydney Swans before coming over to Perth, which obviously has a huge AFL culture. The first thing I learned is that the AFL boys are not so dissimilar to the NRL boys, though less beefy and more agile. It’s the same toxic locker room culture—with similarly slutty shorts.
In an effort to tick some things off my Perth bucket list, I thought I would kill two birds with one stadium. So, last week, with a group of Fremantle and Collingwood fans, I flocked down to Optus Stadium, to which I’d never been, to watch my first AFL game.
I mistakenly took an Uber, not understanding the chaotic culture of driving in on game night and arrived just as play started. After five flights of stairs, I already felt unfit to be there. I had no merch and wasn’t wearing any team colours in a sea of black and purple and was recalling all of the past times I’ve seen sports live. I’ve become something of a bad luck charm, with the past three games I’ve attended ending in a draw. (Can you guess how this game ended?) Nonetheless, already out of breath, I took my seat.
The last time I was in a stadium, I was watching music industry magnate—the music industry herself—Taylor Swift. So I wasn’t expecting anything that theatrical or entertaining to occur. I was quickly proved wrong. One of the first things I noticed was how camp the entire production is. It’s theatre—Elizabethan levels of audience engagement. I’m surprised no one brought rotten fruit to throw at the players. The lights flashing every time the home team scored a try, along with the music, was the tip of the dramatising sports iceberg for me.
Unfortunately, I can acknowledge that if I wasn’t with a group of queer and queer-adjacent friends, I would have felt very uncomfortable—which I still did at points. I couldn’t focus during the first quarter with the beery breath of the boisterous bloke behind me belting, “slap him on the ass,” at the minuscule players down below. And his friend loudly whispering that they’re “playing extra queer this year” took me right back to the high school boys’ locker room.
Men’s AFL is the only professional sport in the world to have never had an openly queer player—past or present. Obviously, I’m not in the sport of outing anyone but I am familiar with the statistic—what is it, one in three? I couldn’t help but overlook the field and count, well, plenty more than three players. There’s no one else to blame but the pervasive, toxic, locker room masculinity for the sport’s lack of queer representation. While there have never been any out male AFL players, when you look at the female teams, you’d think it was a requirement to, well, “play for the other team.” I believe this representation has created a larger fanbase because it is a proponent of inclusion. Switching to the soccer field for a second; even my most non-sporty lesbian and sapphic femme friends follow the Matildas. I don’t think I’ve ever felt represented to that extent in any sport to even care enough to learn the rules of any game.
If you’re wondering where my queer mind wandered during the second quarter, it was many places. How long is halftime? When is Charli XCX’s new album coming out? Is the guy behind me going to spill his beer down my back or bash me? But, in the third quarter, something unexpected happened. I actually started to get it.
Focusing on my friends’ cheers made me realise fanaticism isn’t always toxic. Sure, it still involves ridiculing the players who falter and praising those that succeed but we can do it in our own queer way, in our own language. No, I didn’t say “slay” or “yas” or “queen” at the players—okay, maybe one of those slipped out—but I never felt the need to conform to heteronormative ways of expressing celebration or disappointment. I left the stadium more comfortable with sports than I had entered it. I don’t think it’s enough for me to start following AFL independently of my friends but maybe it’s a step towards a reconciliation between sports and I.
When I was eight, my parents sat me down and told me I had to make a decision. I had gone through almost every local sports club within my LGA and they needed me to have an extracurricular activity I would stick with so that I could get out of their hair for a couple of hours every week and so they didn’t have to worry about my socialising skills. Art classes or acting classes. Those were my choices. If I’d never been told, either by society or a coach or a teammate, that I was too sensitive for sport, too faggy, I may not be writing this article today. You could argue that trying out every sport as a child actually led to me pursuing this degree. If I’d never taken that first acting lesson, I may have never made it to WAAPA. So, thanks to all the bratty boys who excluded me. If they haven’t changed their prejudice, I hope they’ve at least changed their deodorant of choice. No more Lynx Africa. Please.