I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams

Jocko Homo: How Gay Is the Super Bowl?

4 8 How Gay Is the Super Bowl? Jocko Homo every super bowl season, that great event in the history of Our Times is preceded by an interminably drawn-out drumroll of breathless speculation, ESPN stat porn, and news-anchor joshing about who’s going to be whose daddy. For what seems an eternity (at least to those of us who would rather undergo a transorbital leukotomy with an ice pick than the protracted brain death of pregame hype), our cultural conversation is preempted by a live feed from the jock unconscious of Team America. It may come as Piss Christ blasphemy to many, but there are some who Truly Do Not Give a Flaming Fuck who finished last in the league in rushing the ball or who led the league in defending tight ends or who had a hot flash during red-zone play-action passes (although that does sound provocative, now that you mention it). Not that anyone asked us. During the run-up to Super Bowl Sunday , anchorclones, talk-show hosts, politicians, and the rest of the chattering class act as if we’re one big happy congregation gathered in solemn veneration of the Gipper’s jockstrap, displayed in a monstrance . It’s the sheer presumptuousness of the sports-crazed majority that galls the unbeliever most—an obliviousness to the possibility , even, that not everyone shares the One True Faith. It’s the same genial arrogance that makes evangelical Christians so monumentally irritating to those of us who prefer a good exfoliating body scrub to being Washed in the Blood of the Lamb. (The religious reference is apt: in our national religion, sports is one aspect of the Holy Trinity, 4 9 J O C K O H O M O the other two being the Free Market—whose invisible hand, like God’s, moves in mysterious ways, but always for the betterment of all—and Christianity, which in the American vernacular is a bizarre amalgam of self-help pep talk, Left Behind doomsaying, and theocratic fascism.) From the gridiron metaphors in your pastor’s sermon to the scripted locker-room banter of local TV newsdudes, joshing about who’s gonna open a can of whupass on who, to the Fantasy Games geek at the office watercooler maundering on about who had six touchdowns and no interceptions in twelve pass attempts this season , posting a 124.3 passer rating, while outside of the red zone his rating on play-action was only 79.7 and his five touchdowns have to be measured, after all, against nine interceptions, the assumption that every red-blooded American—or at least every red-blooded American guy who isn’t a wussy—would give his Truck Nutz for Super Bowl tickets is as unconsidered as it is ubiquitous. Historically, athletic prowess and a consuming passion for sports have been defining aspects of manhood in America.Boys cursed with a congenital ineptitude or, even worse, an indifference to sports tend to end up stuffed into their gym lockers, pitifully bleating for help through the vents. Growing up gay in the South, the humorist David Sedaris “had no interest in football or basketball,” he confides, in his essay“Go Carolina,”but learned“it was best to pretend otherwise.If a boy didn’t care for barbecued chicken or potato chips, people would accept it as a matter of personal taste, saying,‘Oh well, I guess it takes all kinds.’ You could turn up your nose at the president or Coke or even God, but there were names for boys who didn’t like sports.”1 Indeed there are—“pussy,”“faggot,” and “homo” foremost among them. Recently, over drinks at a bar, I bonded with some friends of mine—all of them intellectually top-heavy ectomorphs who’d ended up in the arts or tech-related industries (code word: geek)—over our mutual sports loathing. (Okay, that and the high-five consensus that Relayer is the best Yes album.) One guy reduced his animus to a terse equation: “I hate sports because the guys who beat me up in high school were jocks.” J O C K O H O M O 5 0 For some men, Super Bowl season stirs memories that won’t stay buried—of beatdowns by jocks, some psychological, some literal. Their legacy, in most cases, is inner wounds whose scars still itch, not to mention an...