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  • Boys Erased and the Trouble with Coaching: Confronting Male-Male Sexual Violence in the Age of #MeToo
  • Eric Solomon (bio)

. . . but that voice—erased boy,beloved of time, who did nothingto no one and becamenothing because of it...

—Mark Doty, “In Two Seconds”

i. boy: zero-conversion

We do not begin with what the sports-minded like to call a level playing field.

—Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal

My eyes were glued to the gym floor, dyed tan and blue to approximate the blue and gold of the school colors. In lieu of replacing the original hardwood basketball court flooring, the administration had chosen a cheaper rubber substitute. This was in the Mississippi Delta, what my mother calls the “armpit of the South” due to its dense, nearly year-round humidity. I watched as boy after boy student streamed through the gym on their way to the locker room nearby. I—a boy of average weight and height for a seventh grader—sat in the top row of the bleachers; next to me sat a friend who was smaller than me in stature. A few rows in front of us sat the rest of the male members of the seventh-grade class, roughly thirty young men, who had all decided they would be playing junior high football for another year. My friend and I would not. As boy after boy filed into the locker room to prepare for the first locker-room orientation of the season, my friend and I remained. [End Page 135] Our coach expressed disappointment, but it was not until we were allowed to leave to attend to our studies and other activities that my coach pulled me aside privately as I began to walk away: “Your dad’s not going to be proud of you.”


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Figure 1.

Collage by author, March 2019.

I had played football the previous year, during which my knee gave out. I was on crutches for several months while it healed. The injury was physically traumatic, but it was this casual comment from my coach that has resonated in my head ever since. This seemingly minor adverse childhood experience was the first moment I can recall in my life when I experienced what I now understand as the trouble with coaching and its relationship to a trouble with white hegemonic masculinity. My coach’s invocation of homosocial pride and bonding to justify a myopic understanding of what constituted “real” masculinity and culturally acceptable gender roles and performance would be a concept that I would return to intellectually in my studies, but in that troubling moment, head bowed, my eyes were glued to the buckling rubber gym floor that separated us. [End Page 136]

ii. trouble: toward an epistemology of the locker room

I don’t think you understood what was—this was locker room talk.

—Donald J. Trump (qtd. Diaz)

Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation asks us to consider how we are indoctrinated into ideological systems, or what he calls state apparatuses. Just as E. Patrick Johnson describes how the word queer made him feel “called ‘out of [his] name” in the essay where he coins the term quare, my coach’s calling on my father to call me out served as a mirror moment of subject formation where I first questioned what was exactly meant by the category “man” (Johnson 2). On the one hand, my coach’s words stood as a moment of recognition wherein I became a subject of an ideological system I call “locker-room lessons,” a set of socially ritualistic rubrics and criteria that determine who is fit to be a member of the properly male, overtly masculine, explicitly heterosexual normative space represented in this figurative framing by the structure of the locker room. On the other hand, the fact that my most clearly remembered detail (apart from his words) is the buckling rubber floor might imply that even in that instance of (toxic) masculine indoctrination and personal trauma, there was visible rupture in the instance of my failed conversion. Being reduced to nothing, a zero-man to his capital M-A-N, formed the basis...

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