Against Football by Steve Almond

Author:Steve Almond [Almond, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61219-416-5
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2014-08-25T16:00:00+00:00

The logic seems to be that football is a domain of hyper-masculinity, a physical and psychological space where alpha males do battle. And gay men can’t be alphas because they are fragile and frightened and weak, which is to say feminine.

And everyone knows (and curiously consents to the fact) that the assigned roles of the feminine in football remain safely locked in the pre-suffrage era. The two archetypes seen most commonly on television are cheerleaders and players’ wives. Got that, ladies? You can either dance around on the sidelines as a half-naked sex object or sit in the stands cheering on your man. It remains unclear to me why so many women watch football, given how dismissive the game is of them.

But I’m more interested, for now, in the way a figure like Sam exposes the neurotic sexual conflicts at the heart of football.

Here, for instance, is how a linebacker named Jonathan Vilma explained his concerns about having Sam as a teammate: “Imagine if he’s the guy next to me and, you know, I get dressed, naked, taking a shower, the whole nine, and it just so happens he looks at me. How am I supposed to respond?”

Vilma’s point is that, unlike employees in other lines of work, he might have to be naked in front of Sam, which would make him feel uncomfortable. Fair enough.

But can I just ask: Why is Jonathan Vilma haunted by a fantasy of his own devising in which he is standing naked next to Michael Sam and being visually inspected by him, maybe even (gasp) admired? What is Vilma—a player so vicious that he was suspended for four games last season for attempting to injure opposing players—really afraid of here? That the simple act of a gay man looking at his naked body will call his own sexuality into question? That he’ll catch gay cooties? That Sam will overpower him and force him to have gay sex? Why does Vilma imagine that he has to respond to Sam at all?

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