Many years ago I read some psychological studies that argued that even for self-identified heterosexuals it is a natural part of their development to have gone through “bisexual” or even “homosexual” stages of life. When I read this, it seemed theoretically reasonable, but did not ring true in my experience. I have always been, I told myself, 100 percent heterosexual! The group process of analyzing my own autobiographical stories challenged the concept I had developed of myself, and also shed light on the way in which the institutional context of sport provided a context for the development of my definition of myself as “100 percent straight.” Here is one of the stories.
When I was in the ninth grade I played on a “D” basketball team, set up especially for the smallest of high school boys. Indeed, though I was pudgy with baby fat, I was a short 5'2", still prepubescent with no facial hair and a high voice that I artificially tried to lower. The first day of practice I was immediately attracted to a boy I’ll call Timmy, because he looked like the boy who played in the Lassie TV show. Timmy was short, with a high voice, like me. And like me, he had no facial hair yet. Unlike me, he was very skinny. I liked Timmy right away, and soon we were together a lot. I noticed things about him that I didn’t notice about other boys: he said some words a certain way, and it gave me pleasure to try to talk like him. I remember liking the way the light hit his boyish, nearly hairless body. I thought about him when we weren’t together. He was in the school band, and at the football games I’d squint to see where he was in the mass of uniforms. In short, though I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, I was infatuated with Timmy—I had a crush on him. Later that basketball season, I decided—for no reason that I could really articulate then—that I hated Timmy. I aggressively rejected him, began to make fun of him around other boys. He was, we all agreed, a geek. He was a faggot.
Three years later Timmy and I were both on the varsity basketball team, but had hardly spoken a word to each other since we were freshmen. Both of us now had lower voices, had grown to around 6 feet tall, and we both shaved, at least a bit. But Timmy was a skinny, somewhat stigmatized reserve on the team, while I was the team captain and starting point guard. But I wasn’t so happy or secure about this. I’d always dreamed of dominating games, of being the hero. Halfway through my senior season, however, it became clear that I was not a star, and I figured I knew why. I was not aggressive enough.
I had always liked the beauty of the fast break, the perfectly executed pick and roll play between two players, and especially the long 20-foot shot that touched nothing but the bottom of the net. But I hated and feared the sometimes brutal contact under the basket. In fact, I stayed away from the rough fights for rebounds and was mostly a perimeter player, relying on my long shots or my passes to more aggressive teammates under the basket. But now it became apparent to me that time was running out in my quest for greatness: I needed to change my game, and fast. I decided one day before practice that I was gonna get aggressive. While practicing one of our standard plays, I passed the ball to a teammate, and then ran to the spot at which I was to set a pick on a defender. I knew that one could sometimes get away with setting a face-up screen on a player, and then as he makes contact with you, roll your back to him and plant your elbow hard in his stomach. The beauty of this move is that your own body “roll” makes the elbow look like an accident. So I decided to try this move. I approached the defensive player, Timmy, rolled, and planted my elbow deeply into his solar plexus. Air exploded audibly from Timmy’s mouth, and he crumbled to the floor momentarily.
Play went on as though nothing had happened, but I felt bad about it. Rather than making me feel better, it made me feel guilty and weak. I had to admit to myself why I’d chosen Timmy as the target against whom to test out my new aggression. He was the skinniest and weakest player on the team.
At the time, I hardly thought about these incidents, other than to try to brush them off as incidents that made me feel extremely uncomfortable. Years later I can now interrogate this as a sexual story, and as a gender story unfolding within the context of the heterosexualized and masculinized institution of sport. Examining my story in light of research conducted by Alfred Kinsey a half century ago, I can recognize in myself what Kinsey saw as a very common fluidity and changeability of sexual desire over the life-course. Put simply, Kinsey found that large numbers of adult “heterosexual” men had previously, as adolescents and young adults, experienced sexual desire for males. A surprisingly large number of these men had experienced sexual contact to the point of orgasm with other males during adolescence or early adulthood. Similarly, my story invited me to consider what is commonly called the “Freudian theory of bisexuality.” Sigmund Freud shocked the post-Victorian world by suggesting that all people go through a stage, early in life, when they are attracted to people of the same sex.1 Adult experiences, Freud argued, eventually led most people to shift their sexual desire to what he called an appropriate “love object”—a person of the opposite sex. I also considered my experience in light of what lesbian feminist author Adrienne Rich called the institution of compulsory heterosexuality. Perhaps the extremely high levels of homophobia that are often endemic in boys’ and men’s organized sports led me to deny and repress my own homoerotic desire through a direct and overt rejection of Timmy, through homophobic banter with male peers, and the resultant stigmatization of the feminized Timmy. Eventually I considered my experience in the light of what radical theorist Herbert Marcuse called the sublimation of homoerotic desire into an aggressive, violent act as serving to construct a clear line of demarcation between self and other. Sublimation, according to Marcuse, involves the driving underground, into the unconscious, of sexual desires that might appear dangerous due to their socially stigmatized status. But sublimation involves more than simple repression into the unconscious. It involves a transformation of sexual desire into something else—often into aggressive and violent acting out toward others. These acts clarify the boundaries between oneself and others and therefore lessen any anxieties that might be attached to the repressed homoerotic desire.
Importantly, in our analysis of my story, the memory group went beyond simply discussing the events in psychological terms. The story did perhaps suggest some deep psychological processes at work, but it also revealed the importance of social context—in this case, the context of the athletic team. In short, my rejection of Timmy and the joining with teammates to stigmatize him in ninth grade stands as an example of what sociologist R. W. Connell calls a moment of engagement with hegemonic masculinity, where I actively took up the male group’s task of constructing heterosexual/masculine identities in the context of sport. The elbow in Timmy’s gut three years later can be seen as a punctuation mark that occurred precisely because of my fears that I might be failing in this goal.
It is helpful, I think, to compare my story with gay and lesbian “coming out” stories in sport. Though we have a few lesbian and bisexual coming out stories among women athletes, there are very few from gay males. Tom Waddell, who as a closeted gay man finished sixth in the decathlon in the 1968 Olympics, later came out and started the Gay Games, an athletic and cultural festival that draws tens of thousands of people every four years. When I interviewed Tom Waddell over a decade ago about his sexual identity and athletic career, he made it quite clear that for many years sports was his closet:
When I was a kid, I was tall for my age, and was very thin and very strong. And I was usually faster than most other people. But I discovered rather early that I liked gymnastics and I liked dance. I was very interested in being a ballet dancer . . . [but] something became obvious to me right away—that male ballet dancers were effeminate, that they were what most people would call faggots. And I thought I just couldn’t handle that. . . . I was totally closeted and very concerned about being male. This was the fifties, a terrible time to live, and everything was stacked against me. Anyway, I realized that I had to do something to protect my image of myself as a male—because at that time homosexuals were thought of primarily as men who wanted to be women. And so I threw myself into athletics—I played football, gymnastics, track and field. . . . I was a jock—that’s how I was viewed, and I was comfortable with that.
Tom Waddell was fully conscious of entering sports and constructing a masculine/heterosexual athletic identity precisely because he feared being revealed as gay. It was clear to him, in the context of the 1950s, that being known as gay would undercut his claims to the status of manhood. Thus, though he described the athletic closet as “hot and stifling,” he remained there until several years after his athletic retirement. He even knowingly played along with locker room discussions about sex and women as part of his “cover.”
I wanted to be viewed as male, otherwise I would be a dancer today. I wanted the male, macho image of an athlete. So I was protected by a very hard shell. I was clearly aware of what I was doing. . . . I often felt compelled to go along with a lot of locker room garbage because I wanted that image—and I know a lot of others who did too.
Like my story, Waddell’s points to the importance of the athletic institution as a context in which peers mutually construct and reconstruct narrow definitions of masculinity. Heterosexuality is considered to be a rock-solid foundation of this concept of masculinity. But unlike my story, Waddell’s may invoke a dramaturgical analysis.2 He seemed to be consciously “acting” to control and regulate others’ perceptions of him by constructing a public “front stage” persona that differed radically from what he believed to be his “true” inner self. My story, in contrast, suggests a deeper, less consciously strategic repression of my homoerotic attraction. Most likely, I was aware on some level of the dangers of such feelings, and was escaping the risks, disgrace, and rejection that would likely result from being different. For Waddell, the decision to construct his identity largely within sport was to step into a fiercely heterosexual/masculine closet that would hide what he saw as his “true” identity. In contrast, I was not so much stepping into a “closet” that would hide my identity; rather, I was stepping out into an entire world of heterosexual privilege. My story also suggests how a threat to the promised privileges of hegemonic masculinity—my failure as an athlete—might trigger a momentary sexual panic that can lay bare the constructedness, indeed, the instability of the heterosexual/masculine identity.
In either case, Waddell’s or mine, we can see how, as young male athletes, heterosexuality and masculinity were not something we “were,” but something we were doing. It is significant, I think, that although each of us was “doing heterosexuality,” neither of us was actually “having sex” with women (though one of us desperately wanted to). This underscores a point made by some recent theorists that heterosexuality should not be thought of simply as sexual acts between women and men. Rather, heterosexuality is a constructed identity, a performance, and an institution that is not necessarily linked to sexual acts. Though for one of us it was more conscious than for the other, we were both “doing heterosexuality” as an ongoing practice through which we sought to do two things:
• avoid stigma, embarrassment, ostracism, or perhaps worse if we were even suspected of being gay;
• link ourselves into systems of power, status, and privilege that appear to be the birthright of “real men” (i.e., males who are able to compete successfully with other males in sport, work, and sexual relations with women).
In other words, each of us actively scripted our own sexual and gender performances, but these scripts were constructed within the constraints of a socially organized (institutionalized) system of power and pleasure.
Questions for Future Research
As I prepared to tell this sexual story publicly to my colleagues at the sport studies conference, I felt extremely nervous. Part of the nervousness was due to the fact that I knew some of them would object to my claim that telling personal stories can be a source of sociological insights. But a larger part of the reason for my nervousness was due to the fact that I was revealing something very personal about my sexuality in such a public way. Most of us are not accustomed to doing this, especially in the context of a professional conference. But I had learned long ago, especially from feminist women scholars, and from gay and lesbian scholars, that biography is linked to history. Part of “normal” academic discourse has been to hide “the personal” (including the fact that the researchers are themselves people with values, feelings, and, yes, biases) behind a carefully constructed facade of “objectivity.” Rather than trying to hide or be ashamed of one’s subjective experience of the world, I was challenging myself to draw on my experience of the world as a resource. Not that I should trust my experience as the final word on “reality.” White, heterosexual males like me have made the mistake for centuries of calling their own experience “objectivity,” and then punishing anyone who does not share their worldview by casting them as “deviant.” Instead, I hope to use my experience as an example of how those of us who are in dominant sexual/racial/gender/class categories can get a new perspective on the “constructedness” of our identities by juxtaposing our subjective experiences against the emerging worldviews of gay men and lesbians, women, and people of color.
Finally, I want to stress that in juxtaposition neither my own nor Tom Waddell’s story sheds much light on the question of why some individuals “become gay” while others “become” heterosexual or bisexual. Instead, I should like to suggest that this is a dead-end question, and that there are far more important and interesting questions to be asked:
• How has heterosexuality, as an institution and as an enforced group practice, constrained and limited all of us—gay, straight, and bi?
• How has the institution of sport been an especially salient institution for the social construction of heterosexual masculinity?
• Why is it that when men play sports they are almost always automatically granted masculine status, and thus assumed to be heterosexual, while when women play sports, questions are raised about their “femininity” and sexual orientation?
These kinds of questions aim us toward an analysis of the workings of power within institutions—including the ways that these workings of power shape and constrain our identities and relationships—and point us toward imagining alternative social arrangements that are less constraining for everyone.
notes
1. The fluidity and changeability of sexual desire over the life-course is now more obvious in evidence from prison and military populations and single-sex boarding schools. The theory of bisexuality is evident, for example, in childhood crushes on same-sex primary schoolteachers.
2. Dramaturgical analysis, associated with Erving Goffman, uses the theater and performance to develop an analogy with everyday life.
references
Haug, Frigga. 1987. Female Sexualization: A Collective Work of Memory. London: Verso.
Lenskyj, Helen. 1986. Out of Bounds: Women, Sport and Sexuality. Toronto: Women’s Press.
———. 1997. “No Fear? Lesbians in Sport and Physical Education,” Women in Sport and Physical Activity Journal 6 (2): 7–22.
Messner, Michael A. 1992. Power at Play: Sports and the Problem of Masculinity. Boston: Beacon Press.
———. 1994. “Gay Athletes and the Gay Games: An Interview with Tom Waddell,” in M. A. Messner and D. F. Sabo (eds.), Sex, Violence and Power in Sports: Rethinking Masculinity. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, pp. 113–119.
Pronger, Brian. 1990. The Arena of Masculinity: Sports, Homosexuality, and the Meaning of Sex. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
a Messner, Michael A. “Becoming 100 Percent Straight.” Copyright Michael A. Messner. Reprinted by permission of the author.