Tangled
In his book The Elusive Embrace, one of the first books I read after coming out of the closet my freshmen year in college, Daniel Mendelsohn says that gay identity is “nothing if not structured by paradox and conflict.” Nothing encapsulates this more wholly for me than my relationship with sports and my experience as a gay athlete. It has taken years of sifting through my loneliness, self-loathing, and bouts of depression to see the role sports plays in the paradoxes and conflicts of my identity, but while this introspection has brought me a level of awareness, the more I look at it — the more deeply I examine the history of what sports means to me — the more I am faced with another paradox: understanding does not always bring clarity.
I love sports. Before Covid-19 brought everything to a grinding halt, I used to spend hours each week playing sports, training for sports, watching sports, talking about sports, reading sports articles, and listening to sports podcasts. I’m not exaggerating when I say that the best moments of my life, with a few exceptions, have all been moments relating to sports: Damian Lillard hitting his series ending three against Houston in the 2014 playoffs, Oregon winning the Rose Bowl in 2012 and 2015, and making it to the Final Four in 2017, Lillard hitting another series ending dagger against Oklahoma City in 2019, and CJ MacCollum’s game seven in the next round that sent the Blazers to the Western Conference Finals. Stronger still are the memories from my own athletic career: winning the Stanford Open my senior year at Whitman, and then upsetting Wisconsin at the Stanford Invite a few weeks later, beating Sockeye in pre-quarters at nationals with Rhino in 2014, and scoring the game winning goal for Sockeye to win the national championship last fall.
Yet when I look back, it’s odd to know there was a time when I didn’t like sports at all. I remember pleading with my parents to take the remote away from my older brothers, who seemed to only watch sports, so that I could have a turn watching cartoons or cooking shows. I remember collecting sports cards because my brothers did, but while they focused on the players who were the best, or whose cards held the most value, I set my sights only on the players whose names, like mine, began with the letter “J” — John Stockton and Jerry Stackhouse were my favorites. Growing up, I played sports with my brothers, with our friends in the street or at the park, and at school during recess and P.E., but as I remember, it almost always ended in tears. It is hard to separate it now, because as a child, even before puberty and the realization that I was gay, I think I was already aware that some core piece of me was different — seemingly inadequate. I remember this feeling being more pronounced whenever I played sports. Sports could be thrilling, but it always seemed to be accompanied by the insidious belief that no matter what I did I would never be good enough, and that the thrill would always end in let down.
As I got older, however, it became clear that my athleticism was, in reality, a power to wield, not a sign of my inferiority as I had guessed. While all around me I was being taught that to be gay meant you didn’t like sports, that you spoke with a flamboyant lisp, and that you were only friends with girls, there I was, possessing a natural talent for sports, speaking in a voice that seemed no different from any of the other boys I knew, and naturally fitting in with my group of male peers — even if from time to time I pictured them naked, or found myself resenting the girls who caught their eye. Whatever social anxiety I had — pertaining to being gay or not — it soon became abundantly clear that sports provided an arena that set me above other boys on the social food chain, not below them. Sports gave me a sense of superiority to cling to in the face of all my self-loathing, and this was surely the reason that as I became more aware of the fact that my other interests — drama, music, and art — were indeed gay stereotypes, I set them safely aside, and allowed my talent for ultimate, as well as my growing obsession with Duck sports and Blazers basketball, to become my top priority.
Entering college, my abilities garnered me a social status that was able to mask and compensate for much of the anxiety and insecurity I carried. Frisbee was well known at Whitman, and even people who knew nothing about ultimate knew me as the freshman who was the best player — or at least the second best player (I see you Jer) — on campus. I revelled in that attention, though I tried my best not to show it. Social doors were immediately opened, and while this led me to a supportive community and many genuine, lasting friendships, it also perpetuated within me the pride and narcissism that I know goes hand in hand with self-hatred. Even today, the “status” I’m bestowed as an elite player is something that makes me deeply uncomfortable, not just because it is superficial, but because I’m frightened by how much satisfaction I get from it. This fear betrays the turmoil I’ve felt towards sports for a long time: that as much as I love it, I also know it serves an important function in the tangled web of defense mechanisms I’ve created to protect myself from the shame of being gay, of being inferior, of being unloveable.
As I’ve gotten older some of the edge has worn off, but my freshman year in college it was as sharp as it was obvious. I was better than these straight boys at something steeped in the kind of masculinity that seemed so antithetical to what I thought it meant to be gay. I basked in this, and clung to it as a pillar of my identity. I remember coming out to my college teammates by saying something along the lines of, “I’m gay, and if you have a problem with it you can try to guard me,” as if my superiority at the sport would protect me from their potential homophobia. How could I be less than these boys if on the field I was so much more?
This complex inextricably connected my sense of self-worth to my achievements on the field, and created a sometimes crippling performance anxiety that I continue to grapple with today. Yet despite all this psychological baggage, it’s something of a surprise that none of it has ever changed the fact that I also just really love playing ultimate.
That I could truly love sports, as a fan and as an athlete, and that my love of sports could also be a fabricated cover I had curated in order to divert attention away from my gayness — that is a contradiction that still stumps me to this day. My love of sports feels true, untrue, and partially true all at the same time. And while I’ve long been aware of the fact that the best lies are built upon some foundation of truth, this maxim crumbles in light of the unmistakable reality that, in spite of how I have used my athleticism to shield myself from the homophobic and misogynistic fear of my own “femininity”, sports has still become the thing that feels most like my calling, is my easiest access to experiencing a flow state, and is the source of endless hours of joy and entertainment. How can it be a lie if it is true? How can it be true if it is a lie? The only answer I can muster is that I have been using something true as a currency with which to lie. This makes the truth no less real, but it also renders the lie no less fraudulent. Thinking about it makes my head hurt.
But my relationship with sports has been more than just a frustrating philosophical contradiction. If playing sports allowed me to see myself as superior, it has also encouraged me to defer a deeper examination or atonement regarding whatever it is that makes me feel inferior in the first place. When I love myself for being good at sports it makes the work of trying to stop hating myself seem somehow less urgent. More than that though, my orientation towards sports, paired with my orientation towards men, has led me over and over again into situations of unrequited love, and a sense of a somehow compromised identity. Specifically, sports has steered me towards far too many straight boys.
For one, there is a simple problem of numbers. By and large, male sports are dominated by straight men, and ultimate frisbee is, at least for the time being, not much different. I have always felt welcomed and accepted by my teammates — a noteworthy reality that is a foreign experience to many gay athletes in other sports — but in spite of being welcomed, over the 16 years that I have played competitive ultimate, I have never had a gay teammate (that I’m aware of).
Many of my straight teammates clearly experience at least some level of homoerotic attraction, but this only ever seems to manifest itself via “man-crushes” — usually on the same boys I have real crushes on — and the “locker room behavior” of slapping asses and nut-tapping that is so easily laughed aside, and remarkably, so rarely seems to have any effect on the way they view their sexuality. Perhaps it is latent desire, but either way, the costume they try on, often for comic relief, is the skin I inhabit.
Regardless, while surrounding myself with straight guys has been isolating in and of itself, it has also created the conditions for the unrequited loves, both big and small, that have plagued me for so much of my life. On one hand, I still wonder what it is exactly that I find so appealing about straight guys. Doubtless there are layers of projection, self-loathing, and a socialized attraction to a twisted sense of what constitutes authentic masculinity. On the other hand, it seems totally natural, and should come as no surprise, that over years of playing ultimate with hundreds of different men, I would fall in love with some of them.
Anyone who has played competitive team sports knows how intimate of an environment a team can be. Not only is it cause for hundreds of hours spent together — during tryouts, practices, workouts, and tournaments; in airports, airplanes, rental cars, and hotels; at restaurants, parties, BBQs, and camping trips — competitive team sports are also spaces in which the best and worst of you is laid bare, in which you rely upon, support, challenge, and push one another. How do you handle success and failure? How do you react in the face of adversity? How do you show up and work for others? How do you hold yourself to account? All these questions are revealed through sports, and as such, they have a rare power to nurture camaraderie, friendship, and love — erotic or not.
From an early age I learned that I could never have the boys I really wanted, yet here was a world in which I could — if not romantically or sexually, then at least by way of this other powerful form of intimacy. Here, for a time, these boys were mine. For while their desire for girls always lurked close by, within the logic of the team, it was irrelevant — somehow removed. This has brought me to a kind of catch-22: I rely on this intimacy because I can’t seem to find it in relationships, and I can’t seem to find relationships because I’m preoccupied with what I can’t have.
Ultimate has been a refuge for me, it really has, but it has also been my ball and chain. Of course, over and over again, I have found that the intimacy of being a teammate — of being brothers-in-arms — is insufficient. Over and over again I have fallen for the straight boys who love me on the field but not off of it, or at least not in the way I want them to. And while the ultimate community has, as I’ve mentioned, led to many lasting friendships — friendships that I would never trade; friendships that don’t leave me with the pang of wanting more; supportive, true, open, and honest friendships in which I can share as much as I do with my therapist — it is also a community that I, apparently, continue to choose over the prospect of finding a community of other gay men, of gay friends, of lovers.
Writing this now, I find myself pulled by the impulse to try to bring it all to some satisfying conclusion — as if any arrangement of words on this page could recuperate what I have lost, or lead me towards what I want. As if, by spilling my soul to the world, I might somehow bridge the paradoxes of my identity. Alas, no matter how many layers I peel away, everything I sort remains tangled. Each time I turn toward one piece of myself, in doing so, I turn away from another.
