Learning To Let Go

There s an American website written by a gay man whose mission is to present himself as an ordinary college jock.
To this end he has gone to extraordinary lengths to have himself photographed in all sorts of different sportswear, looking casual as he bounds off the football pitch, enjoying some horseplay with the guyz with a squash racquet, or relaxing with coffee by the fireside in his Polo outfit. He presents his life as Mr All-American, with success as his goal; success in business; success in love; success in life. Just do it. It s easy for us Europeans to mock.
Maybe we create our own reality. But in his case, I d be careful what I d wish for. Putting so much energy into appearing to be like everyone else is rather telling. The only people who do that are people who don t feel they belong, deep inside. His attitude to sport seems to be compensatory; he s going to be good at it, he s going to win because he won t have anyone say he s not a winner. It might as well be the 1950 s, when male egos were at their most brittle.
The truth is that most gay men that I know are not in the slightest bit interested in sport. Memories of the schoolyard are often painful, being last to be picked for the team, being bullied, wishing that boys were allowed to play in the girls yard. Who in their right mind would want to relive all that heaving and sweating and nasty brutish behaviour over a bloody ball? Complete waste of time, was what I thought. I could never see the point of it. Someone told me once that sport was for exercise, so I spent a lot of time running energetically (one could even say frantically) all around the field when I was forced to play at school. But actually going for the ball was not really on my agenda. By dint of persistent uselessness, I eventually got out of having to play sports at all as a schoolboy.
I had thought that my reluctance to join in and play the game was just because I was a pouff, an effeminate, sensitive, nerdy soul who would prefer studying to enduring the mud and cold of a soggy field in November. Of course even the most enthusiastic sportspeople shiver at the thought of playing in grim conditions; but they ll do it anyway, because they see the point of it. They re having fun.
This concept of fun is problematic to me. Loyal readers will not be surprised at this revelation. I thought at the time, especially in secondary school, that I was having fun when I was thinking/obsessing about sex, when I d spend every waking hour in thrall to a hormonal tyranny. But I didn t know any different. It was part of being a teenager, of course. Trouble is, I don t think I ever stopped.
I imagine most male readers, and quite a few female readers, have scored a goal once in their life, whether it s managing to get a tin can past someone s fat little brother in between two piles of coats on the street, or in a proper match, with referee and spectators. This common childhood experience is completely alien to me. It s a strange thing to admit. I ve confessed to a lot of things in these pages, but never once having scored a goal in football is probably the most embarrassing.
I ve been thinking about why this may be. I don t think it s because the gay gene also carries a tendency to be allergic to footballs, or that we are inherently more likely to behave like the opposite sex as children. Mind you my headmaster in primary school did have words with me for bringing in a skipping rope one day, and I wasn t allowed to do so again. (This despite the fact that a girl played football regularly in the boys yard.) Could it be that the last thing I could cope with, or felt I deserved, was a group of boys congratulating me and telling me I d done something well?
It s a chicken and egg story. If I was already feeling ashamed about myself, for whatever reason, then the last thing I felt like doing was attracting attention by doing anything good like scoring a goal for the team. I would rather have died, then to have the lads slap me on the back and say well done . Perhaps the truth is that I craved their praise so much that it hurt; I d never be able to hide how much I needed it, and if I ever got it, I would have died of embarrassment, of pink-faced transparent pleasure. So I d do badly, and not get asked to play again. And I d feel more ashamed of course; but no-one would ever know.
It s not that I wasn t interested in sport; it s that it mattered too much. I would have found the experience too intense, the spotlight too revealing, the male camaraderie too overwhelming. The shame of being different works in mysterious ways. My sense of being different prevented me from letting go and having fun.
Sport is about doing something for its own sake, and doing it as best you can. In my own way, I m getting into it now, through learning karate, and beginning to see what I ve missed all my life. The less ashamed I feel about myself, the more I want to play. Just for the fun of it. n