Arena of Masculinity

I
Introduction
"The essence of truth is freedom ... Freedom ... lets beings be the beings they are."
--Martin Heidegger




Incongruous and seductive, the combination of homosexuality and sport makes one wonder about the meaning of sex. This book, while exploring the special athletic experience of homosexual men, also speaks of much more. The gay experience of athletics is a lived metaphor for the more general experience of being gay in a straight world, the experience of being an outsider on the inside, of being a stranger in one's own home. By proposing an understanding of our culture's sexuality, a sexuality based on a grossly unjust order of gender, this book offers a substantial criticism of the way in which we all, heterosexually and homosexually, go about our erotic lives. This is not so much a criticism of people as it is a criticism of the culture that has created an ugly gender order, which, through its myths of power, conceals the truth of our humanity by making us see each other always through the filter of gender.
I believe in the power of human beings to take control of their destiny, to say no to an inauthentic myth that has oppressed them, to make themselves free. To find that freedom we must first understand how it is that these myths control us. This book is an attempt at such an understanding.




At least in one's youth, if not throughout life, having homosexual desire goes hand in hand with hiding it. What is it that's apparently so awful about homosexuality that boys with a personal knowledge of it, be it the product of unrequited desire or ambitions fulfilled, feel they should conceal it? Why, when it is revealed, is it often met with stinging silence or vicious attack? Is it just a shallow ignorance of another way of life, or is it a deep sense of the significance of homosexuality that makes people afraid? Why don't we encourage homosexuality in our culture?
If homosexuality were simply a variation of a common sexual urge, merely a matter of preference, of personal taste, as is often maintained, it is unlikely that our culture would make such a big deal out of it. Homosexuality undermines, in a positive way, the most important myth of our culture. This is a myth upon which all human relations are based. In many respects, this myth determines the way one lives, by giving power and prestige to half the members of our society and denying the same to the other half. This myth permeates not only the most important institutions of our society, such as religion, medicine, law, history, the arts, and athletics, but it is also deeply imprinted on the psyche of every human being in our culture. This myth has been responsible for many centuries of appalling subjugation, oppression, and exploitation. It is, of course, the myth of gender, a sociocultural form that divides power between men and women. The gender myth endows the relatively minor biological differences between males and females with major social significance. Homosexuality, although it by no means relinquishes this myth, subverts it. In our culture, male homosexuality is a violation of masculinity, a denigration of the mythic power of men, an ironic subversion that significant numbers of men pursue with great enthusiasm. Because it gnaws at masculinity, it weakens the gender order. But because masculinity is the heart of homoerotic desire, homosexuality is essentially a paradox in the myth of gender.
In many important respects, the difference between an athlete who is homosexual and one who is heterosexual is nonexistent. Sexuality has no bearing on the hitting of tennis balls, speed of skating, height of jumping, precision on gymnastic apparatus, or any other strictly athletic phenomenon. But in our culture athletics has more than purely athletic significance. And sexuality isnot just a matter of the pleasure of flesh meeting flesh. Both sexuality and athletics draw meaning from our culture's myths of sexuality and gender. Because homosexuality and athletics express contradictory attitudes to masculinity, violation and compliance respectively, their coexistence in one person is a paradox, the stuff of irony.
Athletics is traditionally understood as a masculine pursuit. (The evidence for this is overwhelming. For example: women were not permitted in the Olympic Games until 1928 and sixty years later at Seoul they represented only about one quarter of the athletes. There are still many sports in which women are not allowed to participate. Women who do become athletes are often considered unfeminine.) That a man can prove his masculinity in the boxing ring or weight room, on the football field, hockey rink, track, or basketball court, is a well-known dimension of the myth of gender.
As a young gay man, homosexuality and sports seemed like opposites to me. And so for many years I eschewed athletics. My sense of being a gay man had more to do with witty conversations at elegant dinner parties than it did with grunting and sweating in a gym. I had avoided athletics because I didn't want to be part of that straight, masculine world that seemed to me both threatening and inappropriate. Over the years, as I came to accept my homosexuality, to see the many implications of that different sexual worldview, I felt less threatened by straight masculinity and more willing to use traditional masculine forms like athletics in my own untraditional ways.
And so I started running, swimming, and lifting weights. This was a wonderful rediscovery of the joys of movement and physical exertion. I joined a swim team, started going to meets, and immersed myself in athletic culture. Now convinced that a physically active life was worth pursuing, I returned to university to study physical education. During that time, I developed an ever-greater appreciation for a paradox at work not only in my own life, but also more generally, for the ironic significance of homosexuality in our culture.
The athletic world of power, speed, and pain is an expression of the masculine ideals of our culture. My interest in athletics, although focused on the healthy pleasures of physical exertion,also involved an ironic relationship with masculinity: I had no interest in pretending to be straight or masculine, yet there I was in a world rich in traditionally masculine significance, a significance that because of its erotic desirability, I didn't totally reject. Although I took great pleasure in these experiences, their masculine significance for me personally remained dubious. When I meet my gay friends in the weight room, lifting weights, grunting and groaning like everyone else, there is usually a sense of humor about how "butch" we seem. We may look as masculine as the other men in the room and may even be taken for straight, but we are aware of a deep paradox in our sense of masculinity and of the irony inherent in the appearance and reality of our lives.
Not all homosexual men and boys avoid athletics because of its masculine significance. Some, because they have outstanding athletic talent or because they enjoy using their bodies athletically, pursue athletics in spite of its masculine implications. Immersed in that straight world, their experience is one of estrangement: they feel they are alone in an overwhelmingly heterosexual milieu. And the irony of being both athletic and homosexual hangs over them, an incomprehensible cloud.
There are also those who pursue sports because it is a traditionally masculine pursuit. For some homosexual men and boys, athletics is a hiding place; as a proving-ground of masculinity, success in athletics is an excellent cover-up. Some will use their athletic ability to convince themselves that they are as masculine as their heterosexual peers. And some, intuitively aware of their paradoxical relationship with masculine gender and the disapproval that our culture has of that violation of masculinity, will become athletes to deflect the hatred and criticism that others may level if their secret is revealed. As we will see in the next chapter, because athletics is one of the major venues for apprenticeship in the orthodox expression of masculinity, it can be intensely estranging for those who understand the gender myth paradoxically.




My suggestion that homosexuality is fundamentally an issue of gender is at odds with conventional wisdom about it. In 1948, the sexologist Alfred Kinsey and his coworkers published their mammothstatistical study of male sexuality. One of their conclusions was that the stereotype of the homosexual man as effeminate is not born out empirically: many homosexual men behave as "normally masculine" as their heterosexual counterparts. The emerging modern gay rights movement took up that line and argued that homosexuality should be considered acceptable because it is not so unlike heterosexuality; the majority of homosexual men are just as masculine as heterosexual men. When the professional football player David Kopay came out of the closet in 1975, he seemed to be living proof that gay men can be masculine, that homosexuality is not an issue of gender.
And so there has been a recent tendency to accept homosexuality because it is perceived as not being that different from heterosexuality: gay people are just like anyone else; they just prefer sexual relations with members of the same sex. That view is seriously misguided. Although the sexual acts may in some ways seem the same as heterosexual ones--kissing, oral/genital sex, and so on--the meanings of these acts are profoundly different. And although homosexual men may seem to behave in as masculine a way as "normal" heterosexual men by playing sports, developing muscles, and so on, the interpretation they give that behavior may be quite distinct.
As I will show in Chapter Three (Sexual Mythology), homosexual desire emanates from a reading of the myths of gender and sexuality that is fundamentally unlike that of heterosexual desire; whereas heterosexuality is an expression of an orthodox relationship with gender myth, homosexuality expresses a paradoxical relationship. I will argue that heterosexual practice is an erotic and social confirmation of the division of power in our culture through the myth of gender. It is, therefore, a poor standard for the determination of the ethical acceptability of other sexual practices. The legitimacy of homosexuality lies not in its similarity to heterosexuality and orthodox masculinity but in its difference. Because the homosexual interpretation of masculinity in general is paradoxical, the masculine implications of sport may also have a special significance to homosexual men.
The notion that the homosexual experience of gender and eros is largely similar to the heterosexual experience represents a decisively wrong turn in thinking about sexuality, one that dwellson the superficial, observable appearance of homosexuality, while ignoring the deep psychic and mythic significance of it.1 Pride of place has been given to the objective observation of homosexuality rather than to subjective experience. The Kinsey researchers studied objective sexuality, that is, they focused on sexual acts, not on the meaning that people find in those acts. A deep understanding of sexual experience, however, will not emerge from statistics that record the objective facts about sexual practice. It is, rather, in the subjective experience of people, in the interpretations that they give their experiences, that a better understanding of sexuality will be revealed.
The emphasis in this book on subjective experience rather than on objective behavior is important. Viewed objectively, any sexual act involving persons of the same physical sex can be considered a homosexual act. But the simple physical fact of a man's penis being in another man's hand, mouth, or anus is, in itself, insignificant. In our culture, there is great import attached to our saying that someone has been involved in homosexuality. What's important is the meaning of homosexuality. What the homosexual act might mean to those involved, to someone who has caught them in the act, or to someone who suspects another of being homosexual can be highly significant.
To many high-school coaches, the surprise discovery of two male athletes in flagrante delicto would have almost earth-shattering significance. To some, it would mean that the team has two faggots, pansies, boys who are less than real men. Having engaged in homosexual activity, the two young athletes have betrayed the pure aspirations of athletics: mens sana in corpore sano, a sound mind in a sound body. These boys have the potential to destroy the moral fabric of the team and perhaps the entire school. Even more importantly, their characteristically unmasculine behavior could undermine the macho competitive edge that many coaches work so hard to develop among their athletes.
For the boys involved, on the other hand, this sexual foray may have none of the significance that might overwhelm a coach's vision. There is every possibility that the two lads were simply randy and were caught taking advantage of a warm and friendly hand in the showers, a welcome but not necessarily significant physical release of sexual energy. It is also possible, however, thatto one or maybe both of the boys, this sexual meeting had enormous personal significance, that it was the young expression of a profound and largely unexplored world of meaning.
Boys and men can engage in homosexual behavior with each other, but the content of that behavior depends on the subjective interpretation of those involved. It is actually the subjective meaning of the behavior and not the behavior itself that, from an orthodox view, is considered troublesome in our culture. The source of that irritation should become apparent in the next chapter.a
This book differs from many of its recent predecessors in sexual theory, which have focused on the historical and social structures that organize, shape, or make possible people's sexual experience. They have looked from the top down, that is, from the society to the individual. I am looking from the bottom up. This book is, if you will, a user's view of the social construction of the myths of gender, sexuality, and athletics as they appear in contemporary North American and Northern European middle-class culture. My concern is with the interpretation that contemporary people give these myths rather than the "objective" social, historical conditions that brought them about.
Essential to this view is the role of the subconscious mind in its intuitive awareness of the workings of our culture. The subconscious consists of thoughts, emotions, and ways of understanding that, for the most part, remain unconsidered. The content of the subconscious is the product of a human being's interactionwith culture from infancy. The subconscious develops as each human being struggles with the consonances and dissonances between himself and the culture in which he finds himself. That developmental process constitutes the personality.
As the subconscious develops, so too does a deep appreciation for the significance of the cultural myths that are appropriated by the human being. The myths of gender, sexuality, and athletics operate in the subconscious mind in a prereflective way, their significance is intuitively understood. Most live with these myths, in fact use them daily to understand themselves and their relations to others, without much conscious consideration.
In this book, I will reflect on what is taken for granted. Only upon reflection does meaning become apparent. This is a process of recovering a meaning that has been present but hidden; it is a disclosure, a matter of making explicit that which was implicit.
One of the most important shifts in this book involves a change of paradigms. This is the change from the concept of identity to sensibility. It requires that we see sexuality from a new point of view. Rather than defining a person, "homosexuality" and "heterosexuality" describe modes of being in the world, fluid ways of perceiving or interpreting oneself and others in gendered culture. For the last hundred years or so, homosexuality has been understood as an essence; more recently, under the influence of popular social science, it has been conceived as an identity. As I will suggest in Gay Sensibility (Chapter Four), people do not experience homosexuality as an essence. It's not an identity; it is, rather, a way of being and understanding. Sexuality is not so much a drive as it is an ability to know. To be a homosexual man is to have a special intuitive interpretation of the myths of our culture. That "homosexual knowledge" is fluid; it affects the lives of some people differently at various points. Just as there are different levels and forms of knowledge in any sphere, so too there are levels and forms of sexual knowledge. Some people will pay close attention to their intuitions, following through on their implications, and others will not. And so, the significance of homosexuality varies considerably among those who have these intuitions, shaping their experience of sex and sport.
Having paradoxical intuitions about the myth of gender while being in the midst of an overwhelmingly orthodox world, one canrespond to those intuitions by viewing the world in three ways. In Chapter Four, I will describe these views as the triad of gay sensibility; they consist of 1) de-emphasizing the impact of the intuitions on one's life and living within the orthodox sphere as much as possible; 2) grasping the irony of the paradox; or 3) seeing the world in the context of changing the authority of the myths that are the origin of the paradox. Depending on a multitude of influences in their lives, homosexual men will employ these sensibilities exclusively and in various combinations.




The body contact of football, hockey, boxing, and water polo, the practice of gymnastic routines, springboard diving, and figure skating, the attention coaches may lavish on their athletes, the exposure of naked sportsmen in locker rooms and showers, all proceed under the assumption that no one involved is aware of the erotic potential of these phenomena, that everyone is heterosexual. But only those involved know what erotic inspiration lurks for them behind the ostensible heterosexuality of these situations--and as we shall see in Gay Sensibility (Chapter Four) and Sex and Sport (Chapter Six), sometimes even they don't know.
Sport, as a masculine genre, presents some men with an archetypal mythic form for homoerotic desire: the sexy, muscular, masculine athlete. That desire is paradoxical, being at once a reverence for and violation of masculinity. The significance of that paradoxical desire will be explored in Chapter Five (Jocks and Paradox).
Athletic homoeroticism, as I show in Chapter Six, is not confined to the world of fantasy. Homosexual desire on the playing fields or wrestling mats, in the swimming pools or showers of professional, university, or community athletic facilities, is an "unthinkable" secret thought by many. Sustaining that secret is the assumption that everyone is heterosexual. Homosexual men and boys, therefore, usually move about these settings undetected, seeming to be what they are not. Many are not unaware of the irony of being able to move about among muscled naked men in locker rooms and showers incognito. This experience, known as "passing," makes an important contribution to the ironic awareness common to many gay men.
What is it about the homoerotic potential of the athletic world that is so fearful that it must be disguised by the assumption of heterosexuality? It can't be a fear of physical pleasure, since that is one of the principal calls of athletic activity. Nor is it a fear of the experience of masculinity, since it is the attainment of masculinity through sports that is often the inspiration behind outstanding performances and the mythic reward of success. This fear is based on the sacred role of eros (Chapter Three, Sexual Mythology, and Chapter Five, Jocks and Paradox) and the significance that the paradoxical erotic attraction to men has in our culture. Because sport is an apprenticeship in orthodox masculinity, it is ironic to some and fearful to others that that world is also an arena for the paradox of homoerotic experience (Chapter Six, Sex and Sport).
The perception that the world of sports is an exclusively heterosexual one is reinforced by the fact that there are virtually no men in the sports world who are openly homosexual. At the high-performance level, only David Kopay and, more recently, the professional body builder Bob Paris have made a point of making known their homosexuality, intentionally contradicting the assumption that all professional athletes are heterosexual. That few professional athletes followed Kopay's lead of more than a decade ago is telling. Professional sports clubs don't want homosexual athletes compromising their masculine image; homosexual athletes know that and keep their sexuality secret.
To call into question the masculine mythos of athletics by asserting one's homosexuality is to upset the most fundamental beliefs and deep motivations of many coaches, athletes, sports administrators, writers, and fans; it is a break with the established order in sports. The spirit of sport is one of playing by the rules. This often results in a slave-master relationship between athletes and the status quo. Questioning the rules is not part of the game--which means that athletes are frequently reluctant to challenge the unwritten rules, such as compulsory heterosexuality. To see things from another perspective is a kind of failure, a failure to play within the rules. Many coaches seem like gods to their athletes, almost arbitrarily presiding over their athletic futures. What the coach says goes, even if it has little do with the athletic enterprise. And so those athletes with homosexual desirekeep that knowledge to themselves and usually go about their business appearing to be heterosexual.
The experience of the paradox has given rise to gay culture (Chapter Seven, Fraternities: Gay Culture, Athletic Culture), one facet of which is gay community sports, an athletic milieu in which gay men can find a resolution to the estrangement that so often characterizes their experience in mainstream athletics. With the confidence of gay liberation, some gay men are able to participate in mainstream athletics openly as gay men.
Over the last decade, a gay fascination with the homoerotic appeal of masculine muscular bodies has mushroomed. Gay men are going to gyms in droves. Gay folk wisdom has it that mature gay men are by and large more muscular and more physically fit than their heterosexual male counterparts. Within homosexual and gay culture, muscles have become the erotic embodiment of the gay ironic sensibility. In the conclusion of this book, we shall see how gay muscles represent the irony and the ecstasy of paradoxical gender power. As symbols of the erotic subversion of masculine power, gay muscles illuminate the fundamental nature of gender power in both homosexual and heterosexual relations.
THE ARENA OF MASCULINITY. Copyright © 1990 by Brian Pronger. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.