Sport, Masculinities and Sexualities

Eric Anderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135717278
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Index: Social Sciences

Sport, Masculinities and Sexualities examines the impact of decreasing cultural homophobia on both gay and straight male athletes. It suggests that the study of sport, masculinities and sexualities emerged during a time of extreme homophobia— the 1980. Cultural homophobia declined, however, throughout the 1990s and the first decade of the new millennia. Consequently, this research argues that the way young men view homosexuality and masculinity has also changed, resulting not only in improved conditions for sexual minorities in sport, but it has also promoted a culture of softer, more tactile and emotional forms of heterosexual masculinities. The ten studies presented in this book reflect this shift in masculinities; highlighting the necessity of developing new ways of theorizing the changing dynamics between masculinities, sexualities and physical cultures in the next decade.

This book is based on the original special issue published in the Journal of Homosexuality.

Masculinities and Sexualities in Sport and Physical Cultures: Three Decades of Evolving Research

ERIC ANDERSON, PhD

Department of Sports Studies, University of Winchester, Winchester, UK

This article traces the foundation of the study between sport and physical cultures and masculinities and sexualities principally by examining the homophobic zeitgeist by which the academic discipline was formed. I show that the intense homophobia of the mid-1980s waned throughout the 1990s, and that during the new millennia, researchers found more inclusive forms of heterosexuality. Indeed, research on masculinities and homophobia today shows that, even in the traditionally conservative institution of sport, matters have shifted dramatically. This has resulted not only in improved conditions for sexual minorities, but it has also promoted a culture of softer, more tactile and emotional forms of heterosexual masculinities. These studies, alongside those within this special issue of the Journal of Homosexuality, highlight the necessity of developing new ways of theorizing the changing dynamics between masculinities, sexualities, and physical cultures in the next decade.

Although there is a dearth of research concerning the relationship between sport, masculinities, and homosexuality before the 1980s (see Garner & Smith, 1977, and Sabo & Runfola, 1980, for notable exceptions). Gay athletes had not yet begun to emerge from their sporting closets, nor did they exist openly within the sport-related occupational industry. For example, when Pronger (1990) studied closeted Canadian gay athletes in the late 1980s, he was unable to find men who were out to their teammates. Whether participating in individual sports (e.g., tennis, swimming, and running) or teamsports (e.g., football, basketball, and rugby), there were few openly gay athletes in the Western world. They remained closeted because they assumed that the high degree of homophobic discourse, alongside their teammates’ vocalized opposition to homosexuality, indicated that they would have a troubled experience coming out (Woog, 1998).

Interviewing heterosexual male athletes a few years later, Messner (1992) confirmed this perception: “The extent of homophobia in the sports world is staggering,” he wrote. “Boys (in sport) learn early that to be gay, to be suspected of being gay, or even to be unable to prove one’s heterosexual status is not acceptable” (p. 34). These attitudes also extended into recreational level sporting leagues. Discussing the Netherlands, Hekma (1998) wrote, “Gay men who are seen as queer and effeminate are granted no space whatsoever in what is generally considered to be a masculine preserve and a macho enterprise” (p. 2).

This paradigmatic view was supported by the quantitative work on university athletes in the United States, too. For example, in 2001, Wolf Wendel, Toma, and Morphew found that White male athletes exhibited disproportionate degrees of homophobia compared to their attitudes toward racial minorities. Hence, sport has been widely recognized as an institution that promotes heterosexuality over homosexuality. This is a phenomenon that I experienced firsthand.

In 1994, I became America’s first (or at least the first publicly recognized) openly gay high school coach (Anderson, 2000). Although I received tremendous support from the high school runners that I coached, I was maligned by the administration. Worse, my athletes were victimized by many members of the high school’s football team, assumed gay through a guilt-by-association process. My athletes were intimidated by a series of symbolic and real episodes of harassment by our school’s football team, and because this bullying was not stopped by the football coaches or administration, the harassment escalated. A two-year period of abuse saw damage to our cars, the extradition of my athletes from one locker room to another, and threats on our lives. Eventually, a football player brutally assaulted one of my heterosexual athletes. My athlete endured a beating that resulted in four broken facial bones, including his pallet, as the assailant called him a “fucking faggot” while beating his head into the asphalt. The incident was determined to be “mutual combat” by the Huntington Beach Police Department, and the high school principal dismissed the possibility of it being a hate crime.

These experiences led me to abandon my high school teaching and coaching, and to instead pursue a Ph.D. in sport sociology under the tutelage of Professor Michael Messner. Here, I was introduced to studies highlighting that not only was men’s competitive sport built on the premise of homophobia, but that it was also a social institution organized around the political project of defining certain forms of heterosexual masculinity as acceptable, while denigrating other forms (Crosset, 1990; Messner, 2002). Sport, I learned, was also used in promoting men’s patriarchal privilege over women (Burstyn, 1999).

Messner (1992), Pronger (1990), and others (Connell, 1990, 1995; Messner & Sabo, 1990; Plummer, 1999) have shown that sport—particularly teamsports—traditionally associates boys and men with masculine dominance by constructing their identities and sculpting their bodies to align with hegemonic perspectives of masculinist embodiment and expression. Accordingly, literature on the relationship between sport and men’s masculinities throughout the 1990s highlighted that, in competitive teamsports, boys and men were constructed to exhibit, value, and reproduce orthodox notions of masculinity (Anderson, 2005a; Plummer, 1999).

THEORIZING MASCULINITIES

The most prominent theoretical tool for understanding this social stratification of masculinities has come thorough Connell’s (1987, 1990, 1995) concept of hegemonic masculinity. From a social constructionist perspective, hegemonic masculinity theory articulates two social processes (Demetriou, 2001). The first concerns how all men benefit from patriarchy (Burton-Nelson, 1995; Connell, 1995; Messner, 2002; Messner & Sabo, 1990). However, it is the second social process that has been heavily adopted by the masculinities literature. Here, Connell’s theoretical contribution has been particularly adopted for its conceptualization of the mechanisms by which an intramasculine hierarchy is created and legitimized.

In conceptualizing intramasculine domination, Connell argues that one hegemonic archetype of masculinity is esteemed above all others, so that boys and men who most closely embody this standard are accorded the most social capital. Some of the characteristics of hegemonic masculinity concern achieved variables and attitudinal depositions like athletic ability, the presentation of a masculine identity and the maintenance of homophobia. Other variables, however, concern ascribed variables: Whiteness, heterosexuality, and youth. Connell argued that regardless of their body mass, age, or sporting accomplishments, gay men are at the bottom of this hierarchy. Furthermore, Connell said that straight men who behaved in ways that conflict with the valorized form of masculinity are also marginalized. It was for these reasons that homophobia was found to serve as a particularly effective weapon to stratify men in deference to a hegemonic mode of heteromasculine dominance (Connell, 1995).

Connell (1987, 1990, 1995) noted that the power of a hegemonic form of masculinity was that those lower down the stratification of masculinities believed in the right to rule of those at the top. Instead of contesting their position—instead of forming a coalition among the complicit, subordinated, and marginalized masculinities that Connell describes—these men instead looked up and referred back to the jocks ruling their schools, sports, and social spaces. Accordingly, multiple studies found high schools to be locations where teamsport players (predominantly football players) controlled school space (Plummer, 1999). These athletes distributed power as they saw fit (Bissinger, 1990).

Hegemonic masculinity theory made sense in 1987, when Connell (1987) began theorizing her theory of hegemonic masculinity and, undoubtedly, it continued to be effective throughout the 1990s. But the level of homophobia at a cultural level peaked in 1988 in America (Anderson, 2009a), and this had serious implications both on how gay men were treated (and, therefore, how they acted) and also on how straight men behaved. In order to fully understand hegemonic masculinity theory, I argue that it has to be historically contextualized within its own temporal moment—in a culture that I call “homohysteric” (Anderson, 2009a).

I use the term homohysteria to describe the fear of being homosexualized. It incorporates three variables: 1) cultural awareness that homosexuality exists as a sexual orientation; 2) high levels of homophobia within a culture, and 3) the conflation of feminine behaviors in men with same-sex desire. Varying combinations of these three traits determine unique outcomes for men’s gendered behaviors. For example, a highly homophobic culture that believes homosexuals do not exist within their religion is not homohysteric. This is why men in many highly homophobic Muslim countries are permitted to engage in homosocial intimacy without threat to their publicly perceived heterosexual identities: They do not believe someone can be gay. Conversely, a homohysteric culture (e.g., Jamaica) is found in a country that understands that homosexuality exists among a significant proportion of people, but cultural homophobia is so elevated that all men (gay and straight) desire to distance themselves from the possibility of being thought gay. Accordingly, men esteemed the most extreme representations of masculinity and position themselves as highly homophobic as an indication of heterosexuality.

America, the United Kingdom, and Australia were (among other Western countries) highly homohysteric cultures in the mid-1980s. During that period, it was understood that any male (regardless of their gendered expression) could be gay. It was no longer possible to assume that one was heterosexual simply for “acting straight.” This awareness (that anyone could be gay) was the result of “normal” men dying of AIDS in “normal” families. It was promoted by a vehemently anti-gay Christian fundamentalism. With homosexuality being so vilified, homosexual suspicion was also rife. Thus, this was a period of time when Western men desired to physically and emotionally resemble Rambo, all in order to prove that one was not gay (Anderson, 2008b; Kimmel, 1997).

This has traditionally limited the gendered expression of men wishing to retain an image of heterosexuality. Thus, heterosexual men have had to avoid the expression of homosocial intimacy, sadness, or love of their friends. They have been denied the ability to express the emotions of fear or intimidation, and they must adhere to rigid body language while avoiding certain clothing types and entertainment choices (Ibson, 2002). Men wishing to be perceived as straight can only play select sports or dance in masculinized ways. These are expectations that society had placed on boys as young as 8 years old throughout the 1980s and 1990s (Pollack, 1998).

It is important to recognize that the discipline of masculinities established itself during the West’s most homohysteric decade. It was the time when Messner, Sabo, Kimmel, Connell, and others were writing about the social problems of masculinity. But the social climate toward gay men has changed since then. Increasingly, men are less afraid to associate with behaviors that were once coded as gay. When men wear pink, express their love for their male friends, and freak their gay male friends on the dance floor (Anderson, 2009a) it requires us to rethink the theories that we once used to understand men and their masculinities: The stratification of masculinities and sexualities shifts in accord to changing levels of awareness of homosexuality and our attitudes toward it.

While hegemonic masculinity theory has maintained great utility in times of high homophobia (Connell & Messerschmitd, 2005), it nonetheless fails to accurately account for what occurs in a macro or even local culture of decreased cultural homophobia. This is because hegemonic masculinity theory only permits one form of masculinity to reside atop a social hierarchy; it does not explain the social processes in an environment in which more than one version of masculinity has equal appeal (Anderson, 2005a). Accordingly, hegemonic masculinity theory is incapable of explaining empirical research that documents multiple masculinities of equal cultural value (Anderson, 2005a; McCormack, 2010, 2011b). In fact, it argues that this cannot occur.

SHIFTING RELATIONS BETWEEN MASCULINITY AND HOMOPHOBIA

But by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, studies began reporting a rapidly decreasing level of homophobia, even in men’s team-sports (Anderson, 2005b; Kian & Anderson, 2009; Southall, Nagel, Anderson, Polite, & Southall, 2009). At the start of this millennium, I interviewed 26 openly gay high school and university athletes throughout a spectrum of sports in the United States (Anderson, 2002). The study provided the first examination of the experiences of openly gay male athletes on ostensibly all heterosexual teams. In the absence of the ability to ban openly gay athletes from sport, heterosexual athletes within teamsports (both contact and non-contact) resisted the intrusion of openly gay athletes through the creation of a culture of silence around gay identities. although publicly out, the athletes in this study were victimized by heterosexual hegemony and largely maintained a heteronormative framework by self-silencing their speech and frequently engaging in heterosexual dialogue with their heterosexual teammates.

In this 2002 investigation (Anderson, 2002), I also found more openly gay runners and swimmers than football and baseball players. Pronger (1990) theorized that competitive teamsports that involve collision are more likely to be over representative of macho men, that gay men might be likely to deselect out of them as they grew older. Using data from the 1994 to 1995 Longitudinal Add Health Study of adolescent health, Zipp (2011) empirically validates this, showing that while gay youth played teamsports equally with their heterosexual counterparts in middle school, they began to self-select out of teamsports by high school. Of course, it is possible that deeply closeted gay youth play contact sports because of the veneer it offers them against cultural suspicions of homosexuality. In other words, it is those who are more likely to come out that are more likely to run or join theatre, and gays who are highly closeted may be more likely to play American football (Anderson, 2005a).

In 2005, I expanded my work on gay male athletes to 40 openly gay (and 20 closeted) athletes (Anderson, 2005a). Here, I found that openly gay athletes were not physically harassed or bullied. However, I found that their acceptance was partially attributable to the stigma of homosexuality being mediated because these were mostly top-performing athletes. Thus, although many of these athletes reported gay-friendly team cultures before coming out, others used their athletic capital to work through homophobia. I, therefore, argued that hegemonic masculinity (as an archetype) seemed to be slipping. I suggested that this would have implications for the use of hegemonic masculinity theory.

Matters have improved for gay and lesbian athletes since publishing my 2005 work. Supporting this, a February 27, 2006, Sports Illustrated magazine poll of 1,401 professional teamsport athletes also showed that the majority would welcome a gay teammate; this included 80% of those in the National Hockey League. Matters are even better in other Western countries (McCormack, 2010; Weeks, 2007). During my research on heterosexual male cheerleaders, and finding a rift between those adhering to orthodox versions of masculinity and those to more feminine versions, I began to design inclusive masculinity theory (Anderson, 2005b), formalizing it in 2009.

Inclusive masculinity theory (Anderson, 2009a) supersedes hegemonic masculinity by explaining the stratification of men alongside their social dynamics in times of lower homophobia. The theory was constructed to explain settings with low homohysteria. Here, heterosexual boys are permitted to engage in an increasing range of behaviors that once led to homosexual suspicion, all without threat to their publicly perceived heterosexual identities. For example, fraternity members (Anderson, 2008a), rugby players (Anderson & McGuire, 2010), school boys (McCormack & Anderson, 2010), heterosexual cheerleaders (Anderson, 2008b), and even the men of a Catholic College soccer team in the Midwest (Anderson, in press) have all been shown t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Publisher’s Note
• 1. Masculinities and Sexualities in Sport and Physical Cultures: Three Decades of Evolving Research
• 2. “Josh Wears Pink Cleats”: Inclusive Masculinity on the Soccer Field
• 3. Sport Fans’ Impressions of Gay Male Athletes
• 4. Clubbing Masculinities: Gender Shifts in Gay Men’s Dance Floor Choreographies
• 5. Men at Sport: Gay Men’s Experiences in the Sport Workplace
• 6. “Aren’t We All a Little Bisexual?”: The Recognition of Bisexuality in an Unlikely Place
• 7. The Benefits of Sexual Orientation Diversity in Sport Organizations
• 8. Mapping the Terrain of Homosexually-Themed Language
• 9. Homophobic and Sexist yet Uncontested: Examining Football Fan Postings on Internet Message Boards
• 10. An Investigation of Ethnicity as a Variable Related to US Male College Athletes Sexual-Orientation Behaviours and Attitudes
• 11. Male Team Sport Hazing Initiations in a Culture of Decreasing Homohysteria
• Index