Steam In The Locker Room

Well, well, well, a professional athlete has announced that he is gay, and he will continue to play professionally, a piece of news that merited even a call from President Obama.  When I think back over my youthful years when I had such notoriety as a flaming queer in my hometown I have to remember the great number of athletes who sought me out for sexual satisfaction, man to man, albeit, they more generally receiving and me giving.  But there were the university swimmer and the track star who startled me by taking on the passive role, there were boys on every team in my high school who routinely engaged in heavy necking and kissing before we got down to their business, and their was the basketball whiz who couldn't get enough of me, again performing the passive role, even after he married his childhood sweetheart.  And of course the black football player who probably sought me out because the racial mores of the day forbade him approaching any of the town girls with an amatory signal.  Many years later, when I could no longer be called a thing of beauty, I hooked up with a gentleman, a professional athlete of considerable fame, a friend of friends, from whom he had learned that I was gay, and since we happened to be in his hotel suite for morning coffee, he suggested that we put our cups down, and get better acquainted, as his extended exhibition tour of Europe had left little time for as he put it "sexualizing," and he was horny, even if I were clearly not, by gender or by age, the most exciting fruit to pluck from the sexual tree.  The youthful years of exaggerated promiscuity have left me in no doubt that gentlemen who do sports are more likely than not to be willing to engage in some form of sexual amusement with another male.  And, if you think about  it, why not?  Most sports involve constant body contact, require changes of costume in communal areas where extended periods of nudity are the norm, often demand teamwork that makes for emotional and intellectual bonds that could be the intense prelude to more engagement or indeed offer a substitute for emotional and physical involvement that society inhibits the guys from exploiting.  I have always considered the aggressive and outspoken homophobia of athletes no different than that coming from religious leaders who usually weeks later are found in a public restroom with some guy or are accused by the local hustler of engaging their services.  Years ago I had a gay friend who was a cop, a big burly typical Irish cop, right out of central casting, who was unabashedly gay.  And I asked him once if he had come out to the guys in the precinct, and he said no, explaining that they needed to bond closely if they were to maintain their esprit in the violent and crime ridden area where they practiced their calling, and this involved hours of horsing around in the showers and locker rooms, nude or semi-nude, in a series of high jinks, and jokes all of which were intensely homoerotic, as he saw it, and not for nothing would he destroy their bonding games by letting on that a real live gay male was in their midst.