Design by Yosef Phelan

For the last few years of secondary school, my PE teachers accepted that I had some form of undiagnosed scoliosis that rendered me incapable of playing football; the same scoliosis was impervious to trampolining, which I’d take to with glee, boinging up and down, grateful we weren’t gender segregated and that I could chat to my girl friends. My back was capable of all sorts of contortions in the air, but on the pitch I’d hobble like an old man. Years later, I’d have a full-body MRI for a wellness article only to be told that I had “one of the healthiest spines” the doctors had ever seen.

The anxiety that PE or “gym class” can induce for LGBTQIA+ kids is an almost canonical experience; many of us learn early on that it is best to avoid putting ourselves into situations that might make us the centre of attention. According to a recent US report on the school lives of LGBTQIA+ youth, almost 40% of students report avoiding physical education classes, while another study showed that the vast majority of LGBTQIA+ kids have never participated in organised team sports. Research in Australia shows that homophobia in PE class directly turns LGBTQIA+ youth away from taking part – 44% of gay men reported negative experiences in school as a factor preventing them from engaging in team sports. 

In much of the world, sport is culturally intertwined with masculinity. In the UK, this is perhaps most acute in football (soccer). For those whose masculinity is already seen as questionable, the pitch becomes a battlefield of sorts; it is a microcosm of our society – do I measure up against the other boys? When our biweekly football sessions came, my gut would tighten into a screeching knot. There’s a scene I still recall: the pitch is squashed by a heavy, dank sky; our class is lined up, taking turns to strike the ball at the goal. Although I am fit and fast, there is no hope. I strike the ball with a gammy foot and it takes flight like an impotent firework – a lacklustre curve to the left of the goal, it misses it. The PE teacher gives me a consolatory smile and we move on. 

The pitch becomes a battlefield of sorts; it is a microcosm of our society – do I measure up against the other boys?

On the pitch, I hated imposing myself: I was unwilling to sprint or to tackle, acquiescing meekly when someone else wanted the ball. This made me a bad player – the playground was not as courteous as the classroom. The game forced me to confront others with my body, something I’d trained myself not to do knowing that, if conflict were to arise, there was a fair chance that I’d be called “gay”. It felt dangerous to have this articulated too often, so I shrank away from jostling with my peers. Teachers didn’t help football feel easy either. Once, one of the coaches, an old Cockney who looked like a praying mantis, divvied out a batch of pink bibs. As we pulled them on, he made a jibe about the match – those in fuchsia were to be team “poof”.

Though I suffered alone, the footie pitch inflicts its trauma on gay men far and wide. The mark it has left has always made me feel like an outsider and – though I loathe to admit it – less of a man; I want to better understand my experiences, what may have stuck, and whether or not I’m doomed to hate sports forever. I get in touch with Lewis, a gay man in his mid-twenties and an old university peer of mine, to find out whether our internal experiences are as aligned as the statistics suggest. 

Lewis has a soft Glaswegian accent and is a self-declared “nerd” – I can’t imagine him playing attack, in short. There’s a big overlap in the way we experienced childhood. “There were several PE teachers that I felt like the way they’d look at me was either some kind of disgust or they just thought of me as like one of the weird kind of kids,” Lewis says, telling me that playing football filled him with a fear that he might show himself up. Like me, he would get out of playing at all costs, often spending his primary school lunchtimes in the school toilets. “One of the main things was always just avoiding a sense of embarrassment [from] performing badly,” he says.

The football pitch – and sometimes team sports in general – can force you into a position of exposure.

Lewis and I talk about how the football pitch – and sometimes team sports in general – can force you into a position of exposure. Lewis tells me that he hated the shouting football involved, saying, “You have this fear of your voice cracking or sounding feminine.” He would avoid doing anything that risked him being perceived as “girly” by his peers. “I remember one of my friends getting made fun of for how he ran. Seeing that made me conscious about how I was perceived in that kind of physical sense,” he tells me, attributing this self-monitoring to the queer psyche. “So many of our experiences shape us as these incredibly observant [individuals] and [we are] generally quite good at reading people.” This sensitivity towards social cues resonates with me: though my straight peers would miss penalties, fuck up tackles, or end up crying, I was always aware that the stakes were higher for me, any mishap felt like more than just a reflection of my footie skills – another crumb of evidence to suggest that I was not like the rest of the boys. 

When you don’t want to be clocked, situations that require you to “lose yourself” are too scary