While reading up on the curious case of John Amaechi, the gay ex-professional basketball player who’s just written a book about his gay basketballing, I came across this interesting comment from a gay conservative blogger. His argument is that it’s not too great a surprise that Amaechi turns out to be exactly the kind of person we’d imagine, stereotypically, to be a gay ball player. His larger point is that we’re insulting reality so long as we continue to pretend that the stereotypes about gay men are merely stereotypes rather than something intrinsic to sexuality and gender.
… What’s interesting about Amaechi is that he exactly fits my model — that sports are most obsessively interesting to the most masculine little boys, who are the ones least likely to grow up to be gay — of what kind of gay would be most likely to wind up a highly paid pro athlete: a gigantic basketball player.
Amaechi is 6′-10" and 270 pounds. There are so few men in the world that size that the NBA will take even a gay Englishman as a project and try to turn him into a productive player.
Amaechi is an interesting Barack Obama-type: born in Boston but raised in Manchester, England, his father was a Nigerian who abandoned his white mother, a doctor, when he was three. And, yes, Amaechi is ? articulate. His sole distinction as an NBA player was being named to the 1999-2000 NBA All-Interview First Team. He’s now pursuing a Ph.D. in child psychology and has donated lots of money and time to child charities.
Fitting my model beautifully, Amaechi was completely bored by basketball, and was only in it for the money, "earning" $9.6 million over five seasons.
And it’s not just that he didn’t like basketball that set Amaechi apart. He likes poetry. He likes fresh cut flowers. As he writes in his book, he didn’t even need to explicitly come out to a friend of his because the friend stopped by Amechi’s apartment one day and caught he big man in the act of singing along to a Karen Carpenter song.
My first reaction to these details, naturally, is to smile. I mean it’s just charming, right — this ridiculously tall black guy, a walking symbol of the anxiety of black male sexuality that pervades white America, living in Salt Lake City, Utah, amongst the Mormons, having a private life straight out of Will & Grace.
My next, more pragmatic reaction is to wish that Amaechi was just a tad a bit butcher. As is, he’s too easy to dismiss as an aberration. Even if it’s true, as Jamie argues, that his coming out seems already to have moved the NBA ball forward in terms of tolerance, it’s still the case, I think, that because of Amaechi’s obvious, stereotypical difference from the average pro player, most of the ignorant people won’t really accept the truth of what the great Sir Charles Barkely has said:
"You don’t think we all played with gay guys. Of course we have."
My final reaction, however, has been to do some more thinking about whether there are intrinsic ways in which, on average, gay men are different from straight men, and if so, or if not, what does that mean.
Take, for instance, the idea of flamboyance. As Amaechi writes in his book:
The NBA locker room was the most flamboyant place I’d ever been. Guys flaunted their perfect bodies. They bragged about sexual exploits. They primped in front of the mirror, applying cologne and hair gel by the bucketful. They tried on each other’s $10,000 suits, admired each other’s rings and necklaces. It was an intense camaraderie that felt completely natural to them. Surveying the room, I couldn’t help chuckling to myself: And I’m the gay one."
Or what about the interest, in particular, in clothes? As it happens I’ve just spent a fair amount of time, since January, out shopping with my wife for clothes for our daughter (who’s due in May). And I’m not a passive bystander. I’m deep in there, in the racks at Babies ‘R’ Us and the Goodwill store, scanning for just the right blend of taste, cuteness and flair. I’ve said things like, "Gap Baby really isn’t all that great until you get up into the 18-month range; before that, Old Navy is much better," or "I love that Laura Ashley dress your mother sent us."
And that’s not even the beginning of it. I’m genuinely excited by the turquoise color of the stroller we were just given as a gift, and was pleasantly suprised by the polka dots on the interior of the canopy. I think the way that ribbons are sewn into the Pottery Barn crib bumper we bought is really pretty. I’m psyched about the green Baby Bjorn for which we’ve registered, and will be genuinely disappointed if somebody goes out and buys us the black-and-red one which seems to be in most of the retail stores.
I’m kinda gay, in other words. Except that I’m not, and I’ve never really been mistaken for gay. So if I’m caring about all these "gay" things, and I don’t seem gay, then where in the stereotype does the actual "gayness" reside?It’s not in the content of what we men care about — some men like lavishing attention on the details of cars and bikes, and some men lavish attention on the details of baby clothes. It’s all just aesthetics.
The answer, I think, is that when we say that a man seems gay, we’re really just saying, most of the time, that he seems effeminate. He’s a man whose speech patterns, or whose mannerisms, seem womanly. And even if it were the case, which I doubt, that gay men are intrinsically more likely to talk or move in a womanly way, then that doesn’t really account for the cultural significance of gayness, or for, say, my particular interest in gay maleness.
What’s compelling to me about gay men, I think, is that their unavoidable separation from traditional hetero male culture has condemned them, but also liberated them, to look to women as models of how to be interesting, charismatic, attractive people. They seem different from straight men because most straight men are too scared or too ignorant to explore ways that they might want to be like some of the women they admire.
The irony, for me, is that I think I’ve ben so open to the gay male influence in large part because it’s easier for me to want to emulate gay men — who are still men — than it is for me to imagine emulating women.
