| Prelude to an interview from Tim
Miller...
Okay, I admit it, I was definitely one of those queer boys who
got picked last—or on a good day next to last—for
every team sport except square dancing. With that trauma lurking
in my mind, I approached Sportsex, Toby Miller's remarkable
exploration of organized sports, erotics, and culture, with more
than a little trepidation. Instead of having to relive the terror
of seventh grade I was delighted to discover in Sportsex
a hugely enjoyable, smart and sexy examination of the role sports
and athletes play in the contemporary lesbian and gay sexual imagination.
Toby Miller guides us through this tricky terrain with great
joy and profound insights, fully aware of the mine field he has
found himself on. He writes in the introduction to Sportsex,
"And there lies the secret of something alongside my hatred
of sports: the thrill when someone passes a football expertly
and you run onto it; the sensation of receiving a hard-hit stroke
and using its strength to return the ball to you colleague; the
fun of running alongside others; and the pleasure of swimming
in a creek with friends. Adrienne Rich refers to this as "what
makes the body shoot into its pure and irresistible curve.' Such
joys are quite distant from the horror-show world of competition,
authority and critique that characterized the ritual humiliation
of schooldays."
Sportsex dares us to look anew at the huge cultural
motor of organized sports to see how it informs gay people's bodies,
sexuality and culture. I talked recently with Toby Miller about
sports, lesbian and gay erotic symbols and Ian Thorpe's body at
the Olympics.
Tim Miller is a solo performer and the author of Shirts &
Skin, published by Alyson. He can be reached at http://hometown.aol.com/
millertale/timmiller.html.
Q: As I read your remarkable book Sportsex,
I was struck that with all the extensive intellectual and critical
focus examining almost every aspect of popular culture, sports
has been largely left out. What led you to go to the forbidden
land of contemporary sports?
A: I have been very concerned that cultural studies
has devoted a vast amount of energy and time to soap opera, reality
TV, hanging out in shopping malls, you name it, but has done very
little about the most prevalent form of popular culture in world
history. Sport is so important, both as something people watch
and something they do, as well. Bertolt Brecht once said a sports
arena was a place where you might start a revolution. Today, we're
more likely to see a new cable channel! Either way, it needs to
be addressed. Why the lack of interest? I think this neglect has
been because folks see sport as anti-intellectual, right-wing,
and unseemly. In gender terms, it's regarded by many people as
misogynistic and homophobic. But I perceive major changes in the
way sport and sexuality are unfolding. We live in an era when
commercial forces have permeated sport so thoroughly that men
are overtly exposed to a sexualizing gaze. Their bodies are objects
of sale to gay male and straight female spectators. The pressure
on the male body to look beautiful is now beginning to approximate
what women have suffered for generations. There are some positive
aspects to this change. Hence the book. It took me thirteen years
to get there, but now it's done!
Q: I was really haunted by what you wrote
in the introduction to Sportsex that "beauty is
as much a part of male sports discourse today as toughness, while
grace is the avowed compatriot of violence." What did you
discover about this dynamic tension as you wrote Sportsex?
A: It is a dynamic tension. Sport is full of
weird contradictions. We are constantly told that it is all about
competition, but of course it's just as much about collaboration,
especially in team sports. We're told that it's a place where
the cream of talent and work rise to the top, but as the success
of wealthy sports teams and the failure of poor ones shows, that
success comes at a price. In aesthetic/sexual terms, we often
associate sports with aggression and power—a fast serve
in tennis, a right hook in boxing, a defensive tackle in football.
But it's also and equally about beauty—the mechanics of
the tennis shot, the taut bodies in boxing trunks, the tight pants
in football. And the two tendencies have become intertwined. So
just as the National Football League advertises itself as a tough,
"real" man's game, it now markets its players as sex
symbols whose mere appearance in their drag-like uniforms is a
sign of beauty (supposedly!). Of course, the tension is more complex
than that—the beauty is not so easily divorced from the
power. They work together.
Q: It's interesting to me that gay men's
almost universally negative experiences of organized sports in
childhood (the horror! the ball is coming to me!) is frequently
doubled in adult life with an erotic fascination for the bodies
of sports figures. The lesbian cliche of being in love with your
gym teacher brings up a whole other angle of how sports play out—as
it were—in our lives. What did you observe about how sports
both informs and provokes gay and lesbian erotics?
A: Well, it's pretty clear from a lot of lesbian
writing that sports have been a venue for meeting people, forming
alliances, and creating community. Conversely, as you say, the
experience for gay men is often very alienating. That changed,
as the buff body of the '80s clone became fashionable, and the
reality of queer culture's ubiquity became clear. To hear a sports
commentator get excited over another man's performance is to hear
something very erotic. 'Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. He's
done it! He's done it!' Remind you of anything? To me, it's akin
to a powerful orgasm.
Q: I love that! It does make me wonder what
was I really looking at when I saw Ian Thorpe's glamour shot in
Newsweek which was on my computer screen saver all last
fall? His body? His Australian body? (My partner is Aussie, so
I'm a sucker for that.) His Australian swimmer's body? His expensive
wrist watch on his Australian swimmer's body?
A: Well, Tim, your powers of observation, and
pleasure in observing, are remarkable! Of course, you'd not have
seen the watch or the contours of Thorpe's trim, taut, and terrific
form if he hadn't been a swimmer of exceptional quality. And you'd
have seen much less of him prior to this era. Before, swimmers
were supposedly amateurs. Now, that hypocrisy has gone, and they
are up for sale. So that means you see him as a commercial figure
as well as an athletic one, although they are interdependent.
You see, as it were, more of him. And more of it is conditioned
through the commercial realities of his media persona and means
of making money. Newsweek knows it has three key audiences
for its coverage of him—gay men, straight women, and sports
fans of whatever orientation. That makes more money than just
appealing to the old sports fan, supposedly straight and drawn
purely by athletic performance, not by looks (but who knows about
that?).
Q: Is there sometimes a pretty tricky "eroticizing
the oppressor " stuff going on here. All right, I'll just
speak for myself here. I was a bit appalled with myself recently
when I clipped out the photo of the Croatian tennis star Goran
Ivanisevic who had snarled his anti-gay slurs after winning Wimbledon
and then proceeded to head back to Croatia and strip down to his
bikini briefs in public. Such a hot homophobe! He's still on my
refrigerator! Is sports the last refuge of un-politically correct
erotics?
A: Goran Ivanisevic is a very troubling character
for many of us. Sports are dominated by conservatives—every
golfer on the PGA tour is a registered R-word voter. Tennis players,
especially women, leave school well before they have learnt the
basics of social history. Most pro athletes subscribe to a notion
of natural ability added to hard work producing their success,
and extrapolate from that to other activities. They're not prone
to looking at inequality, oppression, etc unless it directly derives
from their own childhoods—and even then, they often understand
their success as the result of a merit-based system. Plus, despite
all the advances made to appeal to queers, pro sports is still
resolutely homophobic. Lennox Lewis and Hasim Rahman had a brawl
at an ESPN restaurant in August when they met to promote their
upcoming heavyweight boxing world title bout. This followed Rahman
referring to Lewis as 'gay' because the latter had used the courts
to initiate their contest. Weird to think of the law as a safe
house for queers! But this tension, this dynamic, this need to
define masculinity as 'not-gay' remains very very powerful indeed.
That said, Lewis and Rahman are revealing our cultural tensions
in a brutal way, living out the contradictions (including the
suspicion that part of this was a publicity stunt). Homophobia
is everywhere. Queers grow up with it all around, including, many
say, within themselves. It's a tough negotiation. There is a side
to sexual fantasy, as we all know, that is bad bad bad. Power
is hot. Sanitised sex is not. We often dream about and get off
on things we don't approve of or wish to do. And sometimes we
cross the boundary!
Q: Sportsex beautifully explores the complicated
gender-bending that goes on in sports: the butt-slapping, wild
hugs, exaggerated almost drag-like behavior for the men and the
critique sometime hurled at women athletes for "playing like
a man?" What kind of genders are being "performed"
by these behaviors?
A: These are means, I believe, of extending joy
beyond the bureaucratic norms of everyday life. They reference
a pre-adult, pre-adolescent moment, when touching intimately has
not been defined and theorized as transgressive. They represent
a wordless play of difference. Folks who would be uncomfortable
touching another man in any other context reach out to do so unfailingly
and joyously at play. When they do that, they open up our repertoire
of relating.
Q: Our experience of sports is inevitable
very personal and embodied. You bring some really lovely and honest
personal narratives of your own experience with sports as you
grew up. What did you discover about your own relationship to
the subject as you wrote the book?
A: First of all, the book came out just after
another one I did on globalization and sport. In each case, I'd
been working on the topic for thirteen years. So I discovered
relief and completion (a bit post-orgasmic!). On the topic itself,
I guess I confirmed that my own response to Sportsex
is highly ambivalent. I loath the disciplinary sides to sports,
the moralistic attitudes, and the history of sexism, racism, homophobia,
and nationalistic chauvinism. But I love the beauty and power.
And I think that there are some progressive sides to capitalism,
when it turns its eager eye on the body. For centuries, there
has been an over-valuation of the gaze of straight men at women,
as registered everywhere in our culture. Now, advertisers have
discovered a different gaze and they like how it looks. We can't
be sure what the outcome will be, but sports are changed forever. |
