Masc4Masc: Backdoor to the Locker Room
By: Liam Scanlon
Tags: Toxic Masculinity, Sports, Masculinity, LGBTQ, Sexuality

Tom of Finland

Baseball caps and jock straps. Big bellies and veined forearms. Dense black hair anywhere but your skull. Rugby profile pics (other sports too, but rugby is the gold star) — the muddier you are the better. In the UK it’s ending your sentences with “mate,” in North America it’d be “bro.” These are the codes, the sign posts that direct you towards locker room country: the most masculine regions of the emotional-digital gayborhood.

In locker room country smells are okay. Encouraged. Stench is a pheromone, gets the blood pumping. Knowing how to take it like a man goes without saying. Freud would have a field day with all these inversions: jock straps make it easier to fuck the ass, sweat’s a good lubricant, the trainers stay on when all else falls off. Plus, all those homophobic phrases sewn into our lexicon — ‘fuck you up,’ ‘fuck me in the ass,’ ‘fuck the shit out of you’ — become erotic. Hypercharged.

In this world the locker room is an idea, a place you strive to and never quite reach. These men were raised on it, these jocks. While I was off reading books and acting in plays with the girls and the other homos, they slammed bodies, sweated together, showered together. Imagine getting nude with your best buddies, imagine the away games and sharing hotel rooms. The entire gay porn industry is built on these scenarios. And these men lived it, lived in a sexual world not meant to be sexual — in a world where your sexuality is forbidden.

That forced an entire demographic, these gay jocks, into subverting their feelings, cutting off those parts of themselves that would make them less in their team mates’ eyes — girly femboys fuck that, I’m not that. As you come out in that environment, sexuality is separate from your identity: “I’m gay, but, I’m not really into all that gay stuff.”

The result? A sub-culture that’s both the most gay and the least. It takes masculinity as an ideal, worshipping men, worshiping The Man. The cowboy, the Marlborough man, the quarterback. In this world the line between preference and discrimination is a very thin one, where who you sleep with spreads to who you drink with, dance with, associate with. Until 2019, London’s largest gay club, XXL, was specifically for ‘men only,’ a designation that left trans people or more femm gay men at the door.

My Inner Jock(strap)

I get access to this world, and it still feels surreal. Because I can grow a beard, I can come inside, and it makes me think of another meaning of beard: a woman closeted men date to pass as heterosexual and, of course, more masculine. A disguise. The locker room by way of the backdoor.

Sometimes I settle in, become one of the boys, sometimes it hits me. One time, while scrolling through an old fuck buddy’s Instagram, I stumbled upon his closet days and, mate, it’s a museum piece of fragile masculinity — snaps of cars, sports games, beer, beer and wings, sports beer and wings, and nudes of Margot Robbie.

But the crowning post? A more recent post, a pic of Lady Gaga at the Superbowl with the caption, “who t f chooses these halftime shows?! #illbeatthebar.”

Seeing that, it feels like we come from different cultures all together, feels impossible that we could take such winding roads from such opposing parts of high school and still wind up in the same bed. Even in my fiercest days of self hatred I still listened to Madonna or Gaga and felt a fire burn through me. To reach (badly) for a sports analogy, maybe we’re playing the same sport but different teams?

But that’s too easy; those same toxic issues of male self-identification are there in me too. It hit me like a poison when I watched my boyfriend dance in a gay club in Portland. He threw up one hand, placed the other on his hip, and hip thrust along to Britney. Eyes closed, lost in the joy. I couldn’t watch him I was so ashamed. I stopped dancing and fell against the wall, mastering a look of cool amusement. I lost all attraction to him for the rest of the night.

After that I could no longer say it’s just a preference. That beards make you sexier and I like a little bit of hair on their chest. Because in that moment, even though I was trying my hardest not to, I reduced my boyfriend.

Masculinity doesn’t always have to be toxic. But these men start to look like a cartoon character, a Tom Finland sketch.

And I’m not a fucking cartoon character. I have more masc in me than fem — I still speed up on my bike, even when the chain groans and threatens to snap, just to get ahead of the other cyclists. I grunt, snarl, and when I walk into a room I usually want to own it.

But often enough the woman clamours to get out. Sometimes I don’t wanna wear the cowboy hat. Sometimes I just wanna be Kate Bush dancing on an Irish cliff, the wind blowing through my red dress as I battle the rhythm of the sea and sky.