Sports
from the Editor
Originally intended to coincide with the 2020 Summer Olympics, this issue of QM is designed to inspire readers to think deeply about the world of sports. How are gender, sex, and sexuality implicated in the performance of sport? What are the current social expectations surrounding them? Together with consideration of the unique and diverse experiences of queer athletes, questions concerning fairness and competition add to our diverse investigation of sport featured in this issue.
R.K. Russell opens this conversation with a personal essay “Coming Out to Play”, in which he details some of the most intimate moments in his early coming out process. As a young collegiate American football player, Russell struggled to accept his bisexuality, and in this essay he details the effects this had on his athletic performance. Contrary to common assumptions that queerness invalidates one’s masculinity and detracts from the athleticism of male competitors, Russell explains how coming out actually improved his game and made him a better teammate, athlete, and friend.
In “Ancient Battles and Modern Brains” Tania Reynolds similarly engages this relationship between sexuality, masculinity and athleticism. Collaborating with colleagues to conduct a series of scientific investigations, she uses evolutionary psychology to explain why today’s men are especially prone to bias against queer men. Rather than uncovering a simple pattern of homophobia, Reynolds reveals how the long history of tribal warfare among humans has led to the contemporary use of sexuality to express preferences for male teammates possessing qualities associated with traditional masculinity.
It is precisely this attitude toward men seen as lacking such qualities that led to the experiences M.Christian recalls so vividly in “Keeping Score”. A sensitive and introspective child, Christian details how his disinterest in sports blossomed over time into full-blown contrarian distain. Charting this development alongside the growing social judgment he received for his alternate approach to masculinity, he uses these experiences to argue for the continued reconsideration of the role sport plays in society and an expansion of how we define what it means to “be a man” today.
Social expectations are also the central focus of Reese Piper’s essay “Children on the Pole”. Digging into the growing trend of pole fitness as an athletic sport, Piper considers questions around the appropriateness of young girls’ participation. Contextualizing concerns within larger social attitudes toward sex and sex work, Piper argues that the problem is not with the pole itself, but rather with the commonly held presumptions about strippers and the culture of the strip club that are the cause of discomfort. The solution, Piper suggests, is not only age appropriate instruction, but also a thoughtful transformation of the way society engages with both childhood sexual development and the sex industry, rather than simply disassociating pole fitness from its progenitors.
Alongside fresh entries in “The In-between”, “My Body and Other Adventures”, and “Zach and the City”, we feature two new cartoons by David Cohen and eight additional perspectives in the Business of Sex Profiles. I am particularly excited about the new Painted Stories collection this issue, which illuminates a number of prominent figures like Jason Ellis, Zach Sullivan, and Karen Rinaldi, as well as our first ever love story told by Ryan Russell and Corey O’Brian. This issue also marks the launch of QM’s newsletter, which offers new insights and highlights all the best that is happening here at Queer Majority. To those readers already on the list: welcome to the family. To everyone who has yet to join: you can sign up here anytime.
Published Jul 1, 2020
Published in Issue VII: Sports