On boys and balls: How I learned to stop hating sports

My childhood memories of sports are generally of feeling either bored or inadequate. I’ve never understood why anyone would chase a ball around when one could easily watch  TV and eat a rotisserie chicken. And people — especially boys — seem to have such a weird emotional investment in the whole thing. Boys are always either playing sports or watching sports or talking about sports, whereas I have always disdained sports, almost as a matter of pride. But now I’ve joined a sports league.

Well — a gay sports league. I am a Los Angeles–based homosexual, which means I operate under the impression that my worth depends on how often I move around and pick up heavy things. Already resigned to physical activity, I thought playing a “game” might take my mind off how awful it is to move around. I also imagined that joining a sports team might give me an appealing air of masculinity, and, having spent most of my childhood doing theater, I’ve always wondered what that might look like.

I realize a gay sports league may sound regressive and self-segregating, but understand: Many of us have not gotten over the way heterosexual boys made us feel growing up, with their fearless athleticism and complete lack of interest in having sex with us. These wounds take a long time to heal, and anyway, I’d like to feel as though I can shriek in fear if a ball gets near me. Somehow I sensed this wouldn’t fly in a more traditional league.

Perusing the cushy options offered by the L.A.-based Varsity Gay League (“trivia” counted as a sport among this crowd, which I found encouraging), I eventually settled on kickball, which I remembered disliking less than most other sports. I arrived to our first game to find my new team was made up of young, fit, sporty-looking boys with almost uniformly good bone structure. I didn’t quite understand why these people would choose to get together and kick a ball, instead of just having sex with each other, all the time, forever, but, as the pope says, who am I to judge? I fell immediately in love with maybe six of them.

By far the dreamiest was Edward, an actor who looked like he’d been commissioned by an ancient Greek. Edward was jazzed up that first afternoon because some football team he liked had just won a game. Ross, a criminally adorable 23-year-old who apparently held allegiance to the losing team was, bafflingly, in a foul mood about the loss, and Edward proceeded to tease him about it. This interaction, which took place in real life as opposed to as a scripted sexual prelude in a porno video, was the first clue that I’d fallen in with some truly bizarre people.