Sportsball
Nothing sends a chill down my spine faster than the obnoxious din of a crowd at a sporting event. Even the sounds of it coming from a television broadcast, with the excited shrieks of sports commentators and music that sounds like the Carol of the Bells by Manheim Steamroller, makes me shudder. Growing up in a family of Chicago Cubs fans, I was more interested in the action happening in the neighborhood adjacent to Wrigley Field, Boystown.
Boystown (now known as Northalsted) is the oldest officially recognized queer neighborhood in the United States. It’s a refuge for LGBTQ+ Midwesterners who’ve fled their hometowns in search of community and belonging.
At the tender age of 14, I set my eyes on the rainbow-filled streets of Boystown for the first time. Seeing so many flamboyant and good-looking men strutting up and down the streets, some hand in hand, made my heart leap. I was quickly snapped back to reality when a pile of mini-comic books entitled “Doom Town” were placed in my hand. I was there with my church youth group as part of an “urban” missionary trip to tell the people of Chicago and the homosexuals of Boystown about the love of Jesus. I lived in fear of my sexuality and God for a very long time because of harmful beliefs and propaganda like we handed out that fateful summer night.
My brothers played baseball, basketball, soccer, and ran track. One of them was even our high school homecoming king. They tried their best to make an athlete out of me, but it was a futile effort as I was left-handed, asthmatic, and chubby. To add insult to injury, I had about as much interest in watching games on television with them as I did in playing sports with them, which was none.
One year, my well-meaning brother got me the Nerf Turbo Screamer for my birthday. It was the hottest toy of the season. Instead of being grateful and excited like most 8-year-old boys would have been, I sat inside crying while he played football with all of my friends outside. It ruined my birthday party and is likely one reason I don’t like celebrating my birthday today.
Sports became layered with shame and resentment for me. Every Sunday and Monday, the sounds of the game and cheers coming from the living room were a consistent, loud reminder I was different.
In junior high, I gave sports a chance by becoming the manager for our 8th-grade basketball team. I loved traveling on the bus to games, gossiping with the cheerleaders, and sneaking fleeting glances at the guys changing in the locker room. In addition to lugging the bright orange 5-gallon Igloo cooler of water around to keep the team hydrated, I was asked to keep the scorebook during the game. Not knowing all of the rules of basketball or its associated terminology, I was relieved of my managerial duties midway through the season. I was done trying after that.
My avoidance and fear of sports wouldn’t be confronted again until my early 20s, when I found myself at a church campground in the suburbs of Dallas. I was attending my first conversion therapy retreat with a ministry called Living Hope.
Conversion therapy is based on harmful Christian pseudo-psychology that believes people can change their sexual orientation through prayer, treatment, and behavior modification. I was desperate to try anything to not be gay, and this retreat was the first of many I would attend throughout my 20s.
The weekend retreat was filled with emotional prayer services, lectures, and activities designed to help us become more comfortable with our gender identity. It meant makeovers from a group of local Mary Kay consultants and an etiquette class for the girls. And for guys, a local football coach came to teach us the rules of the game. He taught us how to throw a football and made us all face our fears by splitting us into teams and making us play a few games. As one might expect, the guys wanted to do makeovers, and the girls wanted to play football.
In so many words, we were told the “cure” to our homosexuality could be found in doing what “normal” guys and girls do. By relating in healthy ways to members of our own gender, we could rid ourselves of our sexual attraction to them, so they said.
For most of my 20s, I followed the blueprint laid out for me through conversion therapy and the toxic “Biblical masculinity” frameworks spewed from church pulpits. I felt like a shell of a person going through all of the motions hoping one day something I was doing would stick, but nothing about me felt “Wild at Heart.”
When I was 24, I moved to Chicago to work for a church. I was still in the closet and in conversion therapy, and the idea of tip-toeing into Boystown, less than a mile away, felt akin to crossing enemy lines. Instead, I found myself in crowded sports bars over frosty $1 pints of Miller Lite and plates overflowing with chicken wings. My fake-conversion-therapy-therapist forced me to join a men’s small group at my church so I could practice “doing things men do,” which included watching sports. I hated every second of it and feigned excitement about touchdowns, goals, and 3-pointers. Every Sunday, Monday, and whatever nights of the week games were on, I was reminded of how much of an outsider and a fraud I was. I would go home feeling deflated and emasculated.
One day, my inner resolve to change my sexuality was weak, and some friends successfully convinced me to go out with them to Boystown. They promised to “watch” me and ensure I didn’t do anything that would disqualify me from my job at the church. I quickly reminded them the last time I set foot in Boystown was as a missionary 10 years earlier. I saw this visit as a similar calling. I would go, I told them, to bring God’s light to the darkness.
My heart was pounding with excitement and fear as we stood in line to get into Sidetrack, the largest bar in Boystown. The words “flee from any appearance of evil” rang in my ears, but my feet kept walking me closer to the door with my ID in hand.
Once inside, I rounded the corner and saw a scene resembling most sports bars I’d been at with my church friends, only this one had a stark difference that took my breath away. There was a sea of hundreds of people, predominantly queer, packing the bar and giant TVs flickered on every wall. Instead of football, basketball, or baseball games dominating the screens, a scene from The Little Mermaid was playing, and everyone was singing along. It was show tunes night. My mouth was agape, and tears rose in my eyes as Ariel sang, “wanderin’ free, wish I could be part of that world.” I knew I’d found my people.
I joked about being a missionary at the bar that night, but I was the one that ended up being converted. The bar wasn’t this awful den of iniquity like I was told it would be. People cheered for Broadway divas singing power ballads like my friends cheered for their favorite players and teams. During Madonna’s emotional performance of “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina” from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita, everyone cheered and tossed cocktail napkins in the air on cue like she made a championship-winning touchdown. It was like being in an alternate universe where I didn’t have to do anything to fit in except be myself. That night and experience changed everything for me.
I would eventually untangle myself from the web of confusion I was caught up in because of conversion therapy, but that’s a story for another time.
When I left my job at the church and finally came out, I moved to a third-floor walkup apartment on Briar Place, a block south of the unofficial entrance to Boystown. I always found it funny how Boystown was a block away from the home of the Chicago Cubs. Two very different worlds bordering each other, separated by a street lined with phallic rainbow poles, crowded gay bars, adult stores, and restaurants serving drag brunch. Giving directions to perplexed Cubs fans was always entertaining when they found themselves on the wrong side of the train tracks.
On certain nights, if the wind was blowing in the right direction, I could hear the crowd’s roar from the Friendly Confines of Wrigley Field billowing through my living room window. If the noise was too much, I’d just turn up my showtunes at home or head to Sidetrack. I still dislike sports, but I no longer feel like it’s an indictment against my masculinity. I can be “one of the guys,” even while singing along to Broadway standards.
