Gay people don’t generally understand hockey. It’s perceived as a barroom brawl at the Ice Capades. The commonest thing I hear is the old saw about going to a boxing match where a hockey game broke out. It’s apparently not correct behavior for a gay guy to play hockey—we’re supposed to be sensitive, caring men, with no time for a rough sport. The second most common thing I hear is some comment about whether I have all my teeth.
Bulldogs (gray) and Rangers, Summer, 1997
Photo Copyright © 1997 by Ralph Vallin

Gay people don’t generally understand sports in general. Many of us— myself included—feel traumatized by the whole sordid high school gym experience. We were never as good at throwing or catching as the other boys, we ran slower and just didn’t have the endurance. Doomed to begin with, there was never any reason for us to try. And gym teachers never seemed to care about the weenies; they paid all their attention to the football stars. There’s this lingering suspicion in the gay community about anybody who calls himself gay yet sides with them and participates in those primitive caveman team rituals. Even the leather community, who you might think would understand issues about masculinity and toughness, seems to be suspicious of gay guys who play hockey.

 

Gay people in San Francisco tend to be very political ... you join a gay hockey team mostly as a political statement about the inequalities between gay/straight and male/female co-opposites caused by a male-dominated hegemony of testosterone-induced machismo oppressing the weaker classes of society. Moreover, any gay person who does embrace the Neolithic institutions of organized team-sports is buying into the oppressive system and can’t have any hope of changing it. Any gay person who plays such games with the stated interest of winning games instead of just aiming for personal best is a traitor to the cause of gay liberation. In the rest of the Bay Area it’s pretty much a non-issue, and people just get together to play hockey and afterwards have pizza and beer.

So why am I playing sports—hockey—goalie? Remember for a moment what I said about my educational and physical background. If you saw me walking down Castro Street in my Clone Clothes, you wouldn’t recognize me as any different from anyone else. A few years ago I made a crucial mental leap about sports. I used to think that you had to be coordinated and tough to play a sport like hockey. It made perfect sense, but it’s completely backwards: you have to play a sport like hockey to become coordinated and tough. (You can apply this in all sorts of situations. You don’t work out at a gym because you’re big and burly—you’re big and burly because you work out at a gym. You dance because you’re lithe and graceful— you become lithe and graceful by dancing.)

Beyond hockey, I’ve got all the same concerns as anyone else—what will I have for dinner tonight; when will I find a boyfriend; how am I going to pay off that damn credit card; can I program my VCR to record Babylon 5 while I’m off playing hockey tonight? And the same as anyone else, I’m a human being just five thousand years out of the stone age, when men hunted for survival, and working as part of a tribe meant you might survive the winter. Compared to how long humans have been doing that, it wasn’t very long ago, and we still carry those instincts with us. What will we do? Hide in a closet of Enlightenment intellectualism and pretend that this thin veneer of civilization separates us from our past? Or honor that past and play hard?

Several years ago I lost five teeth all at once. But that didn’t happen at a hockey game ... it was during a visit to an oral surgeon. They were my wisdom teeth and a supernumerary bicuspid.