Chris Comes Out (cont.)

Although the basic coming out trope of having to hide and then finally finding someone to reveal yourself to is at work in Chris's story, the sexually charged nature of it seems to indicate more that the protagonist already knows that homosexuality is all about sex and that his very existence comes from his erotic life. Chris begins his second paragraph by having the narrator tell us that

when you are young you are very curious about the size of your friends' piece. So I used football as a way to do this.

Football, for this protagonist, wasn't about the sport or about competition, but about having a space to get close to other guys, particularly their "pieces." Two points seem noteworthy about Chris's rhetoric here. The first is that since homosexuality is only about sex, particularly about penis size, Chris has the "right" to be offended by gay men who might infiltrate the sports arena and sully the game he loves to play by making it about something other than good sportsmanship, camaraderie, and productive competition. We can read Chris's rhetoric as indicative of the discomfort that he deals with in real life, as well as in the phantasy world of this coming out story, regarding male homosexuality and how such a sexuality interpellates him and challenges him because he is, after all, a football player himself. This part of Chris's narrative speaks to the dis-ease that Chris--and the three other football players in my class that semester--voiced when conversations drifted to the increasing number of professional athletes coming out of the closet.[9]

Most of the rest of the story involves the unnamed protagonist describing, rather explicitly, how he likes "lying on the ground grabbing another player's ass and loving every minute of it." At one point, he lets the reader know that "there are a lot of nice Asses out on the field." Again, Chris as the writer and football star finds his way back into the narrative he's creating. Certainly, given Chris's sense of himself as a man that any "girl" would want, we can see his protagonist supporting Chris's sense of self as one of those football players with a "nice ass" on the field. Chris's protagonist goes on to claim that he loved the parts of practice and games when the guys would return to the locker room, shirtless, for showers: "Then when the sun hit their nice slender bodies it was all over for me my piece would rise like the sunset. It would stay that way until everybody was gone." For Chris's protagonist, it isn't so much that he "chooses" to come out as he gets spotted. This protagonist knows that it's not safe to come out around the other players.[10] The protagonist explains

So one day he was like why you always on hard around the team and I was like because them boys be turning me on and he said I know how you feel. I was like what you mean and he said they turn me on to so instead of that girl back there we just explored with one another. That has been the most memorable night in my entire life.

Here, the protagonist is confronted by his teammate, which turns out to be a "good" thing for him because it allows him to "come out" to another person and to find someone with whom to explore his burgeoning sexuality. As a gay-identified reader, I find one of the aspects of Chris's story that is most like the typical coming out narrative to be this ending. Similar in romantic movement to the heterosexual story of first love and loss of virginity to a "true love," Chris imbues his story with a tender moment of youthful sexual exploration between peers, which in effect "normalizes" his story of gay love/lust.[11]

However, this fleeting moment of "tenderness" is clearly marred by the last sentence of Chris's story, which comes almost immediately after the passage quoted above: "This is all a joke ha ha ha peace out." Chris's ending, related in the same voice of his other writings and class performances, suggests the discomfort that the writing of this story (or at least the writing of the last part) causes him. He retreats to more familiar space, and he reminds his gay teacher-reader that he (Chris) is not gay and that it was all a joke.

[9] I should note that since the course ran from 8:00-8:50 MWF, it was full of college athletes who had to take early morning classes to free up afternoons for practice. Along with these four football players, I had two female gymnasts, three female soccer players, and one female basketball player--all of these students (of their own prompting) wrote narratives or essays that addressed issues of sexuality performances in sports, most of which demonstrated similar "dis-ease" to Chris's story.

[10] Readers may remember what Chris has written earlier in his more expository writings (where Chris is the speaker) that gay people shouldn't feel comfortable around him or his football playing friends.

[11] We had read Justin Chin's "The Beginning of My Worthlessness" about a young Asian boy whose first experience is with a much older ephebophile in a public restrooms, so whereas I was expecting Chris to use some of these "seedier" tales as a model for his own, he ends up creating a rather tender story, once he gets past the sex and football stuff.

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