Gay men are coming out as sports fans... not that there's anything wrong with thatThe Tuesday after Memorial Day weekend is typically a sleepy night for bars, but a downtown sports bar called Gym is crowded, as always. The Yankees vs. Detroit game, now in extra innings, is playing on two flat-screen TV’s and is also being projected onto the brick wall opposite the bar. Baseball is everywhere.
A line drive hits the Tigers’ left fielder in the forearm. “That’s why we traded your ugly ass!” a bald, well-built black man yells at the T.V. His effeminate tone of voice seems incongruous with the insider knowledge his comment reveals.
In 2002, Marcus Thames was traded from the Yankees, and eventually ended up on Detroit. The fan knows all that, and like most of the men at Gym, he is flamingly gay.
That’s not an oxymoron, and, despite popular misconception, it never has been, says Cyd Zeigler, creator and owner of Outsports.com, the gay version of ESPN. Thirty percent of the general population considers itself hard core sports fans, and 30 percent of the gay population does, too, according to Zeigler.
The stereotype that gay men don’t like sports is not entirely unfounded, however. There are a lot of gay men who want nothing to do with sports because they were scared off of them at a young age, called “fag” or teased for throwing like a girl. Some of those men became voices of the gay community, and the result was that sports did not receive much support within that community, Zeigler explained. Coming out to your gay friends as a sports fan was almost as difficult as coming out to your straight friends as gay.
That’s changing, and nowhere is there more evidence of the shift than at Gym.
Before Gym Sports Bar opened on Eighth Avenue between 18th and 19th streets a little over a year ago, about half the guys who now drink there were watching games at home or at straight bars, Rick Schmutzler, the bar’s co-owner, estimates. These hard-core sports fans come to Gym because it’s more fun to watch sports when you don’t have to censor yourself. “Watching the football game with gay men makes those periodic upwellings of sexual attraction OK to express (like, when Tom Brady leans over to stretch his hamstrings – yowzer.),” a gay Texas-born football fan explained.
The other half of Gym’s patrons would probably be out at other gay bars or clubs if Gym didn’t exist, says Schmutzler. These “others” are casual sports fans who enjoy watching, say, tennis or the Olympics, but would not have gone so far as to identify as sports fans in the past. They come to Gym for the atmosphere, which is friendly and, well, normal.
Jimmy Vanegas, 29, is a Yankees fan, “but that’s about it,” he says. Vanegas works for People magazine and goes to celebrity events a lot, and seems like the type that would favor highly manicured high-end bars, but he’s at Gym at least four times a week. “It is more the social aspect,” he says. “You’re hanging out with guys who like sports. Not just your typical Chelsea boys, who are into the gym, fashion, beauty.”
His drinking buddy, Julio Santana, 29, a chef from Brooklyn and a basketball fan, often stops by when Gym opens at three to have a drink or two. “We don’t have a lot of this atmosphere anywhere,” says Santana. “In Brooklyn, we don’t have a place where gay guys can go to watch the game and hang out with the guys. We needed somewhere we could relax and not have strippers and porno on T.V.”
“One of the things our gay clientele likes is we are kind of like a regular bar,” Schmutzler said. A thick-chested Midwesterner in his forties, Schmutzler retains his native friendliness and the idea that “going out shouldn’t be stressful.” This Tuesday night, he is wearing a black tank top that says “just be, nyc” in neon cursive.
Before Gym, Shmutzler says, there were “down and dirty piggy bars and fabulous martini club spaces,” he said. “That leaves a lot of room in the middle. The majority of gay men are in the middle.”
If not for Gym, Santana says he would probably be hitting G Lounge or XL, hip high-end Chelsea bars specializing in frozen cosmos and fruity cocktails. Or “if I really want to go out dancing, I’ll go to Queens,” he says. “But it’s not like here. Gym is a step away from that whole muscle guys with bikinis on. It’s a good time. It’s normal.”
Gym is the only gay sports bar in New York. Two others have opened in the past few years in Atlanta and Chicago.
The emergence of gay sports bars comes hand in hand with a boom in gay sports clubs and leagues. Out of Bounds, which works with LGBT sports and recreation groups in New York, estimates that 3,000 participants are involved in gay clubs and leagues in the greater New York area. The Big Apple Softball League has grown threefold in the last decade. It now has 650 members and has reached its limit, imposed by field shortage, of 38 teams. Chelsea-based Gotham Volleyball boasts 400 members. The Gotham Knights, a gay rugby team established in 2001, just hosted the 2006 Bingham Cup on Randall’s Island, in which 800 gay players from 10 countries competed. Zeigler, of Outsports.com, started a gay flag football league a year and a half ago, and has a waiting list of 50 in addition to 150 members.
Gym sponsors four gay softball teams, the rugby club, two pool teams, a soccer club, a volleyball club, and a ski club, and the bar has a trophy shelf and a tight-knit community of athlete patrons to show for it. At the welcome party the bar threw for the visiting Bingham Cup rugby players two weekends ago, a player from Sydney sprinted naked across the bar, to the delight of the Gotham Knights, the Sydney Convicts, and everyone there. The next night, two opposing players had a make-out session after trying to clobber each other on the pitch earlier that day.
Like the regulars at Gym Sports Bar, the athletes in these fast-growing gay clubs and leagues run the gamut between those who grew up immersed in athletics and those who screamed when a ball came flying at them. The gay leagues are a blessing to the inveterate athletes because, says a rugger on the Manchester Village Spartans drinking away his last night in New York, “it’s nicer to be with likeminded people.” On the tennis court, you can kiss your opponent hello like you would normally, explains Schmutzler; you don’t ever have to change your pronouns or watch what you say. Nevertheless, jocks like Schmutzler, who ran track and played football in college and has played in countless leagues since, would play on straight teams if gay ones didn’t exist.
It is the “non-athletes” for whom the leagues can be life-altering. C. Brian Devinney, a player on the Gotham Knights, estimates that 80% of the Knights, himself included, had never touched a rugby ball before joining the team.
One of those players is Juan Bonilla, a bartender at Gym who joined the Knights two years ago. “Being Mexican, it was expected of you to be good at soccer,” he said. Bonilla, a big guy, wasn’t cut out for soccer like his friends and cousins, and growing up he got a lot of flack for it. “They never thought of me as the athletic type,” he said. As an adult, he gave up on sports and stayed in shape by going to the gym, but eventually started “getting sick of the routine.” He found out about the Knights online, and after the first practice, fell in love with the sport and the fraternity that comes along with it.
“And lo and behold, he’s really good at it,” says Schmutzler, who is Bonilla’s boss and friend. (All the bartenders are close. They have tickle fights every half hour or so.) “Just to experience something he never thought he’d experience as an openly gay man, it kicked doors open in other parts of his life.”
“It’s a really healing thing for gay men to be involved in some sort of organized sport,” says Schmutzler. Many gay men internalize the negativity that was hurled at them in high school and see themselves as hopelessly un-athletic. Giving it another try in a supportive environment can be life changing. “You’re confronting old demons and moving past them,” says Schmutzler, and you’re getting all the extras that come with playing sports: the network of friends, the opportunity to travel, the self confidence and the great ass.
As more gay men like Bonilla, Santana and Vanegas start identifying with sports culture, that culture is gradually being accepted into the gay community. “The more presence sports has in the gay community, the more gay men are fairly confident coming out as sports fans,” Zeigler said.
The gay community is shedding its Broadway show watching, hard drug using stereotypes, and not only in terms of its relationship to sports. In addition to Monday night football and pick-up street basketball, its widening interest includes everything from greater involvement in the church to square dancing (the Gay Pride Ho-Down is scheduled for June 28). Being gay no longer comes with the set of requirements it did a generation ago, and that gives gay men the freedom to develop their own identities, which, for many, are not much different from the identities of straight men.
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