I’m the last person to talk about sports in general and basketball in particular. When I was 14 and a freshman in high school, my father “suggested” I try out for the basketball team. So I did. About 20 of us gathered after school on the outside court; my alma mater is built on the side of a hill, and in those days, the basketball court was separated from a very steep incline and Foothill Boulevard by a small, maybe three-foot high, wall. Today, that same spot is the entrance to the performing arts center.
Mr. O’Neil was the coach. All us hopefuls were standing in a line facing him like a platoon might stand in front of its drill sergeant. He blew his whistle to get our attention, holding a basketball in his hands. Without warning, and without skipping a beat, he threw the ball to me (it felt like he’d thrown it at me, but I’ll let that slide) and shouted, “Wilkinson, do a lay-up.” The guy next to me, Dave Taylor, sensed I had no idea what that was. He was right! So he whispered under his breath, “run towards the hoop, and then throw the ball into it from about three feet away.”
I lunged forward, holding the ball firmly in my hands. I ran towards the hoop, maintaining my firm grasp on the ball (Dave had neglected to mention the requirement to bounce the ball while moving in any direction with it, which I have now been reliably informed is one of the rules of basketball, the violation of which is called “traveling”). At this point, I had never “run” in my life; I considered it an undue and unnecessary exertion of energy, and beneath me. With my spindly white legs protruding from a pair of ill-fitting vaguely yellowish nylon sports shorts, I careened towards the hoop like a grocery store shopping cart with one bad wheel. About three feet out from it, I stopped abruptly, and, using both hands, pushed the ball in the general direction of the hoop.
The basketball soared upward into the air, flying over what I was later told is called the back board. Airborne, it left the boundaries of the school’s campus and was now directly over traffic on Foothill Boulevard. Gravity being what it is, the ball came down with a tremendous thud on the hood of a car, whose driver was so startled that she swerved into the side of the hill; no one and nothing was harmed, except for several shrubberies. Having hit the hood of her car, the basketball bounced off it, and onto the road, rolling into oncoming traffic which began swerving and maneuvering around it on its downhill trajectory. It came to rest at the bottom of the hill about 200 yards away. I looked at my fellow basketball team hopefuls, and then at Mr. O’Neil. I was expecting snide comments and sniggers. But they were all silent. They stared at me, most of their mouths agape, speechless. No one said a word.
“I’ll just show myself out, shall I?” I said, turning toward the locker room where I’d left my real clothes. I did not make the team.
I’ve never thought much of basketball as a sport, maybe because of that experience, maybe because it seems like just a lot of running back and forth. And you know how I feel about running, even before I was confined to a wheelchair. But there’s a nasty bit of misplaced homophobia going on in the NBA (National Basketball Association) today, and it upsets me so much that I felt I had to write about it. And the player at the center of it, 20 year-old Jared McCain, isn’t even gay!
In 2009, I invited a very select group of alumni, all from my graduating class of 1984, to an “alternative” 25 year high school reunion at my house in Palm Springs. Those invited were predominantly, but not exclusively, gay. I also tracked down a gay teacher of ours who had been very supportive of those of us who did come out in our Junior or Senior year, invited him and his partner to join us, and paid for their airfare and hotel room. I soon learned a valuable lesson.
One of our classmates put the nell into nelly. He was more effeminate than Richard Simmons. He never came out as gay, to me or anyone else. He didn’t have to. He hung around with us, so we just assumed with his lisp and his fey ways that he was. Well, I did, I can’t speak for what the others thought.
Everyone arrived at my old house on Palmas Ridge Friday afternoon for a weekend of activities I’d arranged culminating in Sunday morning brunch at Pinocchio in the Desert, a popular restaurant with gays on Tahquitz Canyon Way downtown. I sent my in-home caregiver at the time, Linda the Lesbian, to pick up Mr. Rodgers and his partner Richard at the airport and get them checked into the Hotel Zoso where I’d booked them a room. Meanwhile, we began with the reminiscing and the “what-have-you-been-doing-for-the-last-25-years?” over cocktails back at my house. Mark (name changed to protect the innocent) the nelly nancy arrived. With his wife! He told us his daughter had wanted to come too and meet her dad’s friends from high school, but she stayed behind because she had exams at USC’s Keck School of Medicine the next week.
What the… Mark’s got a wife?… and a daughter?
It was a moment of profound insight for me. Growing up and in high school, I was effeminate, not as flamboyant as Liberace mind you, but enough to make the jocks uneasy. This led to being called fag, faggot, or queer boy from an early age. But I was, and am, a fag, faggot, and queer boy (man), so I fit the stereotype. Perhaps there’s something to it. But Mark in high school – I was a mere ember to his flame, a burning stove-top mishap to his five-alarm fire. Surely if I was swishing it about the place, and I am gay, then he must be like some sort of Super Gay! But he wasn’t, and isn’t.
Now the obvious lesson is “don’t judge a book by its cover.” But go deeper. One’s gender expression, and gender expression itself, has nothing (zero, zilch, nada) to do with whether one is homosexual or heterosexual. Go even deeper. Why do we associate femininity with homosexuality? Why do we associate masculinity with heterosexuality? I know gay guys who like football. I know straight guys who like showtunes. And brie.
And I know of a 20 year-old NBA player in his rookie year who paints his fingernails and is so athletically talented as a basketball player he’s the odds-on favorite to earn the Rookie of the Year award this season. And he is not gay.
What the… he paints his fingernails?… and plays sports?
This is not the affectation of some nouveau riche kid acting out because at a young age he’s earning obscene amounts of money as a professional sports player. It’s just who he is.
And we know this because during the NBA draft last June, when he was selected by the Philadelphia 76ers, he arrived on stage to shake NBA commissioner Adam Silver’s hand wearing glossy black nail polish (see right). He later told the New York Times, “I had to do the nail polish, I went with a simple vibe.”
He has received massive amounts of negative attention online and backlash from fans and the sports press alike about his sexuality, all while demonstrating athleticism reminiscent of an almost Michael-Jordanesque ability to play basketball.
Online hate and criticism are nothing new to gay men, nor is homophobia unheard of in the press, but Jared McCain is not gay. He paints his nails. And as a basketball player, he averages 15 points per game (putting him at the top of first-year players). I had to get that stat from someone, but not because I’m gay but because I know nothing about and neither follow nor watch basketball. And have no interest in it. One X user even wrote, “Jared McCain really got me to shut up about him being gay that boy can hoop.” Let me say it again: Jared McCain is not gay, he paints his nails.
The issue fans and others take with this kid says a lot about modern homophobia, which equates behaviors like painting your nails with femininity, and femininity in men with being “gay.” Californians… remember when Governor Schwarzenegger used to call anyone opposed to his policies “girly men?” The implication being there was something wrong with them. Today, there’s a new term – “zesty” – which means someone who’s unmasculine and implies the person is gay; in terms used when I was young: a fag, faggot, or queer. But nobody except the most tone-deaf bigot uses fag or faggot anymore, and queer has been adopted by the gay community as a badge of honor, removing its sting. The hateful stereotype has not gone away, though; it’s just been renamed: zesty. Entries in the Urban Dictionary for the term reinforce this unofficial but widely used definition of zesty as “gay.”
Toxic masculinity has long been embedded in our culture, particularly in the hypermasculine realm of male sports. Recently, I was watching 8 out of 10 Cats from Britain on YouTube. The episode featured Louis Smith, who has won more Olympic medals than any other male British gymnast in history. He had gone on to do a celebrity turn on Strictly Come Dancing (their Dancing with the Stars).
When the host, Jimmy Carr, slid in a dig about going from the “ballet” of a gymnastics routine to doing a number on the popular dance show wearing a tight-fitting spandex leotard with sequins, thus implying gymnastics and men dancing are feminine, the gymnast angrily snapped at him, “but I make it look masculine.” Sad that he felt he had to.
The vitriolic criticism and unbridled hate directed at Jared McCain should not be reduced to his decision to paint his nails. Instead, it reflects how society is still hung up on an outdated notion of masculinity which he challenges by painting his nails. A notion which I even fell prey to by assuming my effeminate classmate was gay when he is most definitely not. And let me reiterate, one last time: Jared McCain, with his painted fingernails is not gay.
But that begs the question: so what if he is?