Queer n There	Queer n There Archive

At the University of Bath in the UK, students and professors lounge around in togas all the live-long day at the city's famous Roman tubs.

Just a conjecture. But something's putting staff at the school in the mood to write press releases with such tantalizing come-ons as this:

"A study of former high-school American football players has found that more than a third said they'd had sexual relations with other men."

Your correspondent's ears -- as well as other parts -- perked up at the findings of University of Bath sociologist Eric Anderson, soon to be published in the journal Sex Roles.

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ut was the university's presentation a case of bait-and-switch? A more accurate summary of Anderson's study, it turns out, would be less jaw-dropping: something like "Homosexual experience rife among male college cheerleaders."

That's right -- the startling more-than-a-third-had-gay-sex statistic comes from a gaggle of 68 avowedly straight male cheerleaders. Anderson excluded from his sample self-professed gays and guys who hadn't played high school football. He was left with young men who had failed to make their college teams but wanted to stay connected to the game: a sample maybe predictably skewed toward the pink.

So would the paper -- titled "Being Masculine is Not About Who You Sleep With" -- be more aptly published in the Journal of Obvious Results? That's what your correspondent suspected. But get past the oversold press release, and Anderson's findings are more interesting than they seem.

Beyond pom-poms

Cheerleading hovers somewhere between dance, acrobatics, and the chorus line -- factors that help shroud the masculinity of male participants in an electron cloud of uncertainty. Often chronically short of guys (when they have them at all), cheer squads' recruitment efforts sometime appeal to manly nature at its most red-blooded. Anderson cites one poster featuring a bikini-clad woman sliding into a pool. The tagline: "Want strong muscles? Want to toss girls? Our Cheer Team needs stunt men!! No experience needed." Some former high-school football players bite the hook.

But looking to male cheer leaders -- "university-aged heterosexual male athletes who compete in a feminized terrain," as the sociologist puts it -- wasn't a way of precooking the data, Anderson insists. It was rather a place to look to see clearly what he contends are broad social trends that are hard to spot under circumstances less special. It's just what physicists do when they descend into the bowels of billion-dollar cyclotrons to catch a glimpse of quarks and gluons that are omnipresent but otherwise unseen.

"I'm not trying to make some general claims as to what percentage of university-age men have had sex with men," says Anderson, a transplanted American who was an openly-gay high school track coach in Orange County before donning an academic gown. Rather, he goes on, the value of his findings is in demonstrating that "as cultural homophobia declines, it gives heterosexual men the ability to do things they weren't able to do ten, 15 years ago -- or maybe just five years ago."

What straight college men are doing together, Anderson finds, is kissing, petting, blow-jobs, and playing "switches and trains" (more on that later). The guys are doing gay sex and affection partly for the intrinsic pleasure -- "I'm not gay but I think all guys wonder what it would be like," says one cheerleader. "And I bet guys do it better anyhow." They also perform homosexually as offerings for kinky-minded girls, who put out (heterosexually) in return. What straight college men are not doing together, Anderson reports, is anal sex.

Plural of anecdote... data?

The great part about Anderson's paper isn't found in pie charts, slick statistical regressions, or jargon about constructing hegemonic heteromasculinities. Rather, it's the words of the guys themselves: wildtype, straight-identified cheer-men from squads at two southern U.S. schools (which the author is careful not to name). Over months of fieldwork, Anderson observed, interviewed, chatted, drank, and partied with these young men, his notepad and tape recorder always at the ready.

While engaged in the same sport and sporting the same sexual orientation, Anderson's informants were hardly cookie-cutter. For instance, even while they help bend them, some of the cheer guys are touchy about gender norms.

"I have no problem with gay men," Anderson quotes one "Jeff" (whom a teammate dubbed "the homophobic one on the team"). "I just don't understand why some have to prance around like little girls." Anderson describes Jeff as particularly put off by "Carson," who has two national individual championships under his belt and is "known for both the quality of his stunting... and his flamboyancy."

But Jeff's conviction that men should act like men doesn't exactly put his behavior on a tight leash behind a locked picket fence. Anderson relates in his paper:

"[T]he following evening we ran into Carson at an intra-squad cheerleading party. After a few drinks Jeff asked, 'Who wants to take a body shot off me?' Flamboyantly jumping up and down Carson shouted, 'I do! I do!'"

Anderson continues: "Jeff smiled, motioning Carson to come closer. 'Go for it,' he said as he removed his shirt and lay down on a hotel room bed. Carson poured alcohol into Jeff's naval, pinned his hips to the bed, and erotically licked it up, running his tongue considerably lower than Jeff's naval -- all to the cheers of onlookers.'"

The researcher asked one of Jeff's teammates if he'd had sexual experience with men. "No. Not yet," he replied, "But I will. It's just that there has got to be a reward. If I have to kiss another guy in order to fuck a chick, then yeah it's worth it. It's a good cause."

One way of intermingling homo and hetero-erotics is with "switches and trains." Anderson didn't know the term. "Switching is when each guy is fucking a girl and then they switch and fuck the other girl," explained one of his sources. "Trains are when a line of guys wait to tag-team a girl."

Another informant, named Stuart, elaborated, "You just sort of stand around waiting to fuck her. Hell, I even got my leg shot [ejaculated] on once!" Anderson asked Stuart if this bothered him, and he laughed, "No. It was kind of an assumed risk." Why did Stuart like threesomes? "Hell, if you're gonna hit up a chick," he responded, "it's cool to have another guy there to talk about it."

Stuart's answer lead Anderson to wonder how Stuart got another man's semen on his leg if he'd merely been waiting behind another man to take his turn at a girl. "Well, my friend was fucking her," Stuart explained, "and I was making out with him while he was doing it."

Colors that run and blur

"What's really important is that the teammates who say that they haven't had sex with men don't have a problem with those who do," Anderson tells The Guide. "They don't automatically homosexualize them. It's more like, 'Hey cool, whatever floats your boat.' And I say, well does that make them gay that they've done it? They say 'No -- does a gay having sex with a woman make them straight?'"

Like a physicist finding a new particle, Anderson claims to have discovered a force-field unexpected, at least in the contemporary West. He's found a zone of "masculine peer culture" that's able to sustain and support straight guys having casual homosex. To be sure, in the Rocky Mountains of American team sport, cheerleading languishes somewhere in the foothills. But on the other hand, Anderson limited himself to men who, as late adolescents, had occupied positions at the zenith of American masculinity: on the football team.

It all heralds the demise of the "one-drop rule," Anderson contends -- a sexual parallel with racist ideology of yore that held that "one drop of Negro blood" made you count as a black person. In the sexual sphere, the one-drop rule lives on in the West when it comes to saying who's a "pedophile." But the rule's application to homosexuality per se seems to be fading.

Plus ça change

Anderson's paper is animated by the current academic conceit that "discourses" and codes of "performativity" "construct" people's sexuality. But maybe all Anderson's cheerleaders are telling us is that American sexual ecology is reverting to longstanding patterns, if in a brand new key.

The past 40 years have seen massive changes in sexual culture that -- ironically -- for many guys made casual homosex harder to do. Partly it was that early, casual heterosexuality became less policed, thanks to birth control and sexual equality. (A good deal of guy-on-guy fooling around has always been a substitute for unavailable girls.) Casual homosex also took a hit -- ironically -- from in-your-face gay activism, which drapes the albatross of identity politics around the necks of, for instance, Boy Scout circle-jerkers.

But now, as gay people consolidate their victories in the West and homosex seems ever more commonplace, is what's old what's new?

Alfred Kinsey used looser criteria than Anderson -- including, for instance, adolescent experimentation and hazing rituals. But the great 20th-century sex researcher estimated that somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of American males had homosexual experience. It's a number in keeping with the data from Anderson's cheerleaders.

Guys clear about being guys but finding ways and means to enjoy same-sex sex -- it wouldn't seem unfamiliar either to the toga-clad Romans who, in the day, enjoyed the steamy waters at Bath.

Author Profile:  Bill Andriette
Bill Andriette is features editor of The Guide
Email:	theguide@guidemag.com