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For­mer NBA star John Amaechi’s com­ing out con­tin­ues to blow the ‘gay’ lid on Amer­i­can pro­fes­sional sports (see ESPN extract left).

Not by ‘nam­ing names’, but sim­ply out­ing from inside the locker room itself the homo­erotic met­ro­sex­u­al­ity of het­ero athletes.

Per­haps this is the real ‘prob­lem’ with homos in the locker room (and the bar­racks): not that their penis will some­how invei­gle its way into the hal­lowed het­ero anus dur­ing a com­mu­nal shower — when a hap­pily mar­ried ath­lete is dis­tracted by the steam, his exhuber­ance, or his dropped hair prod­ucts — but that the homo can’t be relied upon to not see the homo­erotic and name it. I cer­tainly can’t. (Maybe it’s a Brit queer thing: Amaechi is also from the UK.)

The pos­si­bil­ity that the team-mate slap­ping their round firm naked butt might be ‘bat­ting for the other side’ is appar­ently too much for some to bear. It’s per­haps under­stand­able though. After all, once it’s named it does make it slightly more dif­fi­cult for those straight guys who are uptight and homo-hating to enjoy their pas­sion­ate, swoon­ing love of men, viril­ity and the male body.

On the other hand, bill­boards and other rather pub­lic media have been adver­tis­ing this sporno­graphic ten­dency for some time now.

Inci­den­tally, it would appear that full dis­clo­sure of the antics of the pro locker room is too much to bear for ESPN too: the Amaechi excerpt seems to have been cen­sored. Here’s the unex­pur­gated ver­sion:

“The pro locker room was the most flam­boy­ant place I’d ever been this side of a swanky club full of martini-drinking gay men. Chris’ [Mills] alli­ga­tor shoes were the least of it. The guys flaunted their per­fect bod­ies. They bragged of their sex­ual exploits. They checked out each other’s cocks. They primped in front of the mir­ror, apply­ing cologne and hair gel by the bucketful.?”

While some of the snips may have been for rea­sons of space — or taste: mar­tini drink­ing gay men and alli­ga­tor shoes are both fairly objec­tion­able — the cir­cum­ci­sion of the men­tion of straight ath­letes check­ing out each other’s man­hood seems slightly hypocritical.

Not to men­tion mean. After all, if the rise of Sporno shows any­thing at all it’s that we’re all, gay and straight, sports mad or sports indif­fer­ent, fever­ishly imag­in­ing that ath­letes do noth­ing else in the locker room.

—

In the extract Eng­lish Amaechi men­tions some­thing else that is also rather reveal­ing. He claims that despite his ‘flam­ing’ friends, his taste for Karen Car­pen­ter, rain­bow flag tow­els and gen­eral indis­cre­tion the rea­son his sex­u­al­ity wasn’t sus­pected was down to his un-American-ness. Appar­ently, the catch-all response to his non-conformity with the iron Amer­i­can laws of guy-ness was ’”Oh, leave him alone, he’s just English’.”

Which is rather sweet. And does of course help to explain the pop­u­lar­ity of fey Eng­lish­men, from Quentin Crisp to David Bowie, Boy George to Mor­ris­sey, David Beck­ham to Tony Blair in a coun­try where home-grown effem­i­nacy can some­times be more un-American than Com­mu­nist Islamic drug-trafficking.

Per­haps the extra­or­di­nary pop­u­lar­ity of the met­ro­sex­ual State­side had some­thing to do with the fact he was also Eng­lish by birth. Though it was Amer­ica who invented the con­sumerist and ‘enner­vated’, medi­ated cul­ture that made him pos­si­ble, if not inevitable. When open met­ro­sex­u­al­ity threat­ened to be too pop­u­lar a sen­si­bil­ity in the US and reveal where the Amer­i­can lifestyle had brought Amer­i­can mas­culin­ity there was a back­lash against the ‘gay­ness’ of metrosexuals.

Yet another rea­son why met­ro­sex­ual pin-up Beck’s move to the US will make for fas­ci­nat­ing view­ing. Judg­ing by the Amer­i­can media whirl­wind that has greeted Amaechi’s post-retirement com­ing out, a glob­ally famous sports­man who is very much out-of-the-closet about his flam­ing met­ro­sex­u­al­ity and also his fond­ness for his gay fans and eager to pose for sporno­graphic photo shoots will raise a few Colo­nial eye­brows. Being Eng­lish and mar­ried with kids won’t, I sus­pect, excuse him com­pletely, even in LA.

What’s more, he’s being paid a record-breaking fee by his spon­sors to per­suade a gen­er­a­tion of young Amer­i­can males to be ‘Eng­lish’ too.

The Eng­lish are com­ing. Because, as the Amaechi story — and the recent Super­bowl Snicker ad deba­cle — shows, Amer­i­can mas­culin­ity des­per­ately needs us.