GAY FOOTBALL
BY BRADLEY MASON HAMLIN

I have an idea for new reality TV show: Gay Football. Isn’t it time to take the overrated “game” and kick the balls into the future? Think of the teams we could have:

The Parrots vs. The Flamingos
The Fairies vs. The Queens
The Disco Boys vs. The Show Tunes

That’s just good television. I myself have not watched a football game in about 20 years and I really don’t feel like I’m missing anything. The sport, like music, like TV, like the movie industry, and all other forms of entertainment went corporate long ago, and along with all the other fun mediums—grew dull almost over night. If you’re old enough to remember the origins of the NFL or at least its heyday in the 1970s you will remember the great characters of the game: Bob Griese of the Miami Dolphins, Joe Namath of the New York Jets, Fran Tarkenton of the Minnesota Vikings, Roman Gabriel of The Los Angeles Rams, and who can ever forget O.J. Simpson of the Buffalo Bills? O.J. was so popular in his prime, the character Exidor of the Mork & Mindy TV show created an invisible congregation to worship “the Juice!”

Remember Namath on The Brady Bunch?

Remember Brian’s Song starring Billy Dee Williams as Gale Sayers and James Caan as Brian Piccolo of the Chicago Bears? You could argue that one as the best TV film ever made. Not a dry eye in the house.

Football players had real personality, often just as much as the leading actors of their day. But once the NFL had been thoroughly overexposed and marketed to doom, the fat cats simply switched gears to basketball, noting they had an even larger market to exploit due to so many urban kids having more access to hoops than playing fields. When football was big in the 70s, basketball cards were almost non-existent because nobody wanted them. I remember how funky they looked because the card companies ran them extra long to accommodate the elongated players. Do they still run those rectangle cards? I don’t know. Because I don’t care. Because both basketball and football (and baseball for that matter) have become so boring, so corporate fueled and generic that we have lost any concept of surprise or originality. Super Bowl suffered its final moment of dumb degradation when the most interesting moment this past year came from a “wardrobe malfunction.”

So, let’s get back to Gay Football, which by the way is not a joke or silly aside to make a separate point. I believe football has existed too long as a mainstream fraternal occupation for the “straight boys next door.” Let’s face it, how many of these good ol’ American boys commit heinous crimes such as rape, assault & battery, fraud, illegal betting, and backstabbing trading deals that drive salaries to grossly inappropriate sums? That kind of selfishness comes from being trained to think you’re better than everything else.

Like it or not, reality TV is popular right now for two reasons. 1) Cheap to make and therefore saves fat cat bucks. 2) Viewers: stupid enough to watch them. Reality TV ain’t going nowhere, and like it or not, neither are the gays. Whether someone believes that homosexuality is religiously repugnant or not, whether you wish your own son or daughter to not become different from you, whether you hide your own sexual preferences inside your mother’s closet—it, the gay thing, the bed bug, the homo chromosome, ain’t going nowhere. There have always been queers and there always will be queers, and really, in this day and age—that isn’t queer at all, is it? We know that some people prefer intimacy from people of the same gender. Period. Case closed. There are homos in the military and dykes in your neighborhood and not a damn thing you can do about it, short of ignorance and intolerance. So why not go the distance? Let them run with their balls out on the open playing field. I bet, secretly, there are more gay men (outside of the closeted-gays that already play professionally with the heterosexuals) that wish they could run down that fake green grass, laughing with their peers with the roar of the crowd filling some long forgotten cabinet filed away in the never could happen closet.

We are all brothers and sisters united as a whole by being a part of the same species. There is not one human, alive or dead, evil or angelic, that does not share a common bond with you or me. Therefore, every one of us, in some respect share all the things we have in common and all things that make us special, unique, and different from one another.

Think of how great the uniforms would look.

Think of how great the halftime shows would be.

Think of Liza Minelli singing the national anthem.

-Brad Hamlin
brad@retrocrush.com

You can check out more of Brad's writing at Mystery Island!

And read his other retroCRUSH writings here:

-Johnny Ramone
-Modern Art