Love Shook My Heart : Lesbian Love Stories Book

At first glance, this book looks just like any number of anthologies of gay sports-oriented stories. The cover features the now obligatory half-dressed, well-toned guy wearing the remnants of a football uniform, and let’s face it, “Jocks!” would make a great title for one of those Cleis Press collections of erotic shorts.

The key difference here, however, is that all the stories in this collection are true, mini-biographies of gay, male athletes and their experiences reconciling the homophobic machismo of sports with their personal identities as gay men. The results are anything but erotic. But they are eye-opening.

The eighteen case studies profiled here run a wide gamut of situations; in addition to athletes, the stories feature gay coaches, gay referees, straight allies, parents and lovers. Football, soccer, hockey, wrestling, swimming, running, lacrosse, tennis and baseball all put in an appearance, as does the author–his is one of the stories, and definitely in my top five favorites in the book.

There is a definite bias towards stories focused on sports in American schools, elementary through college-aged, and when I got to the end of the book I realized why: an included appendix features questions and activities for teachers and coaches designed to promote dialogs about gay students in sports and ways to prevent bullying and encourage a more inclusive and tolerant atmosphere in school locker rooms.

Here’s where I come clean about all this: I bought this book on ebay as part of a birthday lot I chose for myself, and I went solely on the strength of the cover (half-naked men ftw) and the title, expecting titillation. This is because I am completely bent for LGBT stories about athletes. Dirty old woman or not, that is one of my ticklespots, but in this case my impulse purchase led to

The stories are a mixed bag, and were weighted a little heavily in favor of the pollyannas. A surprising number of gay male athletes had accepting parents and functional support systems that let them choose when and how (or if) to come out, and it’s hard for me to judge whether that’s an accurate representation of all gay male athletes in America or not.

There are certainly disheartening stories–the suicidal runner, the Mormons whose families and temples disowned them, the South Boston hockey player whose mom won’t let him come out to the whole family “for fear of retribution”–but the overall tone is one of adjustment and coping. These are very much sports stories whose heroes come to a crossroads of some kind and are forced into deciding their next move, and whether to continue pursuing involvement with their chosen sports.

And some don’t. Some, like the NHL hockey referee who quit after only a year in the league, succumb to the fear of being outed. Hockey and football both come off as incredibly difficult to navigate as a gay man, mainly because of the pervasive homophobia and pro-violence that are presented as endemic to both sports. Both the referee and the South Boston hockey player ultimately decide that in order to be happy, they have to leave the sport they love. They are not alone in their decisions, but it is interesting to see the reasoning behind the decision, and in a few cases, what happens next. More than a few athletes simply switch sports, finding the fulfillment of athletic competition in a more accepting sport or venue.

There are a few really great stories in this collection–the two hockey ones, as noted, and the suicidal runner, the boyfriend of the deeply closeted basketball player are among the others–but by far my favorite was “The Football Player and his Father”.

Mike Henigan coached high school football in tony Orange County, California, and that included coaching one of his sons, Patrick, who goes on to turn down an appointment to West Point to play football for Yale. Then, after two years, he stopped. Patrick’s explanation why is a telling indictment not of sports but of the construction of masculine identity as a whole:

“There are a lot of bad things about athletics everywhere,” Patrick says. “Starting with Little League or Pop Warner, there’s this concept that to be a man is to be an athlete, to be an athlete is to be strong, and to be strong you have to have a certain attitude.” …Still, he played the jock role; he walked the walk and talked the talk of a stud.

When Patrick eventually cracks and comes out at a family reunion, his father Mike, the football coach, is refreshingly open about his response: “‘Despite being a health teacher, I fell into the stereotype that all gays will die of AIDS,’ Mike says, ‘Where [my wife:] was really worried that [Patrick's:] siblings might not accept him, I worried he might be destroyed.’”

But Mike talks about what it took to get him past his knee-jerk response to a place where he could instead become an outspoken ally and crusader for LGBT tolerance in schools and sports, setting off a firestorm of controversy in his conservative Southern California community. It’s a powerful essay on the construction of the “jock identity” in America, and the repercussions of the gulf between that identity and those of gay men.

The collection is certainly not without its flaws. The beginning few stories are slow, and could have benefited from being redistributed in the ordering. Woog has a tendency to want to overexplain his subjects and What It All Means for society, as befits what is essentially a textbook for sports coaches and teachers. But those flaws don’t diminish the fascinating quality of the essays, that these men are individual stories of one segment of America, and one whose tale is very rarely told but should have more widespread attention.