Gay cultural resistance to sport

Being who we're told to be

Many gay men have been conned into believing that combat sports like boxing are somehow at odds with being gay - which is what the dominant culture tends to teach. Likewise, women have been socialised to believe that combat sports are "unfeminine" and therefore inappropriate for women. In many cases we have uncritically accepted this cultural propaganda, and retreated from combat sports, labelling them as barbaric and violent. 

I believe that this "fear of fighting" is especially noticeable amongst gay men, and that it is a culturally-learned phenomenon. It seems to me that society has successfully taught many of us three lies:

fighting is barbaric, and gay men don't do barbaric things;

The first of the above lies is (in my view) demonstrably stupid.  Yet many gay men who would agree that it is stupid nevertheless have a little voice inside them whispering those same doubts in the background.

On the second lie, gay men most certainly do barbaric things (as much as anyone). But those who consider the fighting sports to be barbaric need to ask themselves where that viewpoint comes from. Fear? Ignorance? Rarely from experience!

On the third lie, the fighting sports have a far lower rate of injury and mortality than many sports commonly accepted by society (such as horse-riding and football). 

Medical mythology about boxing

The medicos who tell us boxing is dangerous are the same people who used to say being gay was a mental illness. Their concern is not about health, its about elitism, control and power. For a detailed discussion of the falsehoods involved in the Medical Associations' antagonism to boxing, see Anti-boxing lobby

Gay cultural resistance to sport

Gay men were (and still are) conditioned by straight society to believe that we are all sensitive, artistic and refined, and that anything physical ('masculine') is out of our reach. "You people are so good at the theatre and the arts". Yeah, right. The corollary assumption is that gay men are repulsed by physical exercise, especially sport, and that we find things like boxing dreadful and barbaric. Many gay men actively promote this view of gay sexuality as if it were ordained by God (or genetics), as if we were all cloned from the same stock. 

As someone who has been involved for years with amateur boxing, I rarely encounter straight men who have a problem with my sexuality (I'm a life member of Boxing ACT and a board member of the national boxing organisation); it's more often gay men who find my sports interest unacceptable. Sometimes there's a thinly veiled suggestion that I'm not "properly gay", not really "one of us". Or that I'm kidding myself, just a fairy pretending to be butch. 

Brian Pronger's 1990 book "The Arena of Masculinity - Sports, Homosexuality and the Meaning of Sex" deals in detail with such issues. I found some of the book rather heavy going, and don't necessarily agree with the author's analyses. It is however the first attempt I have seen to deal seriously with the issues of gay men and sport.