174: Gay Sports - Football 5

Bernard Cookson in “The Sun” 25 October 1986

Well yes, as far as “The Sun” will ever care, if gay men play football, then of course they’re going to be skinny effeminate twinks in stockings, who when they’re not wearing skirts are wearing just the shortest shorts, with their hands on their hips and carrying handbags, more concerned with gossiping and bitching. Except for the howitzer smoking a pipe on the far right who, I assume, is supposed to be a lesbian.

173: Gay Sports - Football 4

John Jensen in “Punch” 26 September 1984

An illustration to an article about football scouts. There was nothing about footballers kissing in the article so this is Jensen’s own choice. Except for “gay”, all the little thought bubbles coming from the spying scouts are various football commentary clichés or acronyms. While all the other pieces I’ve posted so far are obviously about homosexual attraction, this is the first cartoon that I’ve seen to actually feature the dreaded word.

172: Gay Sports - Football 3

“The Goodies” – “Football Crazy”, 16 January 1982
Start at 8.10

From an episode mainly concerned about football hooliganism. Tim Brooke-Taylor starts off adopting an elder generation denunciation of modern players’ unmanliness and concern for their own appearance. But as Tim lists off how the players’ appeal on the field is more sexual than sporting, he finds himself succumbing to the “sporno” enticements of the game to the point of almost uncontrolled ecstasy.
Where the Pythons just slightly goosed-up contemporary football celebrations, “The Goodies” examine all the other homoerotic appeals of the game and its players, as Football becomes more and more as one with the entertainment/celebrity business.

171: Gay Sports - Football 2

On February 14, 1976 the newspapers all got rather excited over a report from the Football Association match and ground committee. A proposal was made to the F.A. executive and disciplinary committee that footballers who “kiss and cuddle” could be charged with bringing the game into disrepute. Most of the actual news reporters adopted a rather stiff up-lip - “I say, come on now, chaps” sort of a tone, attributing this kind of unmanly behaviour to having been picked up from foreign players. It’s always those continentals who induce our good innocent lads into all sorts of beastly un-British practices and spoil things for everyone. Cartoonists have the license to point out that it wasn’t exuberant exhibitionism making the crowds antsy, it was the full-throttle man-on-man lip action and what that could really mean. The no kissing and cuddling rule was ultimately rejected by the F.A as “not practicable”.

Stan MacMurtry (“Mac”) in the “Daily Mail”, 15 January 1976

“Giles” in the “Daily Express”, 15 January 1976
This one definitely revels in the taint of mano-a-mano attraction, with every player absolutely avid for a kiss.

Keith Waite in “The Daily Mirror”,15 January 1976
And here, it’s the suggestion that this is all too “adult” to be seen by children.

170: Gay Sports - Football 1

Well, since I’m sort of English, we might as well start the ball rolling with football. Not that I like football. Ball goes one way, then it goes another, and at the end of it all you’ve lost some ninety minutes of your life. Big fun, I’m sure.

There was, in the 60s and 70s, a tendency for on-pitch celebrations by footballers to become a little over-intense. Rolling around, hugging and kissing each other borne aloft on the ecstatic wash of victory. Which of course aroused some discomfort among the supporters and fans. Since these are the heroes of the working man and young boys everywhere they couldn’t quite come out and plainly call their country’s top players a load of old poofters. But they almost wished they could - so now there’s that little germ of irritation from which result all the following comedic pearls. Or something.


from “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” 23 November 1972
(play from 4.07 – 4.40)

A little light music, some slo-mo, and the whole farrago becomes an awful lot more romantic, dontchathink.

Bernard Hollowood, in “Punch” 20 November 1968.

169: Leo Abse

in “Private Eye” 6 January 1967

Leo Abse, who died on Tuesday 19 August 2008, was the Member of Parliament who introduced the Sexual Offences (homosexual reform) Bill. It was passed as an Act in 1967, decriminalising sex between consenting men over the age of 21.

I've never seen "Francis" before or since as a cartoonist. It's a relatively sweet and inncouous cartoon.

168: Gay Sports - Anxiety and Embarrassment

Almost all the cartoons I shall be dredging up over the next couple of days, when they’re not about inappropriate sexual attraction, are instead demonstrating how gay men are unfit to play sports and therefore silly and ridiculous. Here are a couple of cartoons where heterosexual discomfort is the engine of the joke.

in “Mad Magazine” January 1973

A little gay panic. Vast tracts have been written and rewritten about homophobia and homosociality in sports, about how you can only have the intense heterosexual affection demonstrated in team sports through the explicit disavowal of any homosexual feeling – blah blah blah, blah bla-bla-blah. I’m not even going to attempt to add to any of that.
Here, given “Mad Magazine”’s target teenage audience, it just comes down to anxiety about how, when you’re least expecting it, normal manly behaviour suddenly turns into an unexpected sexual encounter. On several levels this is a refusal to play by the acknowledged rules.
I didn’t notice it immediately, and then only after I’d looked at this several times, but the gay player not only has a limp wrist but there also appear to be some lacy frills poking out of the bottom of his shorts. It is a fairly good thunderstruck expression on the first chap though.


by Richard Guindon, “Minneapolis Tribune”, 1977

In this one it’s about feeling the shame of being beaten by gay players, when in the natural scheme of things one might expect to be superior to a gay team.
And has there ever been an article with a gay team that hasn’t included the question, “How do the other teams feel being beaten by a gay team?” Well done, Mr Guindon for being decades ahead of the curve there. And I do often admire Richard Guindon’s cartoons – particularly one from the late 70s/early 80s which is spot on in its prediction of the horror of a world where everyone has a mobile phone.

167: Gay Sports - The Games

by Larry, in “Punch” 6 October 1982

Outside of killing and/or fucking (or maybe even both at the same time, gggrrrr), what can be more traditionally masculine than participating in competitive sports. The commonplace straightness of organised sports almost inevitably invites comically contrasting visions of homosexuality.

Here Larry offers assorted femmy images: bouffy hair, high-heeled boots, purses, lipstick, earrings, etc. In competition his homosexuals are not merely unmanly, but almost infantile – hide and seek, bell horses?

Larry’s cartoons are inspired by the first “Gay Games” in 1982.

166 - Gay Summer Camp

Summer camp is a traditionally outdoorsy and active, rough and tumble boysy American rite of passage. And in contrast we all know that young gay boys are such delicate and sensitive hothouse flowers, to be forever constitutionally disqualified from participating in the free and easy lifestyle that is normal male bonding. So basically here we have three different variations on the same joke – what would a gay summer camp be like?

From “Mad Magazine” June 1971

Here it’s not just that little gays boys are effeminate, but they actually want to be women. Drag, hair styling, interior decoration – well fair enough. They even give us flowers around the border. But Mah-jongg? Really! Who knew gay boys wanted to be Jewish widows? Although I did enjoy “Golden Girls”.


from “National Lampoon” May 1977

Probably the best, and most thorough of the three. This isn’t a camp like the other two, where artistic youngsters have their sissy proclivities indulged and developed. No, the joke here is that this summer camp programme is intended to enable its young campers to participate fully in the experience of being that slightly bullied, awkward, excluded and un-athletic proto-homo.


from “National Lampoon” June 1979

Here’s it’s all about late ‘70s sensitivity development. Hell, I wouldn’t mind having gone to one like this. Although I did do one summer at Johns Hopkins nerd camp, which is about as near an approximation as one could wish.

Note also the first and last make reference to Fire Island. To which we did once go on holiday for one day when I was about thirteen, and where we all utterly failed to notice anything.

165: Gay Ad - Schmitt's Gay Beer

from Saturday Night Live, 28 September 1991
Housesitter #1.....Chris Farley
Housesitter #2.....Adam Sandler

This is pretty much a detail perfect parody of American beer ads in the late 80’s/early 90s. The policy of blatant displays of jiggly female flesh-appeal used to flog beer to young heterosexual men, is here turned on its head with equally and ludicrously explicit displays of male flesh to entice the homosexuals. These beer ads always started with a couple of all-American young men in some situation that was just no fun at all. And every Americans consumer is entitled to constant fun - anything else would be an infringement of their Constitutional rights. So, the solution is to just open a beer cooler (you need a whole cooler of the stuff because American beer has all the flavour and potency of something strained through a sickly donkey’s last kidney). Instantly, the sun comes out making everything magically brighter and more appealing, a raucous rock n’roll track starts blaring in the background, and hordes of nubile, barely clad lovelies with mammaries that’d inspire the Graf von Zeppelin are leaping about all over the scenery. The young men turn to the camera and thank the beer for making everything better. Oh yes, and everyone has been holding a beer in every bloody shot. Fun = tits= beer. God, I wish I had the ingenious insight into the human mind that would allow me to be an advertising executive.
The SNL crew follow exactly the same commercial formula, only all homosexual-like. The joke is about beer ads, not homosexuals per se. The point of these sort of ads is always to instil a fairly base Pavlovian sexual association with the particular brand being advertised. For the parody to work, it therefore has to show the same level of open unabashed homosexual desire – Farley and Sandler staring at the models, taking photographs and other assorted horseplay. In showing that, without sneering at it, this is a fairly positive parody. The tagline about “If you’ve got a big thirst and you’re gay” incidentally shows up how ridiculous much of the pink economy was before it even existed.