Beyond Bro Culture:
A gay athlete finds himself and community in an LGBTQ+soccer team
A Moment of PFLAG Portland Joy is a place where our members can anonymously share meaningful experiences they’ve had as an LGBTQ+ person or someone special to an LGBTQ+ person. Let us know at info@pflagpdx.org if you have a story you’d like to share.
This Moment of Joy came to us in the form of a voice memo. (We love a good, long voice text!) Our joyful storyteller recorded this from the soccer stands, where he watched Travis, his partner of two years, practice with the Portland Net Rippers Football Club.
So I would say it goes back to when Travis and I first met. It was obvious that he played soccer because he had a bunch of soccer gear. But every time I’d ask him about it, he’d say he didn’t play anymore. When I dug deeper into it, I learned that he had played on this hyper-competitive high school team out in the rural Oregon community where he was from. He said that there were these super toxic, masculine dudes on the team. In some ways they respected him because he was good, but in a lot of ways he just hated being around all that nastiness, and he just reached this breaking point I think—something to do with being pressured to play while injured and some other things. He dropped out and just was convinced he was never gonna do it again, other than go to the park with the dog and kick the soccer ball around. The dog had been doing that with him since he was a puppy, so you know it was obvious that he was really good.
So I encouraged him.
I told him, I am sure that there’s a gay league out herein Portland, and we should look into it. We dug and dug and found it, and he sat on it for like six months trying to come up with all the things that could go wrong— you know: Am I not going to be good enough? Am I not going to be able to get a lot of goals or whatever?
We signed up for the first tournament that was open to everybody, and the morning of the tournament, he was like:
What if—you know—what if what if everybody tries to have sex with me?
[Laughing] And I was like:Well, first of all, congrats on your ego getting better. But what if somebody comes onto you in the hallway or on the street? You know how to navigate that.
So just all these things in his head.
But once he got out there, he had the time of his life. It was the most amazing group of just amazing human beings. Every person on the spectrum of gender expression—gay folks, lesbian folks, all the gays and theys—and everybody, everyone was just having a really good time. It was not toxic.It was not high pressure, and he just got addicted to it.
Every day, we’d come to the practices, and they noticed that he was good, so he’d get invited to sub in for more and more games, then eventually to the Timbers adult league. He’s not on the Timbers, not yet at least, but one of the adult league teams is filled by this gay league. They’ve got great names like Footloose and Fruit Punch. They have games all over the place, but the ones he’s most excited about are the ones when he gets on the field at Providence Park. They hand out jerseys, and it feels like he is on the Timbers.
It was just a real moment of joy for me—to see somebody who had walked away from something they were so incredibly good at (because of the toxicity surrounding that Bro culture) suddenly find their own in an adult league of all these wonderful gay and trans folks. It continues to be something that has gotten him through a lot of other challenges in life—mental health stuff and everything. I would say that is a great moment of joy.