Gay Hockey Kid: Rocks

[mbranesf]

I think I might spend too many of my posts here complaining about ugliness, douchebaggery and decrosion. Be assured that I'm still going to do plenty of that in the future, but I am also going to make a more frequent point of highlighting beauty, anti-douchebaggery and awesome-sauce. So today I am directing everyone's attention to this fascinating blog by Mikey, the gay Minnesota hockey kid.

Yeah, I know, I am not a big sports dude. In fact, I'm probably about the furthest thing from it in all the intertubes, so it's a bit unusual that I am pointing people to what is in large part a sports-oriented blog. But I can't get enough of this one for some reason. Mikey's site is a remarkably honest, raw and often touching window into the life and thoughts of a kind of boy that it's gotta be really, really hard to be some days: a gay teenage athlete who is into playing hockey. Gay kids get a really shitty deal anyway: most of them have to grow through youth and adolescence denying who they really are, hiding their real nature, being afraid of being found out, pretending to be str8, and generally being made to feel like hell because of a characteristic that is as natural and normal as left-handedness or blue-eyedness..except left-handed blue-eyed people don't generally get verbally abused or physically assaulted for those things, nor do they often get suicidal about it. For a gay kid who loves sports and wants to play on a team, that probably adds another dimension of potential pain.

I never played any sports myself, so I don't have the experience of it, but I have always assumed (just based on the way that dudes treat each other in group situations) that hockey teams or any kind of team like that must be hot little pits of homophobia.  I am hoping that this is less true now than it probably was when I was a kid (If you read this, Mikey, I am older than hell, I was in college when you were born). But I don't know, since I wasn't part of it then and am obviously not now. Indeed, I think the only times the concepts of "gay" and "hockey" have linked up in my brain is when I would use that 1986 hockey movie Youngblood and its images of a young Rob Lowe's hot bare ass as porn back when I was Mikey's age...ok, well maybe that was just a few days ago, but still...

There wasn't even a web and websites and blogs back when I was that age (fuck, I feel sooo frakkin old already!), but if there had been such things back in the mid-80s, then it would have been the bravest boy ever who would have risked putting himself out there as a gay hockey kid with a blog like this. And it's still  true even now in our slightly more tolerant era. Mikey's site is thrilling in its courage, deeply charming in its honesty and, once in a while, pretty heartbreaking, too, such as the way that he reveals that the younger of his two brothers and one of his friends are the only two people in "real" life who know about his gayness. And, of course, the rest of us who know him about him in webspace. I know, know, and know what that must feel like. A lot of people in meatspace don't know about me either despite how out there I am in my online life.

Seventeen is a really weird age for any dude to be anyway: already totally a man and yet still totally a boy at the same time, and very, very, very much needing respect, love, a hug and a fucking break. So being all of that AND gay AND a hockey player has got to be all kinds of challenging. This kid is doing an awesome job of it.

[By the way, thanks to my Twitter friend, the writer Kelly Barnhill, who tweeted the link to Mikey's page yesterday--that's how I found out about him.]

Comments

[derekjgoodman.livejournal.com]

Your post reminded me of someone else similar to Mikey. You should check out Kody Boye ( http://kodyboye.com ). He's seventeen but has already had two books published. He's also openly (more or less) gay in a genre not known for being a liberal hotbed. He writes horror in general and often zombies in particular (being that the zombie genre often comes off as basically conservative wish fulfillment: "See? I told you there was a reason I had all these guns.")

[mbranesf.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link to Kody...very cool! I will definitely learn more about him. This reminds me that I would really like to try to write something myself for that queer zombie antho because it is a pretty cool idea to bring the queer into that subgenre. I haven't written much horror in recent years and not much that could be considered zombie-oriented ever, but it's tempting. My NaNo story in November just barely brushed up against a zombie concept with the "Waste" disease that I included in that, but I didn't carry it all the way into that territory.I might be able to salvage something out of that for that a full-on zombie fest though.