No. 10 Editors' Letter
EDITORS’ LETTER
DEAR READERS,
We are not athletes. Gym class was never our milieu. We’re not really sports fans, either. We don’t care about our home teams, can name only the most famous players, and rarely know the standings.
So why are we doing a sports issue? We drew a Sports/Art/Queers Venn diagram, wondering what might be found in the center.
Quickly we realized the richness and complexity at the intersection of sports and queerness. For instance, what does it mean that professional teams court queer fans via kooky and elaborate Pride nights, while queer players themselves remain relegated to the closet? In the United States, frenzied lawmakers are mandating the policing of high school locker rooms (and the bodies of students) for fear that transgender swimmers and gymnasts might exert “unnatural advantages” over their competitors.
Sport is ultimately a negotiation between people—more specifically, a negotiation between bodies, whether in jiu-jitsu or curling or volleyball. Tony Orrico and Christopher-Rasheem McMillan used seven sports to renegotiate their bodies through the aftermath of a collapsed relationship. They're also the first artists to get tattoos as part of a Headmaster project!
Queer people are frequently suspicious of sports at all levels, and not without reason. Coaches can be abusive, players homophobic, leagues unscrupulous, fans overzealous, heroes complicated. Deb Sokolow’s work deals with the ridiculousness of powerful men, so we assigned her a project about problematic gay wrestler Pat Patterson, sidekick/henchman to real-life WWE supervillain Vince McMahon.
On a lighter note, sports have long played a central role in gay erotica. Vintage magazines played up the idea of the chiseled all-American athlete. Soccer socks and football pads have been common in man-on-man porn for decades. And then of course there’s the jockstrap, hijacked decades ago by gay men when it had really been developed for Boston bicycle jockeys, whose bouncing balls needed extra support when traversing the city’s cobblestone streets.
Ara Tucker notes in her essay for this issue that queering something can open it up for a wider variety of people… even jocks. She and her wife Hilary Harkness propose the radical idea that there is space for everyone in the (sports) world.
Headmaster No. 10 is our biggest issue, with more projects and more pages than ever. Wayne Koestenbaum wraps up the serial Story of Headmaster, a wild fantasy that concludes as it began: with a letter. With the close of this final issue of Headmaster, we wanted to be sure that the fictional Headmaster’s story also concluded properly. We hope you’ve enjoyed the ride. We certainly have.
Until next time,
Jason Tranchida + Matthew Lawrence
Headmaster(s)