Essay: ‘What The 49ers Taught Me About Football And Queerness’

Brian C. Bell has penned a personal essay about their love for the 49ers and football, but always felt the sport taught them they should exist on its edges. And then the 49ers taught Brian otherwise. https://twitter.com/outsports/status/1756353860673978409 It’s a great read – especially for anybody who has ever questioned why attempts by sports teams and leagues should reach out & empower marginalized communities. From Outsports:

Players like Joe Montana, Steve Young, Ronnie Lott, Jerry Rice, Bryant Young and many others helped teach me the game. More importantly, they came to represent how to play the game.

Those were the names that I carried with me as I pursued my dreams of playing football when I strapped on the pads for the first time in elementary school.

But football itself taught me something completely different when I stepped onto the field with poor attempts at emulating my 49er heroes: I didn’t belong.

I’ve always been undersized. I’ve lived with severe-to-bad asthma since an early age, and the steroids I took to treat it as a kid affected my growth, bones and muscle strength. But those factors weren’t what made me feel pushed toward the edges. It was my developing queerness.

The common factors of toxic masculinity, framed against the rural setting of unacceptance in which I grew up, taught me that before I even really knew who I was.

Brian (who identifies as nonbinary) goes on to recall how their memories of playing middle school football are still viewed through a lens of homophobia, with “slurs being casually thrown around by my teammates in the locker room and on the bench, sometimes directed toward me and sometimes toward no one.” So, after a shoulder injury, Brian quit playing. Even though they still had a love of the sport and the team that spawned it, Brian felt football was “something to enjoy from a distance. I was an anomaly who didn’t have a place in the game.”

Then the 49ers established 49ers PRIDE, an official community for queer fans of the team. “It was one of the first of its kind in the NFL, and it was my team that was reaching out to people like me,” writes Brian.

“All of those negative memories came flooding back, but in a different way. They weren’t there to remind me that I was free to enjoy the game from the theoretical nosebleeds as long as I didn’t do anything gay, but rather to reflect on all the people and experiences from that small chapter of my life that were now cast as wrong by the team that catalyzed the desire that put me in direct contact with them. They were wrong because the 49ers showed me they were wrong.”

Today, Brian says the 49ers led them to “recontextualize decades of thought that shouldn’t have been there to begin with.” “That’s what the 49ers taught me when I was three years old, and it’s what they continue to show me more than three decades later.” I highly recommend you read Brian’s full essay over at Outsports. https://twitter.com/WonderboyOTM/status/1756460970036388105