"Both of them had sex with each other. Then, the
girl and I got in the middle, and they kissed, everyone kissed.
There were no limits."
If you follow the gossip rags (but of course you do,
you’re here) you may have seen recent headlines alleging that
Brazilian surfer Pedro Scooby had sex with footballer
Neymar, one time Brazilian wonderkid; today a Saudi
mercenary.
The allegations came via a Brazilian woman
who identifies as an “influencer”, a term I find so distasteful I
won’t mention her name. She alleges that she and another woman
joined Neymar and Scooby for a foursome, but that the two men were
far more interested in each other.
I wasn’t exactly sure who Pedro Scooby was. The name was
familiar, but I couldn’t have told you anything about him. Cursory
research reveals that he plys his trade mostly in big waves, which
is considerably less interesting than the fact he has a staggering
six million Instagram followers.
Add this to Neymar’s two hundred and thirteen million, and the
sum total makes rich pickings for influencers. As such, you may
take the rumours as you will.
However, it’s not the first time the tabloid press have made
allegations about Neymar’s sexuality, in particular the nature of his
friendship with Gabriel Medina.
But my intention is not to extrapolate salacious gossip, rather
it’s to ask why, in 2023, male homosexuality is still conspicuously
absent from surf culture?
According to an Ipsos global survey from 2021 incorporating
twenty seven countries, just 80% of the population identify as
heterosexual. Of the countries surveyed, the highest incidence of
those “only, mostly or equally attracted to the same sex” were in
India (17%), Australia, Brazil and Belgium (16%), with the global
average 11%.
Exactly half of the men ranked on the WCT this year are either
Brazilian or Australian. (Twenty of the top fifty on the CS.)
Which is enough statistical fuckery to question why the number
of openly gay male pro surfers is exactly zero?
This isn’t just a surf problem, of course. Culturally we live in
a time where people are more aware of LGBTQ issues than at any
point in history. Yet there are still very few openly gay male
athletes, and almost none in major sports or at the peak of their
careers. There are certainly no gay stars.
The first male pro athlete to identify as homosexual while still
active in one of the “Big Four” North American sports was
NBA player Jason Collins who came
out in 2013, just a year before he retired from a thirteen season
career.
But Collins hardly opened the floodgates to a new wave of
honesty and acceptance in sports. In the decade since, only NFL
players Carl Nassib and Michael
Sam have come out as gay while active in any of the Big Four
sports. Neither man is still in the league today.
So rare is the admission of anything other than
heteronormativity in sports, that there’s a Wikipedia page
dedicated to athletes who identify as LGBTQ. It’s mostly a list of
people who’ve retired, and gay women far outnumber men.
In surfing this trend is also evident. We might immediately
think of Jodie Cooper, Keala Kennelly and Tyler Wright as openly
gay women. (But contrary to most other sports, they are among the
most talented female surfers we’ve seen.)
Yet on the men’s side there is only
Australia’s Matt Branson, who waited until his forties, long after
his career was over, before admitting he was gay. You
might also make a case for Peter Drouyn, an Australian pro in
the seventies who transitioned to Westerly Windina in 2008, before
becoming Peter again in 2017. (Though as examined by
Jamie Brisick, the example of Drouyn – or y – is anything but
a cut and dried case of sexuality.)
Both were notable surfers, but neither were stars. And in a
history going back nearly fifty years, you might reasonably expect
there should have been a few more.
So where, then, are all the gay male surfers? How many do you
know? I’ll go first: none. (Though I should qualify this by saying
that Scotland doesn’t have a particularly high number of surfers or
any surf culture to speak of.)
But it would be both a statistical anomaly and factually
incorrect to state that gay men simply don’t surf. Therefore, if we
assume there are many closeted gay male surfers, and there is a
statistical likelihood of the number not being zero among
professionals, what is it that prevents men from being open about
their sexual preferences in surf culture?
Is it the hyper-aggressiveness in surf line-ups around the
world, which most often fall into hierarchical structures presided
over by Alpha males?
Is it the lingering hangover from aeons of surf branding
dominated by bikinis, babes and balls-out masculinity?
These questions are largely rhetorical. There’s no doubt that
surfing, perhaps more so than any other sport, has been marked by
the tumescent sexualisation of its participants and stars.
But the irony is, and without putting too fine a point on it,
surfing’s pretty gay.
Men with tousled, sun-bleached hair and hard, bronzed bodies.
All the preening and posing. Men spending long hours in study and
admiration of the way other men hold themselves. The way we revere
style and poise above all else.
The surfers we admire most are those who approach a wave like
it’s somewhere between a catwalk and an S & M dungeon.
It stands to reason that your sexuality, who you are at your
core, might manifest in any sport that has an artistic bent. (There
are quite a few male figure skaters on that Wikipedia list.)
If surfing hasn’t exactly been a safe space for gay men, it’s
certainly been an attractive one.
So where are they?
In competitive surfing at least, one logical reason might be
that any athlete with sense keeps his personal life separate.
Whether on the court, the football field, or in a man on man heat,
there’s a certain type of competitor who will use anything and
everything to get in your head. Michael Jordan was an infamous
trash-talker. Larry Bird, too. In combat sports it’s as much part
of the game as punching someone in the face.
In surfing we know Kelly Slater has been ruthless in psyching
out opponents. Even if his style of trash-talking was perhaps more
nuanced than slinging insults about sexual habits, you can be sure
men like him would use anything at their disposal to gain an
advantage, regardless of personal values.
Sexuality is just another thing to be used against you, a
perceived weakness that comes with a handy armoury of historical
slurs.
Perhaps it’s also because surfing has a seedy skeleton or two in
the closet when it comes to male sexuality. Lest we forget Paul
Sargeant, the ubiquitous and popular photo-journalist who
documented the Tour in the late nineties and early noughts.
“One point needs to be made clear up front”, wrote Fred Pawle in
The Bottomless Vortex Of Indulgence, one of surfing’s rare pieces
of investigative journalism. “Sarge was born with enormous
psychological burdens. He is bipolar, alcoholic and at various
times has been openly bisexual or gay, which, in some sections of
the pro tour, especially in the 1980s, was akin to leprosy in the
19th century.”
Paul Sargeant was banned from all WSL (then ASP) events in 2005,
with immediate effect and under unexplained circumstances.
Sexuality isn’t always simple. Nor is it always polarised as gay
or straight. In keeping with new cultural norms, perhaps there are
some fluid dynamics among male pro surfers that makes it difficult
to publicly declare one thing or another.
And of course they’re athletes and humans. No-one should expect
them to lay bare their sexual preferences any more than we would
expect them to reveal the inner workings of their bowels. Privacy
still matters, and so it should.
There’s no reason why surfers should blaze a pink trail for male
athletes. It is the right of everyone to declare or conceal their
sexuality as they see fit. But just imagine a top tier pro came out
in his prime.
What might that do for the exposure and popularity of pro
surfing? What about his sponsors and personal brand? Given the
sparsity of homosexual men in sport, we might presume it would mean
death knells for his career.
But it might not.
Rather, it could be the marketing coup of the century.
