Article by a western negatively queer male

A mile or so off the interstate that cleaves the small farming town of Bakersfield, California, the smackdown has begun. I watch as two rival gangs of dark-skinned, half-naked adolescent boys, sweating and barefoot, eye each other across a bare dirt field. Somewhere on the edge of their collective consciousness, endless eighteen-wheelers whip down the I-5; this is the town they grew up in, though few of them were born here. One of the boys on the eastern side of the field gets brave. He steps forward in his black shorts, murder on his face, ready to rumble. Like a cowboy readying to draw, Black Shorts lifts his hands at his sides, even though he's clearly unarmed. It's four against one. That's guts, I think, watching from a safe distance away.

"Stick him baby," one of Black Shorts' friends shouts behind him, and he charges.

Instead of piling on Black Shorts, though, his nemeses link elbows, forming what looks an awful lot like a chorus line. Black Shorts lunges forward and delivers a light flick to one of the chorus dancers' arms, then turns and bolts back to his friends.

I think to myself: that's it?

I had driven three hours that morning to understand the appeal of the legendarily rough sport of kabaddi, a form of team wrestling that began four thousand years ago in India's Punjab region and has more recently made its way to this dusty field behind Guru Angad Darbar, a Sikh temple. Unlike many American males, I don't like watching contact sports any more than

promotion
I like participating in them. Now, as the cheesy refrain blows into my brain — "God, I hope I get it! I hope I get it!" — I feel almost relieved at the lack of the very bloodshed I'd come to see.

Not that I'd known what to expect. Though part of the Asian Games for decades, and a staple entertainment in Punjabi communities from Vancouver to Singapore, kabaddi is still a "people's sport," its heroes still too obscure for corporate sponsorship or the cover of SI.

In the impoverished rural villages of the Punjab, however, kabaddi exceeds even cricket in popularity, for good reason: it costs nothing to play. Seven players, oiled up and usually wearing only boxers or briefs, gather on each side of a field. Each team takes its turn sending a "raider" into enemy territory to tag one of his opponents. The raider must then get back to his side of the field before the tagged opponent can stop him. It is after the tag that kabaddi gets rough: the tagged defender has almost the entire World Wrestling Entertainment playbook at his disposal to prevent the raider's escape. Scissor holds, tripping, headlocks — it's all fair.

Compared to WWE stars, though, kabaddi wrestlers make relatively modest salaries, with top athletes earning $50,000-$80,000 a year. (Unlike in most team sports, kabaddi players can profit individually from their victories, however.) Success in the sport can lead players to careers in modeling and politics, as well as a healthy gambling concession. In early March, the Indian government held a kabaddi match between parliamentarians and journalists. The sport has even seen its share of doping scandals, with some overdoses rumored.

Still, despite having arrived in the U.S. more than a century ago with the first Sikh immigrants, kabaddi has only recently found notice here. I only learned about the sport after watching Kabaddi Cops, a Canadian documentary on the first all-white kabaddi team, formed by the Toronto Police Service in 2002. More recently, U.S. soldiers stationed in India have added kabaddi to their counterinsurgency training.

Sikh culture expert Gurinder Singh Mann isn't surprised, given the sports' origin in the barracks of Punjabi soldiers. "Invaders were always trying to attack Delhi," explains Mann, a professor at UC Santa Barbara. "If the war isn't going on, the army would stay fit by playing the game."

The players are proud of the game's scrappy reputation. "The
They yank each other to the ground. "Stick him, baby!" their teammate shouts. people driving by always stop their cars," says Oppy Singh, 25, son of one of the coaches, pointing to a road running along the edge of the gurdwara, or Sikh temple, where the kabaddi field lies. "They think we're beating each other up."

They must not see very well, I think, watching the next raider step up. Again, the chorus line and the sissy slap; this time, though, the raider isn't fast enough as he darts away, and the defender gets a hand around his neck. The two of them dance for a moment, then yank each other to the ground. "Stick him, baby!" the same teammate shouts.

This is what I'd come to see, this ensuing sticking. Dust flies as the defender locks his legs around the raiders'. The raider tries dragging himself and the defender toward his side of the field before his time runs out. In the sports' traditional version, the raider isn't allowed to draw a breath while on the opposition's turf, and must continuously shout "kabaddi-kabaddi-kabaddi" to prove he isn't cheating. In today's version, he has thirty seconds, and spends most of it locking limbs with his defender, the pair grinding groins together in a painful looking manner. In the end, he can't do it. The coach blows the whistle; the raider stands, dusts himself off and retreats home.

I find myself smiling and remembering games of Red Rover in third grade, the last time sports were fun for me. After that came sixth-grade phys ed, where I found myself getting dry-humped by the same irony-impervious boys who called each other faggot as soon as they reached the locker room. The sport we were learning was called wrestling, and for all his earnest effort, Mr. Van Cherry never managed to communicate its appeal to us. Even the absurd psychodrama of the WWE (then the WWF) seemed more interesting at the time. Sort of.

Therein lies the paradox. What do I, an apparently straight male, not much of a sports fan to begin with, find so appealing about what may be the gayest-looking competition on the planet?

Mr. Van Cherry isn't around to answer this question. So I turn to an expert on sports psychology, Professor Arnd Kruger of Germany's Georg-August-University. Is oiling up and wrestling other muscular men in your underwear inherently homoerotic?

"Not necessarily," says Kruger. Many if not most "vernacular sports" — those played in traditional societies — focus on endurance or raw virility rather than skill. Wrestling is a throwback to the days when sports included yanking your opponent's scrotum until he screamed, or holding your head underwater longer than your competitors, or even the "Black Knight" component of summertime jousting competitions, in which knights would see who could keep the lid of their helmets shut longer. But these apparently "manly" sports aren't necessarily any more sexual than other kinds.

"There are some sports that demand more of the male hormone testosterone than others," Kruger says. "On the other hand, there are some sports that by the symbolism of the activity have sexual connotations, e.g. shooting. I don't think [kabaddi] has more homoerotic connotation than rugby, wrestling, Sumo, Lucha Canaria, the wrestling matches of the Nuba, etc."

Of course, that isn't saying much. Wrestling is the sport that looks more like fucking than any other, the sport in which homophobes and appreciative gay fans find themselves thrust into uncomfortable proximity.

"I prefer the dusty grime of a boy fresh from the wrestling ring," enthused the ancient Greek poet Strato, expressing much the same sentiment that gender-bending WWE wrestlers such as Goldust and Adrian Adonis used two thousand years later to unnerve their opponents. Similar WWE characters, such as stereotypically-flaming twins Lenny and Lodi, were yanked after the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation threatened legal action.

While such characters may be WWE screenwriter's attempt at stirring
There was no better way to avenge yourself on the jock who called you "faggot" than to imply (behind his back, of course) that his sport was an expression of his repressed sexual desires. the outrage of its ten-year-old fans, the same sport has spawned its own genre of erotica, as well as numerous gay fan sites. Nor is the phenomenon limited to the WWE. Even "legitimate" wrestling's most famous modern figure, Gorgeous George, intentionally cultivated questions about his sexuality, as a way of humiliating his opponents and drawing in fans.

In junior-high school, though, humiliation worked the other way around. There was no better way to avenge yourself on the jock who called you "faggot" than to imply (behind his back, of course) that his sport was an expression of his repressed sexual desires. Many NBA fans were right to denounce retired NBA player Tim Hardaway, after he recently announced on Miami radio,"I don't like gay people and I don't like to be around gay people. I am homophobic." But to suggest that Hardaway's homophobia is just a means of concealing his homosexuality, or that of his fellow players, is itself homophobic.

Still, in a country with so few openly gay athletes, denouncing the openly homophobic ones is one of the few forms of political catharsis there is. So it goes with my instinctive reaction to kabaddi. Kruger tells me that if the sport seems gay to me, it's my fault.

"You should be aware that something you might find homoerotic or laden with sexuality might be just your peculiar American perspective," Kruger says.

Indeed, I am not much relieved to



A kabaddi match between Sikh immigrants in Southern California. The ancient Indian sport is catching on with Canadian cops and American soldiers as well.find out who shares my peculiar American perspective. "One of our very higher ranking police officers sent an email [to the Toronto Police kabaddi team] asking what's with you guys stripping down to your underwear," recalls Gregory Cote, director of Kabaddi Cops. "There are a lot of snickers in the locker room and talk away from the players, whether about they're being gay or sucking up to a certain ethnicity. Cops are a cynical bunch."

Less cynical is Ginda Ghakal, a twenty-one-year-old Indian-born kabaddi player from Northern California. He doesn't see anything homoerotic about kabaddi — and if I do, he says, it's just a cultural misunderstanding. "I wrestled in high school, and everyone thought we were gay. Here we're more protective. In India straight men hold hands." About men holding hands in public, Ghalal concedes, "It's a little weird for me, even."

I know what Ghalal means. While traveling in India, I myself have felt uncomfortable when a male friend grabbed my hand to help me cross the street. But it was a different sort of embarrassment than that which I felt on the wrestling mat in Mr. Van Cherry's class, back when getting called a fag left me wondering all day whether indeed I was one. My discomfort in India owed primarily to the fact that I was traveling in a country where homosexuality was illegal. To learn that hand-holding was just considered hand-holding, to be able to defer to another culture's standards when my own are so conflicted, was a nice surprise.

That, perhaps, is the answer to my question. Part of what makes kabaddi so appealing is that it is a sport whose fans (unlike those of the WWE, for instance) could care less about how gay it looks. In Bangladesh, another country where homosexuality is illegal, the national sport is kabaddi. America is both more and less advanced in its sexual politics. We are slowly coming to accept the idea that the NBA and the NFL aren't the bastions of straightness that our fathers and coaches told us they were. I doubt we'll look into the dugout and see the players of our national pastime holding hands any time soon. Unless, of course, they decide to take up kabaddi. n°

You can read comments from real men here.

.....