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Does Our Lucrative Sports Culture Take Away a Boy’s Humanity?

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What a delight to learn that my 14-year-old grandson and a bunch of his friends had organized their own recreational league basketball team that includes no adult coach and no practices. It’s meant purely to have plain old fun without the pressure that “adult” expectations impose. Even the team name they chose has no “adult” meaning - like the already passé “6,7.” Their games aren’t pretty by “organized sports” standards, but these boys are sure enjoying a freedom from all that. It reminded me of their childhood play and a real nostalgia not to give “play” up no matter how “grownup” these boys were supposed act. If you were a boy, you remember that at some point play ground culture became sports culture. If you were able to enjoy the first, that didn’t always mean you could succeed at the second. Play morphed into competition as early as society could get us to internalize the idea that we were vying with other boys for affirmation and the emblem of “manhood.” The boys who were “real b...
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In With the New, But Out With the Old?

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It’s just a New Years’ saying that affirms that what’s coming up is, we hope, better. But the sentiment in much of our culture sees “old” as even dreaded enough to say more broadly “out with it.” I remember that I was somewhat amused when I heard a twenty-nine year old gay man genuinely bemoan the fact that he was about to turn thirty. The specter of that age looming over him, he said, made him “feel old.” So, he told us, he needed to get some things done and find a partner before that happened — and while he “still had a chance.” To those of us who are quite a bit older, and who'd never go back to thirty again, unless it was guaranteed that we could take with us all we've learned from our experiences since, there’s something sad about feeling “old” at thirty. I’m not sure what “feeling old” even means. But it’s not meant positively. I know that’s so, because we take the statements, “You don’t look that old,” or “You don’t act that old,” as complements. Though the cult of youth...
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Today, More than Ever, Liberal Religion Must Leave Its Closet Behind

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The signs are all there. Liberal church bodies are fighting back. Every so often in the past they did so, but now the open, unholy marriage of extreme right-wing bigotry, its political proponents, and right-wing religionists seems to have put denominations and religious leaders on the alert. It has taken decades for liberal religion to value itself highly enough to open its closet door and begin to outwardly challenge the monopoly on “Christianity” trumpeted by right-wing churches. Maybe the triumph of radical and shamelessly aggressive right-wingers in these last presidential and congressional races finally made it sink in.   Liberal religion realized that it had better speak up or forever be shut out of national debate – even its very existence is threatened by politics ending church-state separation. Liberal religion has always been there. Even before the beginnings of “Fundamentalism” in the early twentieth century, religious liberalism promoted progressive social change – figh...
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In 2025 Straight-Acting Masculinity Flows Down from the Top

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It’s apparently been wishful thinking that thought our culture was moving beyond the straight role that was necessary to keep patriarchy going in the U.S. When I wrote Scared Straight: Why It’s So Hard to Accept Gay People and Why It’s So Hard to be Human over twenty years ago, I remember I had hope then that my analysis would be outdated by now. But, on the contrary, as an academic friend who studies masculinity told me recently, that analysis is even more relevant today with the political victories of the old straight-acting masculinity in politics, the renewed down-grading of all things feminine, the media obsession with something they tout as click-bait: the “crisis of masculinity” in boys, and the reactionary and militant embrace by the religious right-wing of a warrior culture that ignores the Jesus of the Gospels. For a while it was labelled “toxic masculinity” as if it were one version of the masculine gender role that dominated patriarchy, but that label was beaten down by th...
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