The Man Show

Yet the Piazza-is-gay brouhaha reveals more about the male psyche than simple homosexual panic. For you can’t be a good sports reporter without first being a fan -- you have to love the beauty and grace of athletic action, thrill to the drama and unpredictability of the game. But as British writer Nick Hornby makes clear in his great soccer memoir Fever Pitch, being a fan is a form of permanent adolescence, and a distinctively male one at that, like obsessing over the filing system for your record collection or building your day around watching TV shows as Hugh Grant does in the adaptation of Hornby‘s About a Boy. By fixating on wins and losses or yo-yoing between adoration and hatred -- the recent coverage of the Lakers has been positively bipolar -- you can create an alternative reality that helps fend off the complex realities of manhood. That’s why so many fans and sportswriters hate hearing about money in sports. That‘s why they still find it hard to admit that Pete Rose was gambling on games. And that’s why the idea of a gay ballplayer threatens not only their attitudes toward masculinity but their whole sense of sports as a refuge from the messy emotional stuff of real life. Once a star the caliber of Piazza (or Shaq!) finally comes out -- it‘s bound to happen -- this refuge will never be quite the same again.

In Tuesday’s L.A. Times, Patrick Goldstein (whose column is consistently one of the paper‘s highlights) wrote about how The Rock and Vin Diesel represent a new breed of action star whose urban, multicultural brand of masculinity cuts across all races (and beyond: Diesel has a cult gay following). Of course, such muscled-up masculinity is hardly new in Hollywood -- it wasn’t so long ago that Stallone and Schwarzenegger ruled the box office -- but it‘s all the more striking in an era when so many of our younger stars are overgrown boys. For every Russell Crowe (an Australian import), there’s a Tobey Maguire, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Will Smith and, of course, eternally young Tom Cruise, who‘s spent much of the last 15 years getting the Piazza treatment. Although these boyish actors are considered heartthrobs, what’s striking is how neutered they seem compared to the ‘60s generation of stars -- Nicholson, Beatty, Redford and Hoffman -- all of whom carried a sexual tang. Even Woody Allen was all about getting laid. One reason Diesel seems bound for a fresh kind of superstardom is that he does something that Sly and Arnold and Clint never could: He brings more than a whiff of carnality to the idea of being a badass.

Diesel is almost the opposite of Hugh Grant, who has spent years serving up a version of masculinity so effetely English that it leaves you begging he won’t take off his shirt during the love scenes. He is the movies‘ current icon of aristocratic charm -- cute, dithery, shockingly sexless -- and one great pleasure of About a Boy is the way it deflates that particular fantasy (and not only by lopping off his forelocks). Rather than suggest that we all ought to swoon before Grant’s posh mannerisms and winning smile, the film shows that these things are an empty shell -- he‘s the good-looking guy you date once, then dump because he cares too much about his shirt. Grant is well aware of this, of course (he’s one of our smartest actors), and clearly delights in the chance to deconstruct an image that has obviously been a velvet prison. After all, if you‘re the kind of guy who’ll pay for blowjobs from a black chick on the Sunset Strip, it‘s humiliating to have to keep saying “Oh, bugger” as if it were the most adorable thing in the world.