In today’s New York Times, there is an article about a Harvard football player who is also an aspiring operatic tenor. Though the Grey Lady would never say it directly, the interest in this story lies in the combination of the hypermasculine and hypomasculine in the public behavior of one man. This is fascinating to me. Almost everything in the piece circles around the confusion created by someone who fulfills the roles of bone-crushing warrior and serious aesthete at the same time. The gender expectations that structure this confusion go unquestioned, however. Why is it so strange for one person to be both football player and tenor? Because the normative American sense of gender admires one identity–the one that says, “We could still conquer a continent if we needed to”–and glances away from the other in faint embarrassment. If this student manages to become a professional singer, it would be interesting to ask him, ten years from now, how his everyday life has changed, if living as an artist is different than living as an athlete in the way people perceive him as a man. It’s possible, of course, that life in the elite realms of culture is shielding him from the worst effects of gender deviance; I’m sure no one at Harvard is going to beat him senseless for being a singer. (It helps to weigh 250 pounds, of course.) But it is fascinating to watch the video that accompanies the article, in which the student sings “God Bless America” in his team’s locker room. He sings the first verse with proper classical technique, and then his teammates chime in, raucously off-key. It’s hard not to read that moment as an attempt to contain an outbreak of “diseased” masculinity with an injection of fraternal bravado.
The Grey Lady is indeed subtle.
