Spectator Sports A Survival Guide

It’s a beautiful Sunday afternoon, but you find yourself locked in a cramped, dank, semifinished basement, the only light glaring from a ginormous flat-screened television whose very name—plasma—suggests it’s feeding a terrifying life force to the mass of pale-faced women gathered before it.

Their zombie-like trance is broken only occasionally by screams of anguish and shouts of maniacal joy, along with the guttural belching generally accompanying the drinking of too many light beers.

Yes, ladies, it’s Game Day. What type of game? Who cares? They’re all the same. A bunch of large creatures crash into each other for several interminable hours until finally, mercifully, it’s over.

Your girlfriend, who has paid zero attention to you all afternoon, suddenly is at your side, expecting either comfort or a high-five.

You’re not sure which, because for the past four hours, you quietly have been reading a good book, instead of watching the game, blissfully unaware of what the women surrounding you are cheering or crying about.

So, my friends, we come to the central question of this article: What’s a girl to do when she loves women, but has no interest in sports?

We are a small but highly-disruptive minority. At every Super Bowl party, you’ll find us nattering on about which team’s mascot is cuter. We’re the girls who click off the television in the last seconds of The Final Four (whatever the hell that is), and demand to be taken to a foreign film. We know every detail of Tiger Woods’s messy private life, and absolutely nothing about his golf swing.

At one time early in my career as a lesbian, I had high hopes that we-who-hate-sports could coexist peacefully with the rest of the community. This was before I suggested to a bar full of anxious, pregame sports-dykes that we skip watching the stress-inducing NBA championship, and sing show tunes instead. I barely escaped with my life.

So, in an attempt to prevent future near-death experiences, I’m offering a few tips on how to feign interest in any sporting event:

• Pick a favorite team for each major sport. Choose by uniform color, hometown—whatever. I always select the least-popular teams, because I feel they need me more.

• Once you’ve chosen your team, do not waver in your support, no matter how vigorously your girlfriend tries to bully you into switching your allegiance to her team. Blind, stupid loyalty to a team that in no way reciprocates your feelings is a true hallmark of a sports fan.

• Get irrationally excited when an umpire takes any type of action. Wave your hands around, and use the most powerful curse words in your repertoire. Apparently, everyone hates umpires, and thinks that they always rule unfairly against their team.

• Liberally sprinkle the following exclamations into your game-day conversations: “Unbelievable!”; “Come on!”; “Run, you idiot!” It doesn’t matter when you use them. Someone in the room will agree with you.

• When your team wins, gloat. Dancing a little jig is acceptable. It is also the perfect opportunity to grope anyone in the room who strikes your fancy, and pass it off as victory-induced psychosis.

• When your team loses, sulk. Insist that someone take you into a bedroom, and make beautiful love to you to help you recover from the defeat. Surprisingly, someone always will take you up on it, because she needs comfort, too.

That, in a nutshell, is why it’s worth putting down the book, and watching the game. Win or lose, ample opportunity always presents itself for a sexual payoff.

Then, to quote a popular sports cliché: “It’s all over but the shouting!”