So there I was, sixteen years old, doing three toe-touches in a roll before sprinting right into the tumbling pass I had been trying to perfect for weeks. My cheerleading squad at the time was a national champion team that had been seen on ESPN by, what had to be, hundreds maybe even thousands of viewers. I was training for an individual event that would name the best cheerleader in the country. As I was reaching the pinnacle of male cheerleader success, my coach pulled me aside and told me that my routine was too gay. This was before he told me to point my toes more on my straddle jump and demonstrated how.

This wasn’t the first time that my masculinity was crumbled while in uniform. When I was thirteen years old, the girl’s all got to dance and have a ball at cheerleading camp learning new routines for football season; the male cheerleaders, all six of us, were pulled to the side to be given the ‘don’t be gay in uniform’ speech. We were told that cheerleading is a masculine sport. As I stared down the hunky college cheerleaders giving us the speech, I was not fooled. I knew that a few of them had the urge to prance around ever now and again as well. Nonetheless, we still weren’t allowed to prance or dance, shimmy or shake. We had to stand there and, every once in a while, throw a girl high up into the air forcing the crowd to focus on her and her shiny metallic bloomers. Boring. I longed to shimmy, shake and jump around as the boys, the real men, got to tackle one another while we back flipped along the sideline.

The other male cheerleaders desperately clung onto their heterosexuality, or what little remained of their heterosexuality, but either way they had their scanners out for any sign of homo-ness. The homophobic banter, sometimes being just as harsh as that which went on in the boy’s locker room, permeated the dorms we stayed in at cheerleading camp. It was bad enough being a cheerleader, but to be accused of sucking on anything more than a megaphone, well, that was just unfathomable.

It is now ten years later and fall has returned to West Texas bringing with it the bitter air that can only mean one thing for men everywhere, football. Now whether you are a heterosexual man cheering on your favorite team or a homosexual man remembering the banter and ridicule, desperately searching for something better on television, you can’t escape the fact that this country loves their football. Cheerleading happens to be the glittering decoration that adorns this rugged tradition.

A few weeks ago, it was homecoming in this small town and so I marched down to the old football stadium and found myself still hypnotized by the shiny pom-poms and pleated skirts. On the far end of the track, away from the girls, a male cheerleader waited on the sideline to throw a girl up in the air. Every now and again, however, he would find himself caught up in the excitement of it all and allow himself a shimmy and shake when the band would blare out something worth prancing to. Maybe some things have changed? Maybe young gay boys everywhere are now beginning to face the cheerleading world as their naturally fabulous selves without the guilt of an extra swish every now and again? Now that is something worth hollering about.

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