Taking to the Mat: In praise of the straight boys at gymnastics

Gymnastics is a girl’s sport. At least, that’s what I thought as a closeted pre-teen trying not to give people any further reason to harbour suspicions about my sexuality. Football, of course, was the masculine choice. So, I joined a team and got called gay anyway. Still, to my mind that was preferable. I’d rather play football and be suspected than do gymnastics and be confirmed. Eventually I quit football and never bothered replacing it. I came out, moved away and shelved my dreams of sporting glory.

Throughout my 20s, a spotty attendance at the gym was my primary method of keeping fit. Then, in a predictably millennial crisis of mortality, I turned 30 and thought: “Everyone knows you’re gay now, Ross. Do the backflip!”

Dougie Graham, a pole vault coach and ex-stuntman, opened the doors of Primal Fitness in 2017. Based in a former industrial unit in Leith, it offers gymnastics, flexibility and calisthenics classes as well as more contemporary hybrid fitness training. While travelling around the UK as a management consultant, Graham had joined various gyms in a bid to keep up with his training.

“You could see there were a lot of adults wanting to do gymnastics but there was very little mechanism for them to actually do it,” he tells me.  “Classes were always at the arse-end of a Sunday night when the hall wasn’t being used... So, I really wanted to have something that could be an adult gymnastics place – not a kid’s gymnastics club with adult classes tacked on the end.”

My first class at Primal was taught by Jena Bishop, an American vet student who moonlights as a blonde bombshell gymnastics coach. She’s short, strong and startlingly adept at spotting men twice her size as they attempt a back handspring.

The number of men in the class was surprising. Not just men but straight men. Big, rugby-playing, 6-foot-something boys who appeared entirely unconcerned with whether people thought gymnastics was gay or not. It appeared the only lingering worries about such things were my own.

Illustration by Fiorella Quaranta

Male anxiety about the perception of gymnastics as a feminine sport is nothing new. In fact, it continues to spark debate even at the elite level. If you watch male gymnasts’ floor routines from previous decades, you’ll notice that they tend to place more emphasis on grace and fluidity than most professional male gymnasts today. While the calibre of tumbling is now much higher, it has come, some say, at the expense of artistry.

Last year, the International Gymnastics Federation changed the rules to reward men for performing a leap in their floor routines following pressure from prominent gay gymnast Heath Thorpe. Previously, such elements could be included but would not be scored – even as leaps were rewarded in women’s routines. In Bishop’s classes, however, skills are not gendered.

I end up spending my Wednesday nights watching a cadre of straight men try their hand at leaping through the air while in a split. It’s rarely the most graceful spectacle. While many of the girls are ex-gymnasts or cheerleaders, the straight boys tend to come from sports where posture and grace are seldom considered. It’s why I love them. We’re all new to this; to moving our bodies in a way that can feel unfamiliar and occasionally scary.

And yet we struggle with different things. The straight boys are fearless. They’ll try skills in an instant that take me weeks to gear up for. Yet ask them to do a straddle jump and they’re suddenly like toddlers newly acquainted with their limbs. When I’d go to football training as a kid, I’d spend hours performing the masculinity that came easy to everyone else. What was natural to them – casual high fives, roughhousing, platonic pats on the bottom – was alien to me. Now, though, the straight boys enter a world that celebrates a pointed toe. Suddenly, I’m the one for whom all this feels natural.

On the surface, gymnastics is surely one of the world’s more bizarre sports. While it’s easy to understand the innate human desire to run as fast as possible or throw a heavy object the farthest, it’s more challenging to trace any primal imperative to launching yourself off a vault or flaring your legs atop a leather-clad, Dada-esque approximation of a horse. The fact that we associate gender or sexuality with such a plainly created sport says far more about humans and their prejudices than it does about gymnastics.

When I’m in that warehouse in Leith, gymnastics isn’t masculine or feminine. It’s not concerned with other people’s thoughts or judgments. So, I try my best. I train harder and leap higher and do all the things I wish I had the bravery to do as a child. And when it goes well? The straight boys clap and I smile. Because I’m no longer performing for anyone.