This month’s Out magazine includes a feature by yours truly on my visit to Montreal in April to see the biggest, baddest, ballsiest Ultimate Fighting Championship event ever. UFC, for those who aren’t in the know, or unaccountably uninterested in seeing fit, near–naked men grappling and grunting, is the cage-fighting craze that is rapidly becoming the most popular sport with young men in North America.
Out tell me my take has provoked some threats against my pretty face from outraged MMA fans. It seems my crime was enjoying it too much. Other less shall we say clenched followers of this man-mounting sport have however welcomed my interest — even if I breathe too heavily.
Here’s how the piece begins:
Imagine the space shuttle taking off with a really fat customized exhaust pipe or the Visigoths sacking Ancient Rome with kicking bass tubes fitted to their 4-by-4s. Or 20,000 supercharged male orgasms. Simultaneously. And you have some idea what it sounds and feels like in Montreal’s famous Bell Centre tonight for Ultimate Fighting Championship 83, as a spunky young carrot redhead in shorts pins an auburn lad on his back with his heels somewhere around his ears. I think the technical term for this is a “full mount.” Or maybe it’s “ground and pound.”
As the chiseled and blond bad guy with the low-slung shorts (Cam Gigandet) in the recent mixed martial arts (MMA) exploitation flick Never Back Down says leeringly to the doe-eyed brunet boxer good guy (Sean Faris) new to MMA, the good news is that in this sport you can choke, kick, punch, pin, and throttle; “the bad news is that it’s gotta end with you looking like a bitch in front of everybody.” Perhaps it was bad news for him — and for the auburn lad in the ring tonight — but certainly not for the 22,000-strong overwhelmingly young-male audience for the biggest-ever UFC event.
Over 2,500 miles away in Las Vegas, “slapper” Brit boxer Joe Calzaghe is tonight defeating light heavyweight Bernard Hopkins on points. In the long-established world of boxing, there is rumored to be an ancient and secret tradition called the “perk,” or “perquisite” — by which the losing man may be required later to literally give up what he has lost symbolically. In other words, the fucked gets…really fucked.
I don’t know how much truth there is to the “perk,” though the breathless trash talk of modern-day boxers in the run-up to a fight — “I’m gonna make you my bitch/girlfriend/punk” — certainly doesn’t discredit it. But I’m fairly certain that the “perk” doesn’t exist in the “full–contact” brave new world of mixed martial arts, an omnivorous blend of boxing, freestyle wrestling, judo, tae kwon do, kickboxing, karate, jujitsu, and Thai boxing that is rapidly replacing boring old traditional boxing, especially among young men, as the fighting sport. The perk isn’t needed. Because in MMA you get fucked in the “ring” in front of everybody. On pay-per-view TV. The “perk” is the whole, er, perking point, man. And UFC, by far the most successful purveyor of MMA fights for the cable TV voyeur, looks remarkably like gay porn for straight men: Ultimate Fuck-Fighting.
Read the article in full here.
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VERY GAY. If your idea of fighting is spooning another oiled up dude and pining him in a 69 position then you love MMA
These guys take one freaking karate class then they think they are badass.
MMA is gay, just look at the full guard position, that is the freaking missionary position. I don’t believe the fighters enter the cage seeking to molest the other guy, but to the spectators it looks like gay porn. Grown men shouldn’t be watching MMA.
mma is pretty gay.…
kind of hard to argue to the contrary.
Fans of mma are just going to have to accept that there is a large gay contingency that enjoys mma fights for more ‘non-fight’ related reasons.
Also, to be an mma fighter, to be willing to pull another man between your legs, to roll around on the ground with a man practically naked.…. sorry boys — even those fighters are stimulated into doing that.
I’m a total homo, and I think MMA is pretty much the hottest sport ever made. I mean, the men are ridiculously fine, aggressive, and strong. Plus the fact that they’re mounting each other and rolling around all sweaty in the ring… where is the downside? Its pretty much the hottest thing on network tv, only because gay porn isn’t allowed. Its a close 2nd best.
This article was hilarious!
and pretty much true… i remembered trying some BJJ moves with my friend at the park.. pulling the guard.. we basically look like we are humping each other?
so.…yea.…
well Mr. Simpson, you do have a history of getting in the ring or going undercover to get a story so I’m not so sure that Mr. Malebranche isn’t on to something!
I would assume you have experience grinding your hips into young fit men as well. But what would I know? Kudos on such a great article about the experience of watching hot sweaty men tear each other apart.
Being straight has never been a problem playing bitch, in my experience.
Fedor is straight, and Crocop only likes adolescent boys as far as males go, so it is unlikely you would do anything to either of them.
Fedor aned Mirko are totally hot and I’d be honoured to make them my bitches.
The best two MMA fighters in the World are Fedor Emilianenko and Mirko Filopovic. Mirko is a former SWAT guy from his native country, and he has exchanged fire with bank robbers, has invaded buildings that were controlled by terrorists, and has been elected as as a congressman for his hands-on fight on crime. As for Fedor…well, this guy is hardcore. He was a former Russian special forces soldier. He fought in Yugoslavia in 1999 in the war there, and he killed dozens of people in combat. He has been shot, stabbed, clubbed in the head.
He is also a veteran from Kosovo. He was notorious for his his fearlessness and fierceness. He would charge against the enemies, blow them up, kill all of them and turn the tide of combat all by himself. Fedor has a huge tatto in his chest that shows Death Herself, holding a bloodied baby. I guess this tatoo expresses his philosophy of life pretty well.
But Mr.Simpson is 100% right that our era has a way of mercantilizing everything. I’m sure that, if Alexander the Great were alive today, that Coca-Cola and Nike would compete with each other to get Alexander to endorse their products by seeing which can pay him the biggest for an endrsement contract. I can almost imagine the propaganda: Alexander is shown right after the battle of Gaugamela looking over the battlfield, where all the bloodied corpses of his vanquished opponents are laying, and he opens a can of Coca-Cola, while the camera focuses on his face and the slogan appears onscreen: “Be a real man like Alexander. Drink Coke.” Or Nike’s propaganda, showing Alexander in the middle of the battle of Gaugamela, where he is fighting with his Nike sneakers in his feet, and the slogan appears onscreen:“Conquer every day battles like Alexander with Nike’s tenis shoes.” Lmao.
Just watching young men punch each other around the ring.…hmmm.
I had a hunch this might be an area of interest to you, Jack! I salute your cojones and your commitment, getting really involved — and putting your face on the line.
On the subject of the erotics of fighting itself, I doubt that even I would find the time to get turned on while struggling to remove a meaty, tattooed forearm compressing my windpipe.
As usual, I’ve approached my subject from the bloodless angle of how it is sold — by UFC in particular — and consumed. Most of the straight guys who watch MMA are, like me, just spectators/voyeurs.
Thanks though for suggesting that I should take up grappling, real-time. I might need to, given some of the feedback.
I’ve been doing some field research in this area.
I actually started taking some grappling courses a month ago. Which means me and some dude rolling around on top of each other and getting all sweaty.
I’m a homo, and I think MMA fighters are often some of the hottest guys on the planet. I mean, if I have a “type,” it is angry strong bald white guys with tattoos. (A touch of narcissism perhaps?)
But when it comes down to actually rolling with someone, it is really all business. I am thinking about avoiding armbars and rear naked chokes. My instructor, who doesn’t know I’m a homo yet, gave me this humorous speech about how I’d have to get used to grinding my hips into another guy…even if it seems a little *weird* at first…because you really have to leverage your weight to keep someone in position.
(Stop chuckling. OK, go ahead, it’s funny. Can’t avoid double entendres with this subject. The whole thing is a double entendre.)
I guess it could be homoerotic if you went into it for that reason and wanted to get that out of it, but I don’t think you’d last long in a class and that would be more than a little pervy in a creepy way. Morally speaking, I would never do that.
If you’re really there to learn, you quickly put your sexuality in a box and get on with it. You have to if you even want to be proficient.
At the end of the day, it looks homoerotic, and I can watch it from afar and get that out of it, but in real life–in first person–it is a sport and a skill and after the initial weirdness wears off that’s all it is.
You should take a few grappling courses, Mark. You’re in decent shape and you have no problem acting like a normal…“bloke”…I gather. Why not do a bit of investigative reporting for one of those magazines you write for and “go undercover?” It would make a good story.
Hi Pedro. Thanks for this and your other posts. While I may be entirely wrong about MMA, and I know you’re a big fan of it, your argument seems to be that MMA can’t be homoerotic because it’s violent and masculine — and that only a gay would think such a thing. Which is only an argument if you start from the position that homosexuality is necessarily weak and feminine — and probably perverted.
And, slightly naughty question-posing in the blog title aside, I don’t actually say that MMA is gay, or that the men who take part in it are.
Lol…MMA is not gay. There are guys who leave the ring with concussions, exposed fractures, sunken eyes, internal hemorraging, etc. In Thailand there were 3 deaths only last year in sanctioned Muay Thai matches. If this is gay, then what’s straight? MMA is the closest thing to actually going to war or having a street fight to the death, and the guys are not faking it. It is genuine masculinity. And the reason why the fighters wear only skimpy shorts is not because they want to be intimate with each other, but because clothes can be used to grab and choke those wearing them, thus giving your opponent an advantage. Leave it to gay men to see sexual connotations in a blood sport. Lol…