marksimpson.com

Mark Simp­son attends an epic UFC event and finds him­self turned on to the charms of ‘gay porn for straight men’

(Orig­i­nally appeared in Out mag­a­zine, June 2008)

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 chis­elled 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, Brit boxer Joe “slapper” Calzaghe is tonight defeat­ing light heavy­weight Bernard Hop­kins on points. In the long-established world of box­ing, there is rumoured 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 (MMA), an omniv­o­rous blend of box­ing, freestyle wrestling, judo, tae kwon do, kick-boxing, 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 perked in the “ring” in front of every­body. On pay-per-view TV. The “perk” is the whole 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.

In the octag­o­nal UFC cage set up over the Bell Cen­tre ice hockey rink — octag­o­nal per­haps because it bet­ter affords mul­ti­ple view­ing angles than a square box­ing ring — Mac Danzig is still on his back; his sweaty, pumped, almost translu­cently white torso is flushed with the auburn heat that auburn skin pro­duces when it is aroused. His pant­ing, fetch­ing head has been pushed up against the cage by red­head Marc Bocek’s ener­getic pound­ing, as if the cage were in fact a head­board. Bocek isn’t mak­ing love, how­ever, or at least not the vanilla kind. He’s ham­mer­ing the liv­ing day­lights out of Danzig, stok­ing the crowd into ever-higher waves of frenzy. Although the Octa­gon is right in front of me, I’m watch­ing all of this on one of the giant screens over­head: MMA is mostly a hor­i­zon­tal sport — one that requires mul­ti­ple zoom lenses and a big TV to enjoy properly.

Bocek pauses for a moment to grab his partner/adversary by his hips, almost ten­derly, and drag him back­ward while still kneel­ing between his legs, not want­ing to break con­tact and nego­ti­ate that tricky “re-entry.” It isn’t, though, out of con­sid­er­a­tion for his chum’s cricked neck. He’s wor­ried that Danzig will use the cage to get up off the can­vas — and then get him in the “bitch” posi­tion. MMA is all about fight­ing for top. (Or maybe for extremely tru­cu­lent bottom.)

Unfor­tu­nately for Bocek, Danzig suc­ceeds in break­ing away any­way, jumps to his feet, and deftly, imper­son­ally, brings up his knee and smashes it against Bocek’s left eye­brow, which pro­vokes another roar of excite­ment from the crowd and opens up a very nasty lac­er­a­tion that spills hot blood every­where, stream­ing into his eye, across his face, down his chin, and splat­ters across his lily-white chest — and all over his oppo­nent. MMA is def­i­nitely not safe sex. The ref pauses the fight to exam­ine Bocek’s eye. If the blood is pre­vent­ing him from see­ing, the fight will be declared in Danzig’s favor.

Turn­ing to my beau­ti­fully pro­duced glossy fight pro­gram, which includes full-page colour images of the top­less young fight­ers arranged oppo­site one another and their vital sta­tis­tics, I learn that Danzig is 5 foot 8 and 155 pounds, 28, and a Cleve­land native. His feisty oppo­nent, Bocek, from Wood­bridge, Canada, is 26, and is also 5 foot 8 and 155 pounds. As some­one who has a thing for red­heads and short-asses, I’d say they are well matched.

The ref con­tin­ues the match — and why not? Blood looks good on TV. There are only a few sec­onds left of the third and final round (UFC fights only go to a max­i­mum three rounds at five min­utes each — about the aver­age length of a porn scene). Bocek, despite the turned tables and his past­ing and what must be deathly tired­ness, is still putting up an aston­ish­ing fight. Danzig scores a take-down almost imme­di­ately and moves, as they say in MMA, “directly to the mount.” Bocek “gives up his back” to try to save his ruined face from fur­ther pun­ish­ment but is then caught in a “rear-naked choke” by Danzig’s pow­er­ful, fatally invit­ing arms. He “taps out” (sub­mits) at 3 min­utes, 48 seconds.

I don’t know about Bocek, but these were some of the longest 3 min­utes, 48 sec­onds of my life. I’m aroused and inspired and exhausted and con­fused. For my money, Bocek won that fight — morally speak­ing. Which of course means that he lost very badly. His face is road­kill. He is really fucked. But he dis­played that qual­ity you hear peo­ple talk about rev­er­ently in MMA: heart.

Despite the gore, MMA is gen­er­ally safer than box­ing — there are fewer fatal­i­ties and brain-damage is less com­mon. Because the fight is “full-contact,” the head doesn’t take all the vio­lence. When it does, though, it’s pretty grue­some. Yet amid all the may­hem, there is a touch­ing ten­der­ness to MMA. Not because it looks to my twisted, queer eye like very rough sex — but because of that “heart” busi­ness. After a bout is over, most fight­ers hug each other in a pseudo-post-coital embrace that re-enacts the war­like hug ear­lier, only this time it’s a hug of warm brotherhood.

Another huge, manly Gal­lic roar. The arena’s giant screen is now tuned to the locker room; a rangy young blond skin­head fighter has peeled his shirt off, reveal­ing a well-oiled fleshly fight­ing machine. The light behind him and his pierc­ing blue eyes gaz­ing into the cam­era, not to men­tion the low posi­tion of the locker-room cam, give him the cast of a demigod. It’s Georges “Rush” St-Pierre, the hand­some, styl­ish 26-year-old local Mon­treal boy who tonight is hop­ing to seize back his UFC Wel­ter­weight belt from Matt “the Ter­ror” Serra, 33, the no-nonsense Long Island mas­ter of Brazil­ian jujitsu who dis­pos­sessed him of it last year with what some peo­ple said was a lucky punch.

We’ve only been watch­ing the hors d’oeuvre. All this blood has just been so much fore­play.

***

“STOP LOOKING LADIES!” some funny guy in the audi­ence shouts. It’s the weigh-in, a day ear­lier. Ed “Short Fuse” Her­man, another 20-something boy-next-door red-headed fighter, from Van­cou­ver, Wash., is naked on the stage under the spot­light, a towel held up by two lieu­tenants to shield his “short fuse.” Fun­nily enough, it’s mostly men rather than ladies doing the look­ing here in this packed audi­to­rium. Though some are per­haps doing more look­ing than oth­ers: From where I’m seated at the side, I man­age to catch a glimpse of Ed’s white butt as he bends over to slip off his briefs (a day later he will fight in shorts cheek­ily adver­tis­ing ‘CONDOM DEPOT’ – across his butt).

Sev­eral guys have had to take their under­pants off — to cheers. I can’t help but won­der whether the UFC offi­cials, for showbiz’s sake, pre­tend some of these guys are closer to the weight limit than they are.

UFC knows all about show­biz. Accord­ing to Forbes mag­a­zine, its pay-per-view shows have drawn well over 2 mil­lion view­ers, most of them male and ages 18 to 49. For­mi­da­bly shrewd, motor-mouthed for­mer box­ing pro­moter Dana White hosts The Ulti­mate Fighter, UFC’s hit PPV series on Spike (a men-only Big Brother with grap­pling gloves), which has taken MMA, essen­tially a semi-organized bar­room brawl in the ’90s, cleaned it up, intro­duced some rules — includ­ing no stomp­ing, no spit­ting, no throat strikes, no punches to the back of the head, and “no groin attacks of any kind” — and made it into a hot, mul­ti­an­gle, high-impact PPV commodity.

Described mem­o­rably by John McCain in 1998 as “human cock­fight­ing,” and under threat of a total ban, MMA has become a dif­fer­ent, more saleable, less relent­lessly vio­lent kind of “cock­fight­ing” in the nur­tur­ing hands of the UFC — so much so that McCain him­self recently relented: “The sport has grown up.” As a mea­sure of just how grown up, UFC — for which casino own­ers the Fer­titta broth­ers paid $2 mil­lion in 2001 — is today val­ued at roughly $1 bil­lion. Cul­tural respectabil­ity has arrived too in the form of a recently pub­lished $2,500 MMA art book titled Octa­gon with a fore­word by man-loving straight play­wright David Mamet, who wrote and directed the MMA-themed movie Red­belt. MMA is also com­ing to major-network TV: CBS recently announced plans to air four MMA fights (non-UFC) annu­ally — despite the dis­ap­proval of CBS chair­man Sum­ner Red­stone. “I’m a lover, not a fighter,” he said, per­haps miss­ing the way UFC brings lov­ing and fight­ing spec­tac­u­larly together.

There is a lot of pas­sion­ate hero wor­ship in the world of MMA, not so much homo­erotic as hero-erotic — or herotic. Straight male fans and fight­ers them­selves will enthuse with shin­ing eyes about “my idol”, in a way that in most other con­texts would be con­sid­ered much too ‘gay’ to keep a straight face.  But per­haps that’s not so sur­pris­ing, since MMA owes a lot to those noto­ri­ous war­rior homos, the ancient Greeks. Although today’s MMA came to us via Brazil­ian jujitsu (alas, not con­ducted in Speedos, as the name may sug­gest), many con­sider it the mod­ern ver­sion of pankra­tion, a com­bi­na­tion of box­ing and wrestling that was the basis of com­bat train­ing for Greek sol­diers and an orig­i­nal Olympic sport. With lethal purity, pankra­tion had two pri­mary rules: no eye-gouging or bit­ing. Fin­gers were often snapped off. Some­times death or uncon­scious­ness was the only form of sub­mis­sion (rather like this year’s Demo­c­ra­tic primaries).

MMA’s younger fans are not likely to acknowl­edge their sport’s homo­erotic her­itage. For most of these young men, many of them blue-collar and swoon­ingly in love with mas­culin­ity, gay means unmanly and pas­sive and emas­cu­lated - and there­fore major turn-off. MMA is gay porn for straight men because its vio­lence not only jus­ti­fies the inti­mate, pro­tracted, eye-popping phys­i­cal­ity of the sport but also pre­serves its viril­ity — the very thing that gets many of its fans hot. These fight­ers can’t be fags — look how fuck­ing tough they are, dude! It’s a bit like how in gay porn “real” tops never bot­tom — for the sake of the bot­toms watching.

Some­times the MMA fighter really is homo — like pro­fes­sional MMA fighter Shad Smith, who was recently pro­filed in The New York Times. From a tough blue-collar back­ground, Smith was des­per­ate to hide his sex­u­al­ity at first. “I was pet­ri­fied because I didn’t want any­one to find out,” he told the Times. “And I would try to be the tough­est per­son around. That way no one would sus­pect. No one would ever say it. No one would think it.” Doubt­less there are quite a few Shad Smiths who became very good, very deter­mined, very moti­vated scrap­pers because they weren’t escap­ing to col­lege or open­ing a hair­dress­ing salon.

The tough-guy image is some­thing of an illu­sion — if an entranc­ing and con­vinc­ing one. Sur­pris­ingly often, fight­ers turn out to be sen­si­tive, intro­spec­tive lon­ers — “fags” who aren’t actu­ally fags — such as Mac Danzig, the beefy auburn-haired killer who is in fact a vegan and whose main pas­time, when he isn’t turn­ing another lad’s face into ten­der­loin, is nature pho­tog­ra­phy. That’s also the story of Georges St-Pierre, a bul­lied slight boy at school who turned to MMA for sal­va­tion, who with his tight, wiry body, immac­u­lately groomed pre­sen­ta­tion and designer clothes looks rather metro. As one observer put it: “He’s the kind of flash Europ­unk you might think you could wipe the floor with if you came across him in a bar, but you’d be very, very wrong.”

Like­wise you might expect a fight between Serra and St-Pierre to be billed as good ol’ USA ver­sus Frenchy “fag,” but you’d be wrong. Because GSP — to give St-Pierre his brand name — is gen­er­ally con­sid­ered to be an excep­tional fighter, gen­uinely excel­lent in sev­eral dis­ci­plines, or maybe because this is such a visual medium, he has begun to look like the David Beck­ham of UFC, albeit one who actu­ally reads books and is, heaven for­fend!, inter­ested in phi­los­o­phy (that’s the French for you). His pho­to­genic face and body and his work­outs have been splashed across count­less health and fit­ness magazines.

His oppo­nent, Matt Serra, may be breezily unpre­ten­tious and resem­ble an unpainted fire hydrant, but he is def­i­nitely no idiot: “I think they look at Georges as the Crest poster boy with the sparkle in his teeth, the looks, the physique, the body and the athleticism…the real ver­sion of what Van Damme was doing,” he’s said. “And then comes me — the Joe Pesci–style ‘Hey­ooo!’ But it’s cool, man. I’m down with it. I fit in those shoes real well. I’m just look­ing for­ward to hav­ing another good fight.”

When he turns up for his weigh-in, a relent­less tidal wave of boos greets him. An Italian-American pocket bat­tle­ship at 5 foot 6, Serra weighs in at 169.5 pounds; he appears indif­fer­ent to the roil­ing sea of hatred around him. The boo­ing doesn’t stop when the host offers him the micro­phone, and what­ever he says is com­pletely drowned out. So he offers the crowd two fin­gers, mean­ing “two times” and V for vic­tory – and, per­haps, “fuck you.”

Ecsta­tic cheers greet his chal­lenger St-Pierre, who’s taller by four inches but in stature by sev­eral feet. St.-Pierre flu­idly strips down to his taste­ful and tastily filled-out black under­wear and also weighs in at 169.5 pounds. Offered the mike, he gra­ciously tells the crowd they shouldn’t hate Serra and that “I don’t fight with angerrr — I fight with my ‘eart.” The two men pose for the cam­eras in a fight­ing stance and then they hug, GSP kiss­ing Serra’s huge neck.

There was no trash talk in the qui­eter sur­round­ings of the press con­fer­ence the day before. The fight­ers had been polite, respect­ful, even friendly. “C’mon, I’ve got noth­ing against the French,” protested Serra when the jour­nal­ists dug up some “Frenchy” quotes from the past. St.-Pierre, for his part, was touch­ingly open. “I am ner­vous and scared to fail but that’s nor­mal,” he admit­ted. “I ‘ave but­ter­flies. but I ‘ave to make the but­ter­flies fly in formation.”

***

“AAAYYYYYYYYAYYYYEAAAAAAA-AAHHAAAARGH!!!”

The Bell Cen­tre out­does itself as Georges St.-Pierre, sur­rounded by his lieu­tenants, makes his way to the stage in a natty red jujitsu jacket. Climb­ing into the Octa­gon, he peels off his silky, tight black T-shirt, and then his baggy trousers come off, reveal­ing tight black trunks with just a white fleur-de-lis on the side of his firm right but­tock. It matches the arty tat­too on the back of his steely calf.

Cheers turn to boos. Matt Serra has arrived in a baggy black T-shirt with big white let­ter­ing: BUY GUNS SELL GUNS — GUNSAMERICA.COM. The stats on the big screen make dif­fi­cult read­ing for Serra: GSP is taller and younger and has a longer reach. Worse, he is more pop­u­lar and better-looking and has nicer pants. He’s the favourite in every way.

The bell rings, and they touch gloves. In a flash St.-Pierre has Serra on the can­vas. All that frus­tra­tion, regret, resolve, train­ing — and heart — have exploded. All over Serra. To tire him out, St.-Pierre lets him get up, keep­ing him within range of his own fists but out of Serra’s. Then he takes him down again. St.-Pierre’s pur­pose­ful, omi­nous shoul­ders rise up like medieval armour, like Joan of Arc seri­ously narked.

End of round 1. Serra’s eye is swelling up badly. He looks beaten already.

Round 2. Plucky Serra tries a kick.  St.-Pierre catches it and takes Serra down. After Serra stands up again, St.-Pierre lets fly a bar­rage of punches. Serra is too groggy to parry them. St.-Pierre — part pan­ther, part lethal bal­let dancer — comes in for the kill, eas­ily tak­ing his oppo­nent down again. Serra offers his back, and St.-Pierre knees him repeat­edly, ath­let­i­cally in the ribs in a man­ner which some­how man­ages to be as pas­sion­ate as it is impersonal.

The ref stops the match, and it’s all over: tech­ni­cal knock­out. Canada has won. Mon­treal has beaten Long Island. The but­ter­flies flew in for­ma­tion. Ter­ri­fy­ing for­ma­tion. And judg­ing by the noise from the crowd, the entire world and its dad have just climaxed.

A grin­ning St.-Pierre exe­cutes a win­ning som­er­sault. The crowd chants, “FUCK YOU, SERRA! FUCK YOU, SERRA!” He has been fucked. He was fucked. He is fucked. He is with­out any doubt what­so­ever the fuc­kee. But he exhibits no resent­ment. The war­riors embrace warmly, another kiss from GSP to that huge, now sweaty neck. Serra holds St.-Pierre’s arm up for the crowd, then hoists him on his shoul­der, car­ry­ing him for a few stag­ger­ing steps.

If MMA is gay porn for straight men, then tonight a part of me won­ders whether, for all its spilled blood and mashed faces, it isn’t the bet­ter kind.

After all, no one could seri­ously accuse gay porn of hav­ing “heart.”

Copy­right Mark Simp­son 2009

This essay is col­lected in ‘Met­ro­sexy: A 21st Cen­tury Self-Love Story’.