I know that I promised a scathing
indictment of Renault’s team culture almost six weeks ago, but clearly, that
did not happen. It is coming, I promise, fueled even more by my anger at the Hülkenberg situation (Grosjean, really?),
but that post is requiring more outside research that originally planned.
However, I am finding it is requiring more research than originally conceived,
and I currently extremely behind on the research I get paid to do, it will have
to wait.
Instead, this blog was inspired by this twitter thread from Matt Bishop (TheBishf1), where he discusses his opinions
and experiences being a gay man in F1. I highly recommend you go read his
thread, but he touched on a topic that has been going through my mind as well, both
during Sochi this season and also when it was announced that F1 might be moving
into Saudi Arabia. As both a bisexual/queer person and a woman whose work
crosses the line into LGBTQ+ and feminist activism, I felt the need to
interrogate my level of investment in F1, the FIA’s policies regarding gender
and sexuality, and the messy compromises necessary for a sport to truly be
global. This post will not get into the gender issue, as that will take a
separate post of its own, but I would like to spend a few paragraphs discussing
my thoughts on these issues.
Hopefully, I didn’t scare away too many of
you by using the “f” word in the paragraph above. While I am both an outspoken
advocate for women and the LGBTQ+ community, I did not get into F1 for its PC
nature. In fact, I often joke that I left the second most corrupt sport
(football, or as Americans like to call it, soccer) for the most corrupt sport
of Formula 1. And in fact, the corruption is a big part of what I enjoy about
it - the scandals, the cheating, the big egos and even bigger bank accounts.
Crashgate, Spygate, the Renault brake-bias nonsense, the shady sponsors, Ferrari’s
current engine spec (allegedly, of course), all add to the drama of the sport.
But generally, the drama revolves around rich people screwing other rich
people, so I can enjoy it without a twinge of guilt (ok, maybe a little guilt,
but I live for schadenfreude. Sue me). I knew what I was getting into, and it
wasn’t a Marxist-feminist utopia, nor do I want it to be. That’s not what I’m
here for.
Like all sports, F1 and other European
open-wheel racing leagues are not particularly gay-friendly, though they do
tend to be more friendly to lesbians, as most women’s sports are (see this year’s
World Cup). This has to do with the long history of sexology, wherein gender
and sexual orientation were not separated. In Western culture, gender and
sexual orientation were connected through a number of pseudo-scientific
theories developed by sexologists like Havelock Ellis. These theories posited
that in a same-sex couple, one person had too many male/female “germs” that
didn’t match their sex assigned at birth, and therefore, where either a man in
a woman’s body or a woman in a man’s body. Thus, the butch lesbian or gay
effeminate man were mixed up, therefore, maintaining the concept of
heterosexuality.
Now, in 2019, most of us know that someone’s
perceived effeminacy or butchness does not indicate their sexual orientation,
but there is still a stigma attached to gay men as being weak or feminine (and
as I will discuss in my post on gender, perceived as not as successful in
sports). This stigma is compounded by the homosocial nature of sports. While F1
is technically co-ed, in its current iteration (and for most of its existence),
it is a male sport. Within spaces of intense homosocial bonding, actions that
might otherwise be viewed as homosexual are instead interpreted as the product
of male-bonding. Think, for example, of de-pantsing your friend at football
practice, or the way athletes often slap each other on the butt.[1] In
order to avoid any hints of homosexual behavior in these homosocial practices,
gay identity becomes further stigmatized and women become further objectified
(see grid girls and locker talk).
Statistically speaking, if F1 drivers were
taken from a random sample of men, at least two men on the grid would be gay or
bisexual. Now, the intense homophobia that often surrounds male-dominated
sports tends to discourage boys from pursuing or continuing on in sports, but
most likely, F1 has had and does have drivers who fall farther to the right on
the Kinsey scale.
But F1, unlike other sports, has more than
just stigma attached to coming out and being open. As Matt Bishop pointed out
in his blog post, sexual relations between men are illegal in both Singapore
and Abu Dhabi, and homosexuals face intense discrimination and even extrajudicial
killings in countries like Russia, Bahrain, and Azerbaijan. While F1 drivers
and crew would most likely be protected from such violence and discrimination over
the race weekend due to their wealth and Western privilege, it would make going
to these countries extremely uncomfortable. Furthermore, sponsors based in
these countries, such as McLaren’s partnership with Team Bahrain Merida, would
most likely drop sponsorships if a driver/team principal/etc. came out as gay. Homophobia
is of course not unique to these countries, and it is likely that a gay driver
would lose some support from fans in Europe, the US, etc., as well. There have been gay drivers in the past, such as Mike Beuttler who did race in F1, but the sport has changed since then in a number of ways related to neoliberalism and globalization that have shifted the financial implications of such an identity.
F1 strives to be a global sport, and as
Matt Bishop’s post points out, at its best, F1 can provide opportunities for spreading
tolerance and acceptance for the LGBTQ community around the world. However,
cultures vary widely when it comes to even the basic definitions of gender,
sexuality, marriage, etc., and a liberal Western view of these issues will
naturally be incompatible with or incomprehensible to other cultures. While I
personally would love to see an openly gay or lesbian driver in F1 right now, the
politics and the economics connected to those politics make it unlikely if not
impossible for that be an option. But who knows, maybe I will be proven wrong.
I have, of course, 8,000 more thoughts on
this, so I will probably come back to this issue at some point. Please comment
if you disagree or feel free to ask questions if some things did not make sense
to you or you just want to know more about the history of sexuality in the
West.
I won’t promise when the next post is going
to be, but I will say that at least I will have a lot more time to
write/research when there is no racing on for a few months.
[1] Or for more specific F1 examples, go enjoy the subreddit
Fanf1ction, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.
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