Dresscode: On Gay Sportswear Fetish
This essay was original published in Spike Magazine
“Pervy Party, Men Only, Play Safe! | Strikter Dresscode Sneakers & Sportswear” reads the description for Berghain’s raucous sex party, FC Snax United. For one weekend every November, the Berlin techno megaclub closes off its main floor, its exhibition space Halle, and its ground floor darkroom Lab.Oratory to host a gay fetish party that has only one mandate for admission: sportswear dress code. Varsity socks, Thai boxing shorts, football jerseys, sneakers. The works. I’ve been twice, came for the sex and stayed for the set design: the boxing ring, the piss pool. As if at a fashion party, you might’ve thought Snax was sponsored by Adidas — ubiquitous here both for its sportswear fetish and fascist kink. A winning look: naked except for New Balance trainers and baseball caps, with phones stashed in their socks. A foot fetishist, with the slow precision of an ASMR video, removed my sneakers and socks before licking the sweat off my feet. “Why does your sweat make my tongue numb?” he asked. Um… I have no idea??? One image sticks out to me: while sitting down to gather my belongings for coat check, I watched two men fucking in the locker room, a facsimile of one you’d find in a typical German gym, where gay men disguise their furtive glances from those who might not return their appreciation. It’s a mixture of shame and pleasure that’s always some version of the original trauma: the grade school locker room, when discovering (maybe for the first time) that forbidden hum of electricity when lingering one’s gaze on other classmates’ bodies, even if you weren’t yet sure what you wanted to do with them.
In childhood trauma, shame acts as a formative affect constitutive of identity. It delineates stigma around what one is (queer) as a discrete entity to be isolated, condemned. Salient strategies in 1960s queer aesthetics (camp, drag) have always exhibited a particular genius in mobilising shame into production. Take, for instance, Warhol transforming self-despising downtown outcasts into superstars on screen, or Jack Smith’s sublimating trash into Golden Age stage sets. Watch Smith’s muse Mario Montez who, in his screen test for Warhol, is asked what it feels like to appear in his drag persona. Montez replies, “I feel I’m in another world right now, a fantasy … like a kingdom meant to be ruled by me.”
FC Snax United is a kind of pervy fantasia, inherently narcissistic, that creates a “subjectivity-generating space” (to borrow a phrase from queer studies pioneer, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick) where queer group sex, as spectator sport, is affirmed by gazes that do not have to be disguised or averted, but are returned approvingly in an exhibitionistic feedback loop. “Queer scenes are the true salons des refusés,” writes Michael Warner, “where the most heterogeneous people are brought into great intimacy by their common experience of being despised and rejected in a world of norms that they now recognize as false morality.”
Snax doesn’t exactly banish shame, rather it makes use of it to produce a subversive theatre. Like Montez in drag, something about the party’s sportswear dress code is structurally comedic (like calling a sex club an “oratory”), as sportswear parodies a normative masculinity that polices gender identity. Within the heterosexual regime, men who sleep with others of the same sex lose their place in gender, that is, of the stylisations and codes of masculine performativity. That any of these clubgoers dressed in Lonsdale and Nikes may or may not identify as men or even athletes is beside the point. Sportswear — removed from its intended functional context and re-appropriated as fetish — exposes through excess the signifying practices that manufacture masculinity, even if the party is still “Men Only”.
My mind snags on this criterion. At the party’s entrance is a sign that reads “MEN’S CLUB” with a directive, “NO PERFUME”. Something about the exaggerated, gendered performance of a sportswear party might suggest a panicked insecurity of what’s styled as “male.” Because sportswear drag is so visibly not the real thing, it calls into question whether there is a real thing as “male” to begin with. For nine months in 2018 I thought I was trans. It was a confusing but generative period, at the end of which I felt I needed to recommit myself to “male”, not as an ideal, but a failed project that, in its wake, has a rejuvenated capacity for possibilities and reinvention. I still do time at the gym because I like the feel of muscles padded onto my body. While I’ll rarely turn down a sex party, I’ve largely outgrown them. At best, FC Snax United is performative of a zombie masculinity or even homonormativity, but it still makes me nostalgic for it. Sportswear posed as masculinity is a scam, but it can still be fun. Fail, but do it in style.
