Gay Softball: It's a Man's Game

In 2005, at the Gay World Series in San Diego, my softball team decided to throw a bone to the handful of straight players on the roster while simultaneously exercising its penchant for kitsch by scheduling a group dinner at the local Hooters.

I decided to challenge our waitress. "Only two of us are straight," I said smugly, being one of that pair. "Guess which."

She scrutinized each player before correctly pointing to our second baseman. But she had a harder time with number two, and finally opted for our big, sure-handed and quite gay first sacker.

"Nope," I said. "It's me."

She crinkled up her nose. "You?" she said.

And so it goes in the world of gay softball, where traditional stereotypes about sexual orientation survive about as long as a line drive to the pitcher.

I had joined a couple of friends on the San Francisco league team several years before. Having played baseball in high school and softball since childhood, I assumed I'd dominate in any gay league, where surely everyone threw like a girl.

Several years and a couple of benchings later, I had been thoroughly disabused of such assumptions. Gay softball is extremely competitive and very serious. Most of the guys on my team had been playing all their lives, and in terms of talent, I hovered somewhere around the 50 percentile.

Vince Torres, on the other hand, was a five-tool outfielder with tremendous opposite field power and occupied a slot in the top tier. "For a long time I didn't know anyone who was gay and who played sports," says Vince, who also rolled an average 223 in regional pro bowling tournaments.

"I had my gay friends I'd go out with and my straight friends I'd play sports with," he says. "It was hard because a lot of gay guys said that by playing sports I was trying to be straight. But when a friend told me about gay softball, I went to a game and it was like, oh my goodness, all these guys play softball? It was a whole different world. Playing gay softball helped me accept my lifestyle a lot more, because I saw I wasn't the only guy out there who was gay and was athletic, and that's how I had been feeling."

The league has also become a refuge for less testosterone-driven straight guys, who don’t always enjoy the trash-talking and win-at-all-costs mentality of some heterosexual leagues. Who, after all, can resist an environment in which teams break out in the cheer, "You gotta hit to run, you gotta run to score, you gotta score to win!" at least once a game?

We came in second in that 2005 tournament, besting dozens of top gay teams from around the country for the right to play in the final, in front of what seemed like a thousand fans. It's been the highlight of my otherwise uneventful athletic career, and I will forever be grateful to the gay community for being so welcoming of anyone who wants to become a part of such a positive sub-culture.