The NFL’s regular season is back this week, and these days the game barely leaves. When I was a kid, it was a Sunday religion with a Monday night encore. Now there is Thursday too, and Saturdays late in the year, and games beamed in from London and Germany and São Paulo at breakfast time, until football season feels less like a weekly appointment and more like a tide that comes in every few days and soaks the whole calendar.
I am not complaining. I have loved this sport my entire life, and a version of it that spills into more of the week is, to me, simply more of a good thing.
But by the usual accounting I have never quite belonged to this world. I am a queer man, and I root for the New England Patriots, which I have done for a quarter century from 300 miles away, in the heart of Philadelphia Eagles country. I am not the fan that the NFL pictures when it imagines its fans. But I have never once felt like an outcast because of it. Not for a single Sunday. I love the game too much and, if I am being candid, my team has usually been better than the one everyone around me worshiped, which does wonders for a boy’s sense of belonging.
I did not inherit the Eagles, which is the strange part. I grew up with a soft spot for the Miami Dolphins but no real allegiance to speak of until, at 18, I left Reading, Pennsylvania, for college in Boston in the fall of 2001 — the autumn that changed everyone. While the country was knocked sideways by the Sept. 11 attacks, I was a closeted kid alone in a new city, and football did something for me that I have never forgotten. It gave me somewhere to put my attention that was not the news, and it gave a shaken city a place to stand together and roar about something that would not break its heart.
I watched a sixth-round afterthought — the 199th pick in the draft, a kid nobody had wanted on their team — walk onto the field and start rewriting what was possible. A young gay man who also felt overlooked and underestimated needed that story like air.
Football and Boston also handed me Tom Brady. I watched a sixth-round afterthought — the 199th pick in the draft, a kid nobody had wanted on their team — walk onto the field and start rewriting what was possible. A young gay man who also felt overlooked and underestimated needed that story like air. I did not choose the safe local team that would have let me disappear into my own living room, which othered me even more. I did not care. My devotion crystallized right there, and it never left.
Simply saying “I like football” does not begin to cover it. There is the ritual, the way a whole week bends toward the game and then releases. There is the tunnel vision, that narrowing of the entire clamoring world down to 100 yards of grass and a single question of whether the men in my colors will get there. There is the joy, uncomplicated and total, of watching people who are the best on earth at a hard thing go and do the hard thing. And there is the part I did not understand until I was older: the sheer improbable fact of a fractured, exhausting country all looking at the same thing at the same moment and, if only for a few hours, agreeing that it matters. In an era when we cannot agree on an election result, a border or even a shared set of facts, tens of millions of us still gather, in living rooms and bars and group texts, around a game. That unison is not a small thing. Some Sundays football feels like the last public square we have left.
Like nearly everyone I grew up around in this corner of Pennsylvania, Sundays in our house were a congregation in green, and I was the lone holdout in the pew, quietly pulling for New England. It never once felt like rebellion. It felt like being comfortably, stubbornly myself in a room full of people I loved who simply happened to be wrong. I would not trade a single one of those afternoons.
I want to be careful here, because I can hear the question underneath all of this. Did no one ever try to make me feel like an outcast? Of course they did, or tried to. The casual homophobia of a sports bar is its own weather system: the slur used as punctuation, the assumption that every man watching is straight and would want it that way, the joke that lands a beat too hard. I heard all of it. What I want to be honest about is that it never made it inside me. Some of that was armor and luck; I am a big Greek man with a loud voice and a settled sense of myself, and the world tends to leave that alone. But most of it was a decision I had made long before anyone could get to me.
I had already given myself the thing they were threatening to withhold. You cannot evict a man from a house he has built himself. So when the slur came, I heard it as a fact about the person saying it and not a fact about me, and I went back to watching my team. I also know how much luck lives inside that sentence, and that not everyone who loves this game gets to be insulated the way I was.
Because there is a renegotiation that happens, quietly, every single season. Each fall I re-sign a contract nobody handed me: to love a league that has never quite figured out how to love me back, that still films its commercials as if I do not exist, that treats queer fans as a demographic to be discovered rather than a congregation that has been in the pews the whole time. Every year I decide again that the arrangement is worth it, that my belonging is mine to grant and not the NFL’s to approve. Most seasons I sign without thinking. In the ones where the culture around the game turns especially ugly, I feel the pen hesitate. And then kickoff comes, and I sign anyway.
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This is the part I cannot let slide. The league has, lately, started to grow up in public. Its partnership with Roc Nation dragged it, blinking, toward the current century, and in February it put Bad Bunny on the biggest stage it owns, producing a largely Spanish-language Super Bowl halftime show that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. That is real, and it matters.
But a halftime show is culture, not commitment, and the league’s honest scorecard is not flattering. Major League Baseball does more. The Premier League does more; my friends who love Arsenal will not stop telling me about the Gay Gooners, the oldest queer supporters’ group in the sport, embraced by the club itself. The NFL could do that kind of thing in its sleep, and mostly does not.
I am not asking the league to sign a player because he is gay. That would be its own kind of insult, and no one worth admiring wants a roster spot handed to him as a gesture. What I want is smaller and harder: scholarships for LGBTQ kids who play, real support for the high schools with an out athlete on the roster and no idea what to do about it, a hand extended to the boy in the locker room doing the terrifying math of whether he can be both things at once. I understand why that math is so hard. This is a sport that has not made coming out safe, where the silence is not cowardice but self-preservation. That is precisely why the NFL, and not the frightened kid, should be the one to move first.
Somewhere there is a gay kid watching alone with the sound down so no one asks why he loves this, certain the joy is not meant for him. He is the fan I actually want the league to reach, and it would cost them so little to do it.
I think about the fans, too, the ones who are not built the way I am. Not every queer person watching has my armor, or my volume, or my stubbornness. Somewhere there is a gay kid watching alone with the sound down so no one asks why he loves this, certain the joy is not meant for him. He is the fan I actually want the league to reach, and it would cost them so little to do it. A gesture that said plainly, in a stadium and not only in a press release: You are one of us, and you always were.
I love the camaraderie of football, the friends, the shouting, the shared table. With one exception, and it is a firm one. When my Patriots are in a real one, a season-on-the-line one, all hands come off deck. I do not want the party then. I want my own home, the door closed, the room quiet, the tunnel vision at full strength. Some things you can only feel properly alone. The people who love me know by now not to text me in the fourth quarter of a close one. I will see them at the funeral or the parade, whichever the game decides to hand out that day.
As a Greek man, I know something about elaborate systems of belief. I do not have faith in gods the way my ancestors had faith in Zeus. But I will confess, with very little shame, that for the better part of two decades I believed in Tom Brady, and that a fourth-quarter comeback was the closest thing to a miracle I ever expected to be handed. Every religion needs its saints, and mine wore number 12.
And yes, since we are being honest, there are the smaller pleasures a queer fan is uniquely equipped to appreciate. The team spirit. The devotion. The physics of enormous men throwing themselves at each other over a leather ball. There are also the uniforms, which I will note, with love and no apology, are cut to flatter in ways the league does not put in its marketing and I have never once failed to notice. I bring it up not to be crude but because it is simply true, and because the fan the NFL imagines is never me, and yet I have been in the stands the whole time regardless, seeing exactly what I see, loving exactly what I love, needing no one’s blessing to do either.
That, in the end, is what “never fully belonging” has actually meant for me. Not exile. Not grievance. Just the plain fact that I was never the default fan, the assumed fan, the one the cameras cut to in the crowd. I was the Greek kid in Eagles Country pulling for New England, and the gay man in the most hypermasculine room in American culture, and at no point did either fact make me love the game one degree less, or feel one degree less entitled to every second of it. Belonging, I worked out early, is not something a room grants you. It is something you decide. I decided, at about six years old, that this game was mine, and no one has ever managed to talk me out of it.
So the season is here again, more of it than ever, and my Patriots are back chasing redemption for the Super Bowl they lost in February. I will be exactly where I always am. In my own home more often than not, my door shut on the close ones, tunnel vision on, one small part of the enormous quiet congregation of a country doing a single thing together. The wrong team, the wrong fan, by every conventional measure an outsider. And, by the only measure that has ever counted to me, completely, joyfully, permanently at home.
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from Dimitrios Aletras Jr.
