A few nights ago I had a sex dream about Tom Brady. I have never been a fan of the Patriots but there I was, eagerly sucking his long quarterback dick, delighted that he would let me. Usually I am a top who describes himself as vers, but in this instance, had it gone there, I would have bottomed for Tom. I would have been his fawning sub, draped my arms around his neck as he savaged me on the massage table where he had been lying prostrate when I crept in from the waking world. As it happens, the scenario did not go there; we hovered for hours on the edge of consummation and survived more than one threat of interruption from half-seen apparitions calling Tom or me away. (The haters, the losers.) Tom looked me in the eyes and assured me in his throbbing California voice. He told the intruders to back off before they could enter the frame, and we continued on our merry way, round and round after round, until a sound he couldn’t silence broke the scene: beep beep.

I have, I admit, dallied with football—or, rather, with an interest in it. 

Throwing isn’t one of my strong suits and concussions haven’t won me over. I’ve never played. But I did spend my first eighteen years of life in central Mississippi, where the sport can accurately, if unoriginally, be described as part of the social fabric and where, in 2000, at age seven, I watched my town’s high school team, the Clinton Arrows, plow through the playoffs and into the state championship game, which they lost badly to the underdog, 45-15, on a night I remember as boring and bitterly cold. By the start of high school, football and its jocks had become something to make fun of, masculinity straining until it shit itself, and Friday night games a place to be drunk or high or both in public. But through most seasons I continued to follow the action in the NFL week to week—for example, when the Patriots went 16-0 in the 2007 regular season and Tom set what was then the single-season touchdown record for a passer, only to lose, in the Super Bowl, to Eli Manning’s Giants, to whom I and many around me felt some allegiance since Eli played in college for Ole Miss, the destination university for students from my high school. And on ESPN’s website I would click through the stats pages and glance through the weekly Power Rankings, paying dull attention to which team was where, who was playing whom, and making unconsidered predictions to myself about who would win and lose. Some days I went so far as to watch Sportscenter.

I spent my adolescence fighting the good fight, i.e., deep in the closet. So yes, one might assume that my ambivalent interest in football derived from a desire to stake my claim on heterosexuality and in the southern heteropatriarchy; that, noticing my interests lay outside of what seemed acceptable for Mississippi boys, I redoubled my efforts to like or at least follow football and to participate, however half-heartedly, in the celebration of a sport that valorizes macho violence while sweeping domestic abuses and the risk of lifelong brain damage under the rug. The try-hard squall of military aircraft sweeping over stadiums of fans and the warm, pitchy hum of the anthem washing over billionaire owners in high glass boxes: sick, bro, I may have thought. 

Or, alternatively, one might venture that I simply wanted to have something ‘neutral’ to talk about at gatherings with my family, nearly all of whom—cousins, aunts, uncles, parents, grandparents, and sisters—loved the game. Politics was unspeakable and religion reserved for blessings. We had municipal failings to discuss and the stray family absurdity to recount, but we had little else, at least when everyone was healthy. Worst of all, one might think that I actually just liked football, that I relished the crack of helmet on helmet, the delicate brush of the quarterback’s fingertips on the center’s groin before the snap, and the piling up of men. 

What is certain is that, between 2006 and 2011, in the evenings after middle and later high school, I was very often cooped up in my house, and specifically in my room, with little to do but explore the internet on a semi-functional Toshiba laptop-cum-tablet my school had mandated I acquire at the start of ninth grade and, before that, via a constantly-overheating hand-me-down one of my sisters had abandoned when she left for college. Porn took up a lot of bandwidth. The obvious is true. But after one or two or three or four sessions, when I couldn’t look at dick anymore—or, if I never arrived at that point, at least between sessions, when one had ended but I was not ready to begin the next—I would have to find another way to occupy myself. Then I would hear it: ambient cheering, an announcer’s explanation of a coach’s dissension, a referee’s confirmation of the ruling on the field. Football filtered from the living room television, through my house’s thin walls, and into me. It nestled in the lungs. It beat through the blood. It flitted from my fingers to the search bar. And so I kept track of football the way one keeps track of the weather, an absentminded investment punctuated by bolts of leering cathexis when the winds began to whip just so. 

Porn held my attention more consistently. I favored amateurish videos for what I took to be their proximity to reality in comparison to the too-clean productions of professionals, whose depictions of sex struck me, a teenaged virgin desperate for proof that what I yearned to do was done by civilians outside of filmic utopias, as grossly, offensively unreal. But I still encountered the polished content of major studios, Sean Cody chief among them. It was unavoidable, and still is, flashing in the boxed advertisements on the sidebars of other porn sites, popping up in stray windows and tabs, or presented illegally in bootlegged extracts on sites that depend on user-uploaded content. Some days and nights I ended up watching them. 

The Sean Cody aesthetic trends white, muscular, boyish in the All-American, masculine sense, and the studio then required its models have no prior pornographic experience, little body hair, and, typically, large genitalia. The models often look, in other words, like football players, but not any football players—not running backs, linebackers, or cornerbacks, and not the 70% of players in the NFL who, in 2021, for example, were Black men. They look like quarterbacks, white quarterbacks, the hoary fantasy of white quarterbacks: tall and muscled, smiling and chiseled, affecting an approachable earnestness that disguises but also points to their unattainability. They’re the jocks of high school dreams, James Van Der Beek and Paul Walker in Varsity Blues, stripped nude and paid to fuck each other for the studio’s enrichment and the pleasure of viewers at home. We the fans see them taken and taking, not by us or our surrogate, but by themselves, by variations on a theme. The flash of glossy, milk-toothed images on the monitor fulfills us, perhaps, if only briefly. Bodies pose as if in pleasure, as if satisfied, and we bask in their ersatz ecstasy, so finely machined and long-lasting. On another screen the anthem erupts. Eyes water. Hands cover hearts. Planes pass over and men blitz in the shadow of the flag. Depending on our preferences we hope for a struggle, a tight game, or total domination; at the least we deserve unlikely feats of athleticism. And no one provides them like Tom. 

Even amid my most potent storms of interest in football, I despised Tom. I hated his accomplishments and loathed what I gleaned of his politics. Yet he fascinated me. I couldn’t turn my eyes away: fifty touchdowns in a season, seven championships, throws to Randy Moss, to Wes Welker, to Rob Gronkowski, quiet sideline conferences with Coach Belichick. In his defeats I felt glory and something else. At his successes I scowled—and something else. Oh Tom. He of the dimpled chin and long forehead, the high mountain cheeks and fine brown hair, his eyes hazy blue and his indignation righteous: the valiant cheater, the consummate winner, the 6’5” forty-four-year-old MAGA man-boy who has never eaten a strawberry, husband to Gisele, the word incarnate, fantasy made flesh: he—you—slipped into my dreams, slipped into my mouth, a gentle smirk upon yours as you saddled your balls across my nose, landed your taint on the space between my eyes. I eagerly pleased you; I was eager to until I awoke, hard and embarrassed, the memory of your tight hypnotic lips freshly sour upon mine as I spilled myself upon myself in the curtained morning light. 

The impulse to submit to an icon of Americana, to be accepted, enfolded, and fucked in the arms of sculptural big-brand whiteness, lurks in the unconscious, streaks through the unconscious, and, now and again, manifests itself in no uncertain terms. When it appears, the impulse can register as funny and strange. There is little to do, I might say, but laugh and gasp at the sleeping brain’s capacity for infiltration by and surrender to the symbols one’s waking self professes to loathe—all manner of media implore us to admire the Tom’s of the world, after all, so how could our dreams hope to preclude the occasional love affair? How could they expect not to moonlight as an index of our repressed fascinations? I can dismiss the coupling, if I like, as a one-off movement of the mind, a freak weather event that will not repeat for another hundred years. I can play back the footage, unfurl charts on my living room floor, impale them with pins here and there, and plot out in exacting detail how my visions of Tom might have come to be until, at last, a tidy picture of cause-and-effect peers up at me, one that might allow me to believe that I can predict or even counteract future recurrences of the Buccaneer. Or I can tell myself that whatever Tom’s visit was, an isolated incident or part of a larger pattern, it was a dream, and dreams are nothing but dreams. They are to be seen and then forgotten, like pornography after the tabs and laptop close.

Of course, some people prefer to remember, to work through in their preferred medium; some people are exhibitionists.