Gay Games

 
Who You'll Meet In Sydney
Hitting the Ice in the Northeast

By Cyd Zeigler Jr.

When a four-year-old Kevin Battistelli was first put on ice skates and told by his father that he had to play hockey, Kevin’s reaction was anything but predictable.

“I loved it,” Kevin says.  “I hated football, but I loved hockey.”

Kevin, now 28, has been playing hockey ever since:  first in Manchester, NH, the town he grew up in, and most recently with the New York City Gay Hockey Association (NYCGHA).  Skating with a gay team provides a comfort level that Kevin never quite felt skating with his high school team or other mostly straight teams.

 “[With a gay team,] nobody cares about anything but enjoying each others’ company and having a great time.  It’s all about the sport.” 

With his high school team, Kevin was often called “fagboy,” even though he wasn’t out.  He attributes that to not having a girlfriend while most of his teammates had cheerleaders on their arms.  Kevin never took offense at the comments.  “They didn’t know I was gay,” he says.  “It was just something they said.”

“Fag” is a term thrown around in the locker room often not to say someone is gay, but to denote them as weak – a misperception that gay men face in sport or otherwise.  “A lot of people don’t understand that you can be gay and be competitive,” Kevin says.

Despite the name-calling, Kevin knew he was gay since he was 11 – the crushes on his teammates were a dead giveaway.  Playing hockey, basketball and volleyball in high school, “there’d always be one or two guys on the team that caught my eye,” he says.

Playing with a gay team in New York City offered him the chance to play with other guys just like him, and to be away from the heterosexually-driven locker room bantering that dominates so many teams.  Even the straight teams he has played against in New York have stayed away from attacking his and his teammates’ sexuality, for the most part.

Kevin has recently moved back to New Hampshire after his long stint in New York City doing work he just didn’t like.  While it may be quite a bit further to travel to his hockey games (he does still travel to tournaments with the team), it’s considerably closer to his boyfriend in Boston.

Kevin has also garnered quite a bit of attention recently, gracing the cover of the NYCGHA 2002 calendar in his skivvies.  Kevin feels the point of that calendar, and of being an out gay athlete, is much more than simply self-serving himself or his team.  He uses it to reach out to gay men who may be timid about playing sports. 

“If you don’t play a sport because you’re afraid you might not do well, you’ll never know how great it can be.” 

Thanks to that calendar, 20-40 e-mails come in every week from admirers in, and outside of, New York City.  Most of them admire his willingness to be an out athlete.  Others enjoy seeing him in briefs with a hockey stick.

Both Kevin and his boyfriend take the latter in stride.

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For more information on Kevin, the NYCGHA, and their 2002 calendar, visit their Web site.

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Outsports.com co-founder Cyd Zeigler is also the Sports Editor for Genre Magazine.  His "Jocks" stories appear there monthly.