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Page 1 of 2 New TV series featuring a gay basketball team breaks out of reality show mold
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When I first heard about Logo’s new series titled 'Shirts & Skins,' I was worried that it would be thrust into the MTV reality show cookie-cutter, and that Logo would trivialize sports into focusing on shirtless jocks, made-up drama and people behaving like fools in hopes of 15 minutes of reality fame.
I am happy to say those worries have been totally shut down. What the creators of the show have developed in their docu-series is a testament to the diversity of gay people and what should be a source of real inspiration for young gay men who, more and more, don’t want to turn their backs on sports. There’s drama, there are shirtless jocks, but it’s organic to basketball and the show, and that makes it all the more real.
A little disclosure here. I’ve know the creator of the show, Bill Kendall, for over 10 years; and one of the stars of the series, Rory Ray, has been a friend and Web developer at Outsports.com for years. Still, as they’ll both tell you, I generally speak my mind with truth; so while my friendship with them may have been able to color my watching of the show slightly, I don’t think it affects this analysis much.
The show follows the players, managers and coaches of the Rock Dogs, a gay basketball team based in San Francisco. They’re not just a team, they’re quite possibly the best ever, winning more Gay Games gold medals than any other basketball team and dominating the gay basketball scene for various stretches over its two-decade-long history.
This incarnation of the team, with a relatively new crop of players, has rented a house in San Francisco to live together for two weeks and train for the National Gay Basketball Association championship in Chicago (it’s better known in gay sports circles as the Coady Roundball Classic). The series follows the team as they practice, plan and scrimmage, and of course, end up learning more about themselves and their teammates as gay men who don’t quite fit the stereotypical gay mold.
The basketball-playing is hot. It’s impossible to watch this team play without recognizing they are talented indeed. They’re dunking, stealing and passing with the best I’ve seen in amateur basketball. In fact, these guys are so talented that it’s almost impossible to believe them when they talk about how difficult the climactic championship tournament will be for them in the final episode. With that much talent, and two weeks together in a house to prepare exclusively for the tournament, I would be shocked if the Rock Dogs (who are the tournament’s defending champions) didn’t win every game in the final episode, and win them by double digits. But then, I’m the guy who picked the Patriots to win the Super Bowl last year. We’ll see.
In the first episode, gay viewers will surely love how this team of out-and-proud players takes it to the straight guys in a scrimmage with the San Francisco Fire Department. Also fun to watch is how they school a group of straight guys they play in a pick-up game (leaving one of them puking on the sideline). As we hear several times from the players, they love being the fags that beat the straight guys. Kendall wanted to take aim at the stereotype that gay men can’t play sports, and this show delivers that like Karl Malone.
However, the show also isn’t afraid to showcase these guys being gayer than Dennis Rodman in a boa. You forget the dribbling and dunks when these guys are naming designers with ease, calling teammates “she” and snapping their fingers and spinning their necks around like Men On Film.
Some people might attack the show for these perceived stereotypes, but it’s one of the reasons I enjoyed it the most, and the show’s creators deserve praise for keeping it in there. As out former NBA player John Amaechi, who stops by to offer some insight, tells the guys: you can play basketball and drink fruity drinks; they’re not mutually exclusive. I love that these guys get that, and that they’re not afraid to fall into some stereotypes while at the same time shattering others. That takes a lot more guts than being fake and ordering a Guinness when they’re really dying for a Cosmo.
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