Anyone for tennis?

ADULT: Barry Lowe’s twink muse Gavin has taken up a new sporting interest – tennis. And not even the anti-gay words of a former tennis champion can keep him away from Rafael Nadal.

“What is it with sporting people?” Gavin asked after he’d flung aside the newspaper report of Margaret Court’s bad mouthing of gay marriage and German national football captain Philipp Lahm saying his sport and its spectators aren’t quite ready for the sight of gay professional footballers. “Well, I’m sick of all these fuckers. I’m hereby boycotting tennis…”

“Gavin,” I said patiently because he is comparatively young, even in gay years, although he sees himself as old beyond his gay years politically, “You don’t watch tennis. You say it gives you a crick in the neck following the ball even though your head bobs three times as fast and in more directions when you watch man balls on the nude beach.”

He wouldn’t be mollified. “It’s not like Margaret did anything important. All she did was hit a fuckin’ ball over a net.”

“But she hit it very well and better than most of the others who played tennis at the time.”

“I’m pretty expert at wiping my ass with my left hand even though I’m right-handed but I don’t see them naming a park or a street after me let alone a bloody tennis court,” he moaned.

“Perhaps if you let your local council know, they’ll name a public lavatory after you,” I suggested.

He loved the idea, his sporting boycott forgotten. I could almost hear the cogs in his brain as he envisaged a glittering dunny at Taylor Square named in his honour.

Oh, dear lord, what have I unleashed?

The only positive I could take from the glazed look in his eyes was that Gavin’s attention span is about as long as the first squirt of a male orgasm – forget the follow-up.

For example, during the furore over the ‘transphobic’ ad for Libra tampons that insinuated only ‘real’ women wear sanitary pads, Gavin was heard to say loudly, “Why didn’t the drag queen just flop her dick out, that would have put the ‘real woman’ in her place.”

I tried to shoosh him by pointing out he was being sexist as well as…well, I could think of a dozen or so ‘phobics’ and ‘ists’ he was being.

He looked shamefaced and as a penance took to wearing an opposition brand tampon at every opportunity. An unexpected side effect was, he said, that it really got him in touch with his feminine side. Of course, no one knew he was protesting the Libra ad except for those people he met in darkened sex-on-premises venues and toilets in bars. He gave up his campaign after a day or two because his pick-ups would discover the string dangling from his asshole and think it loads of fun to pull on it. It was costing him a fortune.

His boycott of tennis should have been comparatively easy for someone who believes even watching sport on television is too exhausting; besides his young twink body is trim, taut and terrific without the aid of, in his words, ‘artificial exercise’. So I was somewhat surprised to visit him at home a few days later, dropping in some notes he wanted for his uni course, to hear the roar of what sounded suspiciously like a sporting crowd. Gavin rarely locks his door during the day and early evening as he’s big on lying naked on his coffee table, his arse exposed when tricks come through his front door.

I did the usual and barged straight in. It was one of those sights where you want to pluck your eyes out. Gavin was on said coffee table, his legs spread, a tennis racquet inserted in his capacious arse. I’d love to report it was the stringed end, but it wasn’t. He was fixated on one of the players on the screen. Rafael Nadal. He’d seen his photo in a newspaper and had to watch him in action.

The tennis champ had broken Gavin’s political will just by being so damn gorgeous.

I left Gavin to his penetrating affair with tennis when he made the astute observation, “There’s a lot more to it than just hitting a ball over a net, you know”.