“Queer not as being about who you’re having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.” - bell hooks 

“When I criticize a system, they think I criticize them and that is of course because they fully accept the system and identify themselves with it”. - Thomas Merton

No, I Am Not Ready For Some Football

I’ve always found it easy to provoke anger in men, most often by simply being apathetic about anything involving sports. In Kentucky, a state obsessed with college athletics, being uninformed is rare. If you were to rattle off the 10 or 20 most famous Kentucky athletes, I’d only recognize one name, and that’s Muhammad Ali, and how are you not gonna recognize Muhammad Ali? (If you want my opinion on Kentucky notables, ask me about my favorite poet laureate.)

My grandfather (who loves me) gets frustrated when I don’t know the latest gossip out of Rupp Arena. My father (who is incapable of love) would roll his eyes and point his sausage fingers at the screen whenever I wandered past the couch during a U of L football game and asked, in what I thought was an attempt at connection, “Who is winning?”

As a freakishly big sixth grader (5’10”, 140 pounds, 11 years old) I truly stood out physically. Once, on my way to the cafeteria, a man I knew only as “The Coach” stopped me in the hallway and offered me a spot on “The Team.” 

When I asked him to which team he was referring he threw his shoulders back and said “THE team. The FOOTBALL team.”

“Oh. No thank you,” I said, turning on my heels and heading to lunch. “I don’t know how to play football.” 

The Coach grabbed my shoulder and spun me back towards him. He pulled me in close and did not release my shoulder.

“You’re a big kid,” he said, eyeing me like a prize pig. “You’re gonna get bigger. We could use a man like you on the line.” 

“What’s the line?”

He huffed. “The DEFENSIVE line. The big guys who try to tackle the quarterback.”

“Who’s the-”

“They told me you were a wiseass,” he said, poking me in the chest with the hand that wasn’t already gripping my shoulder like a vise.

He shoved me away and walked off, shaking his head and muttering. 

If it wasn’t anger or disappointment, my disinterest in sports created a kind of glee in men. Playing street hockey at my friend’s house, the adults who played with us would always insist I play goalie. I was actually a pretty decent goalie and had fun playing that position - but that’s not why they put me there. 

“Feels good hitting balls at that boy,” one adult said to my friend’s father, who smiled and nodded. 

“My son’s always had queer taste in friends,” he replied in agreement.

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The Riker Of It All

The Icarus Factor focuses on Commander William T. Riker and his promotion to captain of the starship Aries. To prepare for this opportunity, Riker first requires a detailed briefing of the Aries’s current mission, stating that this will be a deciding factor in whether he accepts the post. While he insists the promotion is not a given, the people around him are practically calling him captain already. Jean-Luc Picard is particularly pleased, eyes wide as he tells Riker there “really is no substitute for holding the reins” and raw-dogging space exploration. 

It turns out the expert Starfleet sent to brief Riker is actually Will’s estranged father, Kyle. Eventually we learn that, after his mother’s death when he was an infant, Will was raised solely by his father…for about 13 years. Then Kyle split, leaving the teenage Will to fend for himself. If my math is right, Riker is about 31 years old during this episode, which means he was probably a sophomore in high school when his father left.

The Riker Conflict boils down to this: Kyle insists that he was as good a dad as he could’ve been in the given circumstances, and therefore he deserves forgiveness for all his fatherly failings. Will (correctly) responds that as the father, Kyle was responsible for raising him, no matter the difficulties. Both men are MAD. Will says Kyle was a BAD DAD. Kyle says to Will “you’re no son.”

A lot of dads hate being reminded that they are fathers. My own father was always surprised when I needed a ride someplace, or a signature on something from school. “Can’t your mother handle that?” he’d ask, waving me away with the tv remote. Kyle and my father want it to be both ways, where they are recognized as exceptionally important, accomplished, and educated men who could not possibly be expected to handle being a parent. (Kyle goes so far as to suggest that in the 24th century there aren’t ANY texts to prepare parents-to-be, which is a lie! He’s a liar!)   

Kyle sees Will as an extension of himself, and takes Will’s successes as his own. But his constant need for validation (wandering around the Enterprise dropping non-sequiturs like “I may have something of a reputation for excellence”) is completely transparent. In a brief encounter where she flexes her therapeutic skills, Counselor Troi nails Kyle to the wall with her assertion that more than respect, pride, or candor, honesty is the value Will Riker values most. She goes on to challenge Kyle, prodding him to “honestly consider why you’re so competitive with your own son.”

How shall this matter be resolved? On a show like this you may have expected a calm conversation in the briefing room with everyone reclined in purple office chairs. Or perhaps a discussion mediated by Counselor Troi, in her office. 

No, I’m sorry, but despite the totally sane objections of both Dr. Pulaski and Counselor Troi these are Men and Men who Can’t Handle Feelings have to use FISTS. That’s right, the Riker boys choose violence expressed through the fictional martial art of anbo-jyutsu.

Sports Are Silly

This episode is notable because of what comes next: the frankly hilarious combat scene between Will Riker and his father Kyle. But as silly as it is to watch it’s also one of the most quietly upsetting scenes in all TNG. I quite agree with Dr. Pulaski that this sort of “contest,” as Kyle puts it, is nothing more than gussied up violence. You may think I’m overreacting, and that high-contact sports like football, basketball, and anbo-jyutsu are just a fun pastime, but there’s more to violence than physical touch. Have you ever seen a man yelling at a tv screen? Violence begets violence.

The adult men in my life didn’t want me to have fun playing games, they wanted to use my body for violence, to exert control over others, to maintain dominance over me. Kyle’s attempts at dominating his son are unbecoming of a father, a diplomat, and a Federation citizen. I want to laugh in his dumb fucking face when he says “she may have been your mother but she was my wife,” as though an infant, motherless Will should’ve been responsible for his father’s well-being.  

A lot of the tension over sports lies in the unwillingness to admit that they, particularly those popular in the US, are deeply silly things. The uniforms are silly, the overly complicated rules are silly, the fact that the most popular sports seem to fixate on balls and big sticks is silly. We try to hide the silly behind national anthems and fighter jet flyovers, but that just adds to the silliness! (These are not highly evolved or particularly original feelings about athletic competition, but in a place like Kentucky, recognizing the silly in sports is one of the simplest queer things you can do.) 

You can’t hide the silly of anbo-jyutsu. Once they are kitted out like lobsters and swinging bulbous-ended sticks at each other, the “fight” allows them to deliver some awkward, boilerplate father-son dialogue about who’s disappointing who and who loved mom the most. The match ends as quickly as it began when Will catches his father using an illegal move. 

Kyle admits that he has always cheated, to make sure Will keeps “coming back for more.” He suggests that the conflict, the battle, the basic disagreement of Who Hurts More? is all he and Will have connecting them. The scene progresses, but the characters are stuck here. Even if someday they can forgive, neither of them will ever forget.

Riker turns down war-like Aries in favor of staying second banana on the diplomatically minded flagship Enterprise. This isn’t the first time he’s declined the captain’s chair, and it won’t be the last. In the end, he made his own best choice.

What’s Up With Worf?

Elsewhere on the Enterprise, Worf is in a mood. Well, a particularly noteworthy mood, prompting Wesley Crusher to note that he’s not behaving normally, at least “not normal for Worf.” 

Wesley, Data, and Geordi put their noggins together and apply the scientific method to solving the problem of Worf. After a little observation and some research, Wesley uncovers the cause of Worf’s disquietude; it’s the 10th Anniversary of his Age of Ascension, a sort of second bat mitzvah for Klingons, but he has no Klingons with which to celebrate.

After inviting Transporter Chief Miles O’Brien (who is always down to clown ‘til he’s in the ground), the boys arrange a holodeck surprise party for Worf, where he will be able to experience ascension in the presence of his friends and some holographic Klingon compatriots. 

While none of the boyfriends particularly enjoy the rite (it involves Worf being stuck with “painstiks”)  they respect it enough to bear witness, and understand that it is important to Worf. While the ceremony does mimic violence, they see the essentially self-inflicted pain as a spiritual practice of endurance, not as a substitute for war. Even Dr. Pulaski, who correctly identified the anbo-jyutsu match for the poor excuse for father-son violence it was, recognizes Worf’s ascension as a form of self-flagellation done (more or less) safely under the watchful eye of a medical professional.

There is only one conflict in this part of the episode, and that is Worf’s internal struggle to celebrate himself while living in a place outside the Klingon culture to which he adheres so closely. His friends witness the fallout of this struggle, and do their best to aid Worf through genuine curiosity and kindness. Their generosity of time and spirit is what makes Trek special. 

“We are his family,” Data says.

Final Thoughts On Fathers

I’m blessed to be dear friends with men who take after the non-Rikers of this episode, and make up some of the Best Dads in the entire galaxy. They are not in competition with their children, nor do they expect their children to engage with the world as combatants. I don’t think any of the dads I call friends will ever need to defeat their sons in the ring to prove some nebulous Point. Between now and the 24th century I expect we will simply outgrow the Kyle Riker’s of the galaxy; someday there will be no more bad dads.

Next Time On Ekphrastic Trek

Eventually I was coerced into spending one season on the wrestling team which I was assured would be more like random roughhousing than a strictly organized sport. My mother told me I looked surprised whenever my opponent scored a particularly hard takedown, as though they didn’t realize we were just supposed to be goofing around. Satisfied that I lacked anything like a competitive drive, my parents and teachers no longer expected my participation in sports. By high school my size leveled out and I was able to blend into crowds of students, no longer of unsolicited interest to the adult men in my school. 

At some point I started taking acting classes and performing in community productions, and theatre would be the driving force of my life for the next few decades. Yes, despite the ubiquity of and pressure to participate in sports, I always preferred playing dress up to playing ball. Which man could I look to to support that desire, validate it, even encourage it? LeVar Fucking Burton, that’s who.

Tune in next week when we examine Elementary, Dear Data and how Trek helped me embrace my love of dress up and pretend!

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