The initial tone of the media response, reflecting the group disappointment, seemed to be full of hate, bile and in The Sun in particular - according to one note samba band Peter Tatchell - homophobia. Yet it became clear, as the news emerged that the young lads had put their tempers behind them and swapped conciliatory texts, that there was, in the events and the reporting of the events, indeed, the whole of the World Cup tourney, an undercurrent - nay, roaring overcurrent - of enthusiastically encouraged, extremely gay, very dirty man love more torrid because of its occlusion than anything from the more overt works of Tom of Finland or Pat Califia.
A close reading of the Sun's "offending" page, from top to well-slicked bottom, ilustrates the hands of masters. The banner at the top in the print version was: 'line up to lash the rat', a phrase dripping with associations, allusions. A line-up, gang-bang, 'lash the rat' also appears to be a masturbation euphemism, which given the page's pin-up potential and its proximity to the peaks of page 3 was clearly an incitement to priapismic pulling. There is also the idea of corporal punishment for the pretty young boy who is considered dirty, verminous... lashing with its suggestion of knots, the British naval tradition - 'One in the eye' like Admiral Nelson, whose own 'column' towers over the centre of London - a tradition which, as Winston Churchill once remarked, was naught but 'Rum, sodomy and the lash'.
The phallic tones continue. The headline is underlined by a dart bigger than the actual dart board. Coupled with the military fetishes suggested in the preceding words, we are clearly embarking on a dangerous s&m fantasia with suggestions of uniformed men exacting humiliating revenge. Portugal's small population producing a team capable of beating the better paid and resourced English squad is an affront, the contemporary trope of disproportionate response dictates the unleashing of missiles to 'give Ronaldo one in the eye...' The dart clearly also represents the penis, with the chiselled oval of the flight suggesting both dynamism and a bulbous techno-scrotum of war... We are BETTER, BIGGER, HARDER than Portugal.
The 'Portuguese nancy boy' Ronaldo is the'world's biggest winker', a specifically English wordplay joke, which yet also suggests the other perennial News International favourite topic of cruising men identifying themselves with a brief flutter of the eyelid. Vada that omi-paloni. Ronaldo's eye is the bullseye, the 'bull's eye' connoting associated rural virility, Pamplonic danger... And again the collision, the coupling, of technology with organism. The target with its radiating filaments is overtly a stylised wire and rubber facsimile of the anus. For numerologists and da Vinci code acrostic enthusiasts: the numbers 9, 12,5,20,1,18 and 4, arrayed around the winker's head in a halo, add up to 69.
There is the fact that the 'nancy boy', the Portuguese mince-o-war, his pouty, smirking insolence repellant, got away with it. These sordid, sordid practices succeed. The overall tone of the piece leads one ineluctably to the Carravagian image of Cristiano Ronaldo as the kneeling recipient of a healthy English six gun salute in the bukkake mode.
The trophy is the phallus in excelcis, like Pele's forearm holding a grapefruit. The reaction of the eventual winners, Italy, was supremely fetishistic, an admixture of lingam worship and Roman Catholic ritual, all stooping to kiss the cup, to caress, to lay hands upon it, to revere the trophy-cock. The bitter seeds of frustration crust on our lips. Here's what we could have won, says The Sun, wisting: It should have been us...
Tatchell just isn't trying hard enough!
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