the real reason for the backlash against male nfl cheerleaders
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Right-wing media recently lost their minds when the Minnesota Vikings announced that they were adding two men to the cheerleading squad. Blaize Shiek and Louie Conn are the two newest members of the Minnesota Vikings Cheerleaders (MVC), as well as the subject of a week(s)-long media frenzy about how men aren’t men anymore or something.
The negative responses have ranged from threats to cancel season ticket packages, to washed up "Hercules" actor Kevin Sorbo whinging that he’ll need to find a new team to cheer for, to NFL player Antonio Brown throwing a homophobic slur at the pair. But the discourse went even further off the rails when Fox News host Will Cain begged Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to intervene and rid the Vikings of their male cheerleaders. (Hegseth is a Minneapolis native and self-proclaimed Vikings superfan.)
As
points out at The Present Age newsletter, “Cain made this big show of explaining how he's totally fine with male cheerleaders — the ‘right’ kind, anyway. The Texas A&M kind. The burly guys who throw women in the air. What he's not okay with? His exact words: ‘male cheerleaders being female cheerleaders.’”
Nevermind, of course, that the NFL has had male cheerleaders since at least 2018, when Napoleon Jinnies and Quinton Peron joined the LA Rams cheer squad and made history by performing at Super Bowl LIII in 2019. The New England Patriots added Steven Sonntag and Driss Dallahi to their squad the next season. And at least 11 NFL cheerleading teams will take the field with men on their rosters this season.
So why have the Vikings caused an uproar over what has become a well-established practice? The tipping point seems to be the rising fascism under the second Trump administration, and with it, increased homophobia and transphobia leading to a more militant enforcing of traditional gender norms by popular right wing figures that’s spilling over into mainstream culture.
Cheerleading is an American-invented sport that began as an exclusively masculine activity, and is now perceived almost entirely as feminine. Different types of cheerleaders also carry different stigmas; competitive, elite cheerleading is entirely different from collegiate sideline cheerleading, which is distinct from NFL cheerleading. Those distinctions reveal a lot about the cultural response we are seeing to the men on the Viking cheer squad.
And to understand why, we need a little history lesson.
Cheerleading began as a strictly male activity on the sidelines of collegiate football games at the end of the 19th century. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who graduated from Harvard University in 1903, was emblematic of the cheerleader of the day. I’m actually kind of obsessed with this very horny New York Times description of the Stanford University cheerleaders from 1924:
“A contemporary of Pericles, strolling into one of our football stadiums, would … delight in those lithe, white-sweatered and flannel-trousered youths in front of the bleachers, their mingled force and grace, their gestures at the same time hieratic and apparently jointless, that accompanied the spelling out of the locomotive cheer. And even an ancient Greek pulse would halt for a moment at the final upward leap of the young body, like a diver into the azure, as the stands thundered out the climactic, ‘Stanford!’”
Male college students were seen as members of the social elite through the first half of the 20th century, and thus future leaders of the country. “Yell leaders were highly charismatic, highly visible, solo performers who emerged or were selected because of their popularity, personality, or perceived leadership abilities,” writes Mary Ellen Hanson in her 1995 book, Go! Fight! Win!: Cheerleading in American Culture. As a result, their role on the sidelines was seen as equally important to that of the quarterback on the field: Both were demonstrating leadership qualities that would benefit them later in life.
“The reputation of having been a valiant ‘cheer-leader’ is one of the most valuable things a boy can take away from college,” reads a 1911 article in The Nation. “As a title to promotion in professional or public life, it ranks hardly second to that of having been a quarter-back.” In 1924, Literary Digest explained that the rigorous audition process for becoming a cheerleader was due to the position's "high honor.”
Around that time, skills like acrobatics and tumbling became valued on the sideline. Simultaneously, the sideline roles for men and women diverged; even as some colleges opened their doors to women for the first time, they often barred women from performing these highly physical acts because they were considered too dangerous. Women's voices were also deemed too soft to be heard in the stands. When they were added to squads, they were seen more as a decorative element.
Women were pushed into song girl and pom squads, early prototypes for the dance squads we now associate with professional cheerleading teams. These groups would wave pom pons and lead the crowd in singing alongside the band. What we know today as “professional cheerleading” actually “owes more to the drill team and dance team than to the cheerleading squad,” Hanson writes.
The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders (DCC) are the blueprint for modern NFL cheer squads. Tex Schramm, the Cowboys general manager who originated the DCC in 1971, envisioned them as “atmosphere producers” in the stadium — beautiful women who could dance like the Rockettes. Or, as a 1980 story in the Denver Post described them, “go-go dancers on the sidelines.”
The DCC became a national sensation thanks to television broadcasts that focused on the pom lines rather than the action on the field between plays. ABC television sports director Andy Sidaris is often credited with popularizing the “honey shot.” He once famously said, “Once you’ve seen one huddle, you’ve seen them all,” and was described by Los Angeles magazine in 1980 as “the man who brings T & A from the gridiron to your home,” as well as being “to cheerleaders what Hugh Hefner has been to centerfolds.”
(At the time, the National Women’s Football League, the first (and so far only) women’s pro football league in the U.S. that ran from 1974-1988, effectively countered the NFL's objectification of women. While reporting Hail Mary, the book on the NWFL that I co-authored with Lyndsay D’Arcangelo, we discovered that the Columbus Pacesetters had an all-male cheer squad made up mostly of gay men. “The beauty of the Pacesetters was that kids got to unlock all this gender nonsense,” said Linda Stamps, a founding member of the Pacesetters. Kids of any gender could come to a game and see a different path for themselves, whether it was on the field or on the sidelines.)
NFL cheerleading has, from its inception, been designed as eye candy for the presumably straight men watching the games. NFL women cheerleaders have fought for nearly a century to be taken seriously. Their pay is still negligible, the years they spend training to make the squads go largely uncredited and the hours upon hours they rehearse to prepare for game days go largely unnoticed. They are subject to sexual harassment, abuse, and chronic devaluement. The most recent season of America’s Sweethearts on Netflix details the DCC squad’s attempt at collective action to ensure themselves a raise. They succeeded, with headlines in the New York Times applauding the “400 percent raise” that DCC members received from $15/hour to $75/hour (without health insurance).
Meanwhile, according to the Hollywood Reporter, “since June 20, 2024, when America’s Sweethearts premiered, the cheerleaders have provided the Cowboys with $50,207,813 in what is known as equivalent brand value.” The failure to pay these women what they are worth is par for the course in highly feminized professions. “The women are,” writes
at the Mad Women newsletter, “not just dancers, entertainers, but sexual consumables within a highly masculine athletic arena.”It is within this context that male cheerleaders have joined the NFL.
The presumption is that NFL cheerleaders exist to be eye candy for a predominantly straight male audience. Statistics refute that argument: Approximately 50% of the league’s fans are, in fact, women.
People like Cain, the Fox News host, have argued that they would be OK with masculine men, like many collegiate cheerleaders whose job is to throw tiny girls in gravity-defying stunts, standing on NFL sidelines. They’re not OK with the fact that the Vikings' male cheerleaders are effeminate, and many (if not most) male cheerleaders around the NFL are openly gay. These men aren’t performing in the Fox News-approved role for a male cheerleader, but as dancers on the pom squad, a historically feminized role. Maybe that’s why there was less outrage directed towards Justine Lindsay, the first trans woman to cheer in the NFL, than there has been to the men on this year’s Vikings squad. Or perhaps the cultural moment is the culprit. Lindsay announced her retirement from NFL cheerleading this season, citing the “uncertain times” as part of her statement.
“The outrage over male cheerleaders isn’t about sports,” RK Russell, a former NFL player who came out as bisexual in 2019, wrote in The Guardian. “It’s about control: over masculinity, over image, and over who gets to be seen and celebrated in public spaces or on the global stage of the NFL. It’s the same impulse that drives anti-LBGTQ+ legislation, the same fear that fuels book bans, bathroom bills, and attacks on drag performers. This moment isn’t isolated; it’s part of a broader cultural backlash to liberation.”
But try as they may, conservatives can't erase visible queerness from the world. That visible queerness is visible joy, visible liberation. Who knows, maybe these outraged men are only mad because they don’t have the guts to live their own lives as freely as queer and trans people do, furious that they feel forced to conform to suffocating norms. Maybe they take that anger out on those of us who are living our truths.
Sheik and Conn’s responded to the backlash by posting a photo with their poms and the caption, “Did someone say our name?”
A visual reminder that they won’t be pushed out of the public sphere just to make bigots more comfortable. A visual reminder of the joy they've found through dance, and through achieving their dreams of making an NFL cheer squad. (I can’t help but think of this TikTok that Rams cheerleader Napoleon Jinnies posted of him dancing on a high school pom squad.)
Try as they might to steal our rights, conservatives can’t steal our truths. Joy isn't always resistance, but joy is one thing we can claim as our own, something else we can refuse to let them steal.
I, for one, look forward to seeing the Vikings' cheerleaders shine.
This newsletter was edited by Louis Bien.
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