Tennisexual: On The Sexual Tension of Tennis

A few years ago, writing about my pandemic-era return to tennis, I waxed poetic about the sport’s erotic charge, suggesting that something homoerotic—or simply erotic—lay latent in the game. After several more years of testing this hypothesis, I can confidently report that tennis is indeed a sex act in the abstract.

In Infinite Jest, the misanthrope and tennis aficionado David Foster Wallace writes, “The competing boy on the net’s other side: he is not the foe: he is more the partner in the dance.” He goes on to call the opponent the “occasion for meeting the self. As you are his occasion.” It is not a great leap of logic from dancing to sex—depending on the dance, it may not be a leap at all—and so I choose to take the Infinite Jest line as corroboration for something I have long suspected.

The choreography requires two people to arrive at the court together, exchange pleasantries during a brief warm-up—“Are you watching the Open?”—and then retreat to opposite baselines until they are nearly seventy-eight feet apart, with a net between them and several hundred years of byzantine rules to decipher. Communication devolves into primal grunts and groans, and the meetup becomes an isolated confrontation with the self, giving you space, yes, but also leaving you alone with your thoughts.

In an age of increasingly specific sexual identities, let’s add tennisexual to the taxonomy. Touching is not part of the plan, save for the customary final handshake, a decorous post-coital goodbye. Unlike the “gay handshake”—meaning sex first, introductions later—the tennisexual maintains their distance, performing instead a courtship: a regulated and restricted mating dance governed by the laws of the court.

Singles, doubles, triples

People are always wanting to play tennis, imagining themselves looking cute in tennis skirts and polo shirts, only to discover they can’t keep the ball in the court. Walks, drinks, and dinner dates require less skill, though that inevitably produces a wider pool of partners: talentless losers whose only discernible gift may be ordering a mezcal Negroni. There is no magical potion that will suddenly teach you tennis, besides years and years of hard work—or maybe a traumatic brain injury—and so the idyllic tennis date becomes two people (who look amazing btw) chasing balls into adjacent courts while receiving dirty looks from their neighbors.

The NTRP (National Tennis Rating Program) system rates players on a numerical scale according to experience and ability, but it relies heavily on self-rating, inviting the same rampant inflation found in every other statistic men (in particular) report about themselves. Before agreeing to play, I ask prospective partners their rating and whether they are “good”—I guess that’s my idea of flirting—all meant to establish how likely I am to, well, come.

I have found hitting partners on hookup apps, though, in my case, the tennis-ball emoji just means tennis. A few years ago, my friends and I started a tennis group for “tennis fags” called GRUNT, which grew into a group chat and eventually a spreadsheet where players list their NTRP ratings and look for people at their level. Instead of advertising your position, measurements, or dick size, you advertise that you are a 3.5, or, when the blood is really flowing, a 4.0.

Sometimes I want to play someone better and be pushed; sometimes I want to play someone worse and win. I like playing around, learning unfamiliar strokes and rhythms from different partners. But I also like something closer to monogamy. My regular hitting partner Nick and I have gradually moved closer in level, partly because he is getting better and, unfortunately, I may be getting worse; diminishing yourself for your partner is an age-old romantic tradition, and compromise is key, right? But he’s always there when I need him, and maybe that’s what any good husband, tennis or otherwise, eventually becomes: a wall—steady, dependable, hard, and capable of returning whatever psychotic shit I send his way.

I also know of a trio whose tennis pairings tracked the changing geometry of their throuple. Two were longtime boyfriends; then a third joined them. Over several years, I saw them appear on court in different combinations: sometimes all three, sometimes one pair or another. Without asking, I could look at the court and get a general relationship update—two people inside the lines, the third sidelined. 

Despite all this, I have rarely slept with people I play tennis with. Tennis has usually been enough: we enter some strange shared trance, get hot and sweaty, shake hands, and then, at least in my case, I want to get away from the person.

And you can always just watch. Men on the pro tour now receive increasingly feral attention online, probably because people keep hiring me to write articles like this. Holger Rune’s insatiable need to hike his shorts up; Tomáš Macháč’s shrinking inseams; Lorenzo Musetti’s undeclinable face card; the ongoing forensic manvestigation in Carlos Alcaraz’s bulge. Tennis television provides hours of uninterrupted full-body footage, and the GRUNT group chat has an active scouting department. The men’s tour itself remains decidedly not-gay: João Lucas Reis da Silva and Mika Brunold are the only openly gay active male professionals, and neither has yet reached the top 100. But with Heated Rivalry converting closeted athletes into objects of mass desire, perhaps the world is finally ready for a bottom at No. 1.

Coming out on top

Before Heated Rivalry did away with women entirely, there was Challengers, 2024’s heteroflexible hit, in which Tashi declares, “tennis is a relationship.” The prodigy turned puppet master describes playing an opponent as feeling “like we were in love.” But the film is less a love triangle than a cuck corner. Tashi’s husband Art is steady, disciplined, professionally successful, rich: excellent husband material. When he tells Tashi he loves her, she replies, “I know,” before returning her attention to his tennis. Patrick, Art’s cocky adversary, is messy, broke, and naturally talented. My ears perk up when Tashi tells him, “You’re charming. You’re talented, you got a big dick.” Which explains a lot. 

After a knee injury ends her career, Tashi is consigned to watching from the sidelines. One suspects that, in a Luca Guadagnino film, being a woman may be the more permanent injury. In a flashback to their lives as emerging tennis stars, she gets Art and Patrick to kiss, then leans back and watches them continue without her while Blood Orange’s “Uncle ACE” plays. My boyfriend would call this fujoshi behavior.

Years later, Tashi asks whether Art is merely “a racket and a dick,” but Patrick supplies the erotic chaos missing from her high-performing marriage. Tashi never chooses either one; she gets them to play each other in service of her one true goal: really good tennis. In the final point, she gets it. Art and Patrick finally cross the erotic distance between them, leaping in the air and crashing into a hug over the net, breaking tennis’s most basic taboo.

Sometimes gay guys dispense with the metaphor entirely. Two friends recently told me about a post-tennis tussle. One arrived from an afters wearing a jockstrap, making sure his opponent noticed, and trounced him nonetheless. Afterward they went into the woods, where the loser topped the winner (sometimes bottoming is the prize). The score was simply reversed off court: six inches–love.

But this story may imply too strongly that tennis leads to sex. My own experience is that tennis often replaces it, at least with an evenly matched opponent; if you suck, a trip to the woods may be more stimulating.

Tennis is sex made abstract, protected by seventy-eight feet, a net, elaborate rules, and mutually agreed-upon decorum—the kind of distance that has saved many marriages. You still need someone on the other side of the net; you just don’t necessarily need them any closer. Perhaps the tennisexual is not trying to close that distance at all, only to use the encounter, as Wallace puts it, as an “occasion for meeting the self.” Sometimes tennis leads to sex. Mostly, I come for tennis. 

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