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The hate gene and the two famous gay footballers

Life always ends up breaking through. They loved each other. They shared a room at the rallies. They loved each other at night. Saturdays. Before Sunday’s game. Once a week. The perfect alibi. Risk free. Without errors. One night, a hotel room, and a furtive wish. An airtight shelter from the elements of the world. A clean, enlightened love. Condemned to a perpetual, clandestine night. All this I learned years later. One of them told me about it, and I carry it with me like one of those passports that spies keep in the double lining of a coat. They loved each other from the risk, the only loophole that football allows you.

Sometimes you just can’t handle life. Eventually they stopped seeing each other. They let themselves “go”, building missing instants, like unpleasant abysses secretly flowing through the events of life. They dissolved in silence, under a desert full of abandonment. Of wanting to live and not knowing how. “I couldn’t take it anymore. Fear and panic overcame me. The terror of being discovered, of being hated. It is that installed hatred that paralyzes you ”, one of them confessed to me, with a voice that came from the depths of a wounded soul.

In memory it is difficult for one to imagine the intense fragility of his world. One world within another, like Russian matrioskas. Worlds that overlap in silence, that do not name each other, that despise each other, that ambush each other. Of diverse identities, that hide, that dissolve and disappear. An implacable world, of billy goat football, hostile, intolerant, of a blind cainism, that inhabits us with its buried violence – and without buried – emotional, physical, furious, of clerical, barracks, decadent morality.

The identity drive requires defining in some way how we are, and that “we are” reaches deep levels of conceptual abstraction. Times change, and questions are answered. Two studies of international prestige published this year in “Science” and “Nature Human Behavior” reaffirm that the “gay gene” does not exist, but they certify that there are many genes that affect sexual orientation. Geneticists call it “polygenic trait,” and it is a very common situation in any heritable trait. None of this is deterministic. Genetic variations mark more or less strong tendencies, not inviolable destinies. The latest genome-based results, and associated questionnaires from the British Biobank, the North American National Longitudinal Study, and 23andMe, which collectively group data from 836,000 people, identified small variations in many genes that in combination correlate with sexual orientation. . The key fact is that some variants associated with homosexuality are the same as those manifested in heterosexuals. Up to 25% of heritability is linked in its development, which explains, as a whole, that a certain genetic association of homosexuality lasts over time.

The past is an immense fog full of resonances. But memories always await us. In a hotel room, my two famous gay soccer friends drank life down the drain. A way to bring back to life what she had given them. The perception of pleasure and pain take time. “The limits of my understanding are the limits of my world” said Wittgenstein. Football anchored in that immobile labyrinth of hatred and resentment continues its own thing: in the deception of what we are, the forgetting of what we have been, and the denial of what we can be.

Former Velez player, and World champion Tokyo 1979

Soccer

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