Waxing Poetic on the Sag King of the Queen City
What’s that I hear? It’s the swooning, sighing sound of every football dad in the southwest Ohio tri-state area getting starry eyes for Joe Burrow, Sagittarius quarterback of the Cincinnati Bengals. Joe Burrow led the Cincinnati Bengals to a victory over Tom Brady on Sunday. Jupiter was in Pisces at the time. So the stars were on the Bengals’ Jupiter-ruled side.
Now, what does this mean in football terms? It means that Tom Brady gave up his marriage to play the worst season of his career and get beat by the 1996-born quarterback that some have ambitiously dubbed “the next Tom Brady.” Is Burrow the next Tom Brady? I have no idea. But would I like to see Joe Burrow and Gisele Bündchen have a red carpet moment at next year’s Met Gala (to which I am manifesting an invite for Burrow)? Yes, yes I would.
I, of course, have little interest in football in general. I struggle to stay up to date on the sports world. But I enjoy a bit of drama as much as (ok, more than) the next gal. And the Bengals specialize in a dramatic finish. They are, as a burly, long-haired, bearded man whose name I swear to god is Bear, said to me and my friends at a bar during last year’s Super Bowl, “a second half team.” Which was true during last Sunday’s game as well. The Bengals were down 17-3 at halftime, but pulled through for a victory of 34-23.
This has been a big week for Joe Burrow in more ways than one. Not only did he beat Tom Brady on Sunday, but he also made the New York Times 93 Most Stylish. To keep humble and realistic, I must also acknowledge that both John Fetterman and New York City mayor Eric Adams made the list, so idk perhaps not the most exclusive list.
Professional athletes and famous men in general have been upping their fashion game in recent years. A lot of cis men (including Pete Davidson, Russell Westbrook, and Brad Pitt) are wearing skirts. I think this is for attention, mostly. Like, none of them are making interesting comments about gendered garments and gender queerness, although Russell Westbrook genuinely looks great in that white kilt. Even so, I still find the sartorial explorations of famous men to be generally a good thing and much more interesting than the alternative, which is being boring and wearing a dumb, ill-fitting suit to every occasion. Joe Burrow, as a fashion icon, operates within a wave of men having fun with their outfits.
But Joe Burrow also grew up in Athens, Ohio and is currently quarterbacking for the Cincinnati Bengals. To make any kind of list for anything interesting is something I could not have previously imagined possible. That he’s on the list of most stylish in a paper that people actually read is just short of astonishing.
The Bengals were like an inside joke when I was growing up. Burrow is preceded by Andy Dalton and Carson Palmer. Weirdly, Palmer and Dalton look kind of like they could be cousins. Carson Palmer is famous, primarily, for pissing off Cincinnati fans, and I’ve selected a picture of him here with a fish. His aesthetic suggests he’s too much of a man to care about his clothes. Andy Dalton, by contrast, looks and writes instagram captions like a mega-church youth pastor. And to be honest, mega-church youth pastor is not far off from his real identity. He has long been linked to the Young Life organization, a christian youth cult that I unfortunately spent many of my teen years a part of. Dalton’s clothes are curated to appear inoffensively and vaguely stylish. They seem to fit properly, his sneakers look crisp and fairly expensive, he’s well-groomed, but never in a way that suggests he might care about fashion or think about it.
But Burrow is different. He first caught my attention in the now-iconic black turtleneck, puffer jacket, Cartier buffs look that he arrived in to beat the Chiefs and win the AFC Championship last year. (lmao imagine me knowing what the AFC Championship is! I’m like the son my father never had!) The look was completed by a diamond-encrusted Nike necklace with “JB 9” above the swoosh. It was a flourish so absurd, so overconfident, and so (dare I say) campy that I became obsessed.
Here’s Burrow three weeks ago wearing sequined floral. Sequined! Floral! And in September wearing a floral suit. In a sport that is so hyper-masculine, from a city where men on the regular still find themselves agog at my (straight, male) partner’s pink platform Converse, Burrow is not just wearing floral, but wearing floral.
This is not a skirt-donning act of sartorial bravery, to be clear. And I’m a little sick of clapping for straight men who wear skirts anyway. But there is something interesting going on here that I am optimistic and deluded enough to hope may signal a cultural shift. I have regularly annoyed my friends with my monologues on the inherent queerness of stanning a football team. But pointing out the queerness of homosocial, hyper-masculine environments also isn’t exactly a new thing (see last season of Euphoria). As I’ve explained many times, I’m not saying that the ostensibly straight men in my life who dress up like Joe Burrow every Sunday, who watch him play with baited breath, who worry over his safety, and who, in general, view him with a kind of reverence I’ve only seen matched by pop stans have a crush on him. But I am saying that the parasocial relationship that straight men are allowed to form with professional athletes is not dissimilar in its romance from the parasocial attachment to Harry Styles that I and my teenage-girl friends formed as Directioners in high school.
The fact that Joe Burrow breaches, however subtly, Midwestern norms of masculinity by, first of all, caring about fashion, and, second of all, caring about it in a way that is not always strictly masculine is something that matters to me. Because in my silly little bisexual brain, I dream of a culture in which all sorts of things that heteronormativity would make disparate can intertwine together in generative ways.