It is one of the most iconic images in sport. Geoff Hurst, cheeks puffed out with exertion, strikes the shot that will put England ahead during extra time in the final of the 1966 World Cup. But something here is not right. Something has been snatched away. Hang on a minute – where’s the ball?
This is Glory, by the artist JJ Guest, and in a way this large, screen-printed sheet of aluminium resembles those old newspaper Spot the Ball competitions, although in this instance it’s not hard to spot where the ball should be. In its place is a circular hole, carved into the metal with a precise diameter of 3.5 inches.
“That’s the standard size of glory holes in gay clubs,” explains the 30-year-old artist, referring to the small openings in walls and cubicles that allow for anonymous sexual encounters. Indeed, when the piece is finally mounted, the idea is for the hole to be at what Guest calls “dick height” – and for an actual hole to be cut into the gallery wall so viewers can see into the adjacent room (at least, Guest assumes that’s all they’ll do).
It may not be the first glory hole ever installed in an art gallery but it’s almost certainly the first one within the grounds of a Premier League football club. The gallery Oof, dedicated to art inspired by the beautiful game, is based at Tottenham Hotspur’s stadium in London, and can only be accessed via the club’s official shop. Some casual fans wandering in after a game may be in for a shock – or perhaps a life-changing experience.
Glory is part of The Other Team, Guest’s first solo exhibition, which uses football to examine society’s double standards when it comes to LGBTQ+ issues. Works such as Glory might appear playful or amusing but they’re rooted in anger. Guest reminds us how the gay community is always having to fight to stop its rights being removed – and he wanted to erase the ball from the Hurst image to show “the other team” how it feels to have something they take pride in ripped away.
It’s the kind of intelligent, challenging show that Oof excels in. Previous exhibitions have involved ball sculptures, subversive scarves and unsettling motivational messages. One show, entitled The World of Gazza!!, focused on Spurs legend Paul Gascoigne and featured posters, programmes and other football paraphernalia. It brought in plenty of punters keen to reminisce about their own teenage bedroom shrines to Gazza. Guest’s exhibition, says the gallery’s founder Eddy Frankel with a mixture of trepidation and relish, is likely to involve some trickier conversations.
Indeed, you enter the gallery’s second room to be confronted by Splash, a lifesize changing room bath of the kind players used to celebrate in together after winning a match. But look around and there are no balls here either – and no boots nor shirts nor anything football-related. Are we in a changing room or somewhere else? A gay sauna? Attendees are invited to take a cup of water from the bath and fling it at the tiles mounted on the back wall. Using special ink, Guest has designed tiles that reveal a very steamy image, when wet, of the naked Everton team sharing a communal bath after an FA Cup semi-final victory over Manchester United in 1966.
Guest came across the image a couple of years ago, after going down a rabbit-hole on obscure gay forums that “obsess about footballers in the same way that football fans would … but for a very different reason”. There, he found multiple black and white images of footballers from the past, hugging each other, bathing together and, as he puts it, “just walking around with their willies out”.
“I remember thinking, ‘They’re so happy – why is this so upsetting to me?’ And I realised it was the absolute freedom they had from all those societal rules about how to be friends with a man, or be in love with a man, or just be around another man. I was confused as to how this could be celebrated when, at the same time, gay men were being beaten by police and arrested for almost the exact same activity.”
It wasn’t the first time Guest had run into such hypocrisy. Growing up gay in Small Heath, a working-class area of Birmingham, he struggled to know how to behave in typically “masculine” situations. The Birmingham City games his dad would take him to were particularly fraught. “You can’t cheer for a player too loud,” he says. “You can’t look at the players in a ‘different’ way. There were too many things for me to keep track of. Growing up queer, everything was a facade. You’re constantly changing your voice, how you walk, what words you use, how you dress. You put a mask on to survive. And then you get to the age of 30 and suddenly you have to ask yourself, ‘Who am I? And what have I told myself I am?’ It’s hard to know what’s me and what’s not. It’s very existential.”
When he was younger, Guest would scour the internet looking for clues that a footballer might be gay. These searches led him to the famous image of Gary Neville kissing Paul Scholes in 2010, after the latter had scored a stoppage-time winner in the Manchester derby. “I suddenly got really angry,” he says. “My eyes started to stream. There’s, like, seven different versions of this image, all from different angles. Two straight men are allowed to do that and I can’t hold my boyfriend’s hand in Birmingham because I’m terrified I’m going to get beat up?”
Kissing, hugging, getting naked: clearly, the football shirt offers protection to act in ways not tolerated by traditional society. When you first enter The Other Team, fragments of the Neville and Scholes kiss have been printed on to aluminium sheets and placed around the room – the different body parts only align to form the full image if you stand in a certain spot and configure yourself to Guest’s own height. I crouch down and see Neville’s fingers embracing Scholes’s cheek. This unsettling contortion is deliberate, says Guest, a chance “to experience that awkwardness, just for a second”.
This is not passive art but work to be engaged with: twist your body, splash those tiles, explore the holes. There is even a urinal, entitled Your Parade, emblazoned with an image of Manchester United celebrating winning the Premier League in 2001. It’s not plumbed in, sadly, given the number of rival fans who would enjoy using it.
The Other Team seems especially timely, following the controversy over Qatar hosting the World Cup last year and supposed LGBTQ+ allies such as Jordan Henderson accepting huge pay cheques to play in Saudi Arabia, where homosexuality is against the law. The works on display don’t address those issues directly, and avoid hectoring in favour of creating a safe space for visitors to explore and question their feelings.
What struck me, from the moment I saw these works, was how they reach beyond LGBTQ+ issues, reflecting how uncomfortable many men feel about the expectations put on them by traditional masculinity. My own positive relationship with playing football soured around the time I hit my teens and puberty began transforming some of my fellow players before it transformed me – a genuine case of men versus boys for a year or two. And Splash brings back terrifying memories of the sadistic PE teacher who would force us into the showers after games, no matter how insecure we felt about our bodies.
If football can help people examine such feelings, Guest is all for it. “I’m not trying to get people’s backs up,” he says. “I want people to know that if straight men found it easier to be tactile with their friends, it would make it safer for us as well, because we wouldn’t be scrutinised for doing it. So the work is really for everyone.”
Making The Other Team has helped Guest untangle his own knotty relationship with the sport. “I’ve not always been comfortable with feeling anger,” he says, “because angry men have always terrified me. But in my wise old age, I’m using the anger to learn about myself – as opposed to running away from it.”
• The Other Team is at Oof Gallery, London, from 17 November to 23 December
