Dressed in short shorts and tight T-shirts, they bounded on to the gymnasium floor. After the female roller derby teams had pushed, pounded and smashed into each other, the men and their pompoms were now on the same court in Vienna, ready to offer up the exact opposite: a hip-shaking, acrobatic half-time show.
“We wanted to play with the stereotypes,” said Andreas Fleck, one of the founders of Austria’s Fearleaders, believed to be Europe’s first squad of male and non-binary cheerleaders. “We have this idea of heroic, strong male players on the field and on the sidelines these very sexualised female cheerleaders. We wanted to turn this around.”
Their boundary-pushing quest traces back to 2011 when Vienna became home to its first roller derby team. Made up mainly of women, their fiercely aggressive, full-contact playing style challenged the clichéd role of women in sport. Fleck and others soon wondered if there was a way to push things further.
“We wanted to create this tension between roller derby, this very physical sport that is mainly done by female players, and these more fragile, funny and dainty men on the sidelines supporting this team,” he said.
What emerged was the Fearleaders, made up of about 30 members whose shorts, braces, colourful headbands and shimmying dance moves have become a staple of Vienna’s roller derby scene and beyond. The group echoes the inclusiveness of roller derby, in which teams on roller skates use their hips, shoulders and chests to block a member of the other team from scoring points, and which is one of the few sports that welcomes trans and non-binary players.
The Fearleaders name is a nod to their courage, Fleck said. “There’s our own fears of getting into this outfit and exposing yourself to an audience,” said Fleck. “And then there’s the example we try to provide to others, to erase their fears so that they say: ‘OK they can do it, why can’t I?’”
Reactions from those around them have been positive, but the extent of what the squad is up against was laid bare soon after its 2013 launch when it was featured in a left-leaning publication. “It was really terrifying to see the comments,” said Fleck, citing one that had hoped for their deaths and others that directed “homophobic, transphobic” vitriol at them. “We live in a very progressive bubble, but outside this bubble I think there is still a lot of rejection and a lot of hate.”
For member Fabian Schipfer, the reaction was in some ways unsurprising. “Right now society is really polarised, especially on gender topics,” he said. “Especially on social media, we definitely feel that we hit some kind of pain point.”
Others were swift to follow in the the Fearleaders’ path. By 2016, France had its first all-male cheerleading squad, Les Scrimmage People, launched to support Lille’s roller derby team, while other squads sprung up in Montreuil, east of Paris, and Brittany.
What unites all of them is their link to the boundary-pushing world of roller derby, said Emma Darquié, a coach for Les Scrimmage People and player on Lille’s roller derby team. “These squads wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for roller derby,” she said.
“It’s a way of continuing the conversation, as roller derby players have shown that team contact sports are not just for men. Now these squads are building on this in their own way, deconstructing these hyper-divisive stereotypes.”
In recent years, as terms such as non-binary and toxic masculinity have become more widely used and understood, those behind the Fearleaders wondered whether the initiative had run its course. “At some point we had questioned whether what we were doing was still necessary. We were thinking maybe not,” said Fleck.
The sentiment soon shifted as hints began to emerge of what Fleck described as a global “gender backlash”, fuelled in part by an online “manosphere” eager to peddle its own views on manliness. “It’s getting more toxic,” said Fleck. “It’s getting harder to work against these forces because they are getting somehow stronger. They’re getting louder, more popular.”
The battle hit home in September when Austria’s far-right Freedom party (FPÖ) won most votes in the general election, buoyed by promises that included amending the country’s constitution to declare the existence of only two genders.
It was a sad return to the mindset that had dominated decades ago, said Fleck. “We’ve been thinking a lot about how we can tell a different story about masculinity. What other views on masculinity can we offer society?”
The quest to answer these questions breathed new life into the Fearleaders’ raison d’être, he said. “After this year, 2024, we have the feeling that what we do is more important than ever.”
