Growing up in Chicago, I used to get into “Sportswriters on TV” — one of the original sports commentary shows which are now ubiquitous on ESPN. Even though the show celebrated the cigar-smoking, curmudgeonly, old-(white)-boys’-club nature of sports reporting, at its best it provided one of the first mainstream arenas to put sports in a larger perspective — focusing on the social context as much as on the performances themselves.

Which is all to say I caught myself watching the “Sports Reporters” Sunday morning on ESPN. Theoretically a bastion for intelligent, reflective sports commentary amidst its more flashy (and presumably better-rated) counterparts like “Around the Horn,” the show regularly features at least two reporters/writers I actually respect: John Saunders and John Feinstein (Mitch Albom and Mike Lupica don’t do much for me).

But watching them struggle to discuss the implication of former NBA player John Amaechi’s “coming out” made me realize how small their sense of social context actually is. Feinstein did state the male locker room is the “most homophobic” place in America — and Lupica believed that the locker room would be the “last bastion” of homophobia in America. But none of them gave any reasons why that was the case — or any suggestion on how that might change.

To find that type of analysis, we need to look elsewhere — to one of my new (thanks HomeboyNet) favorite cultural critics, Mark Simpson, a British writer who appears frequently for American audiences in Out magazine. In an article this past summer, he coined the term “sporno” — which became one of the New York Times Ideas of the Year in 2006.

Writing from a distinctly European perspective, Simpson introduces the concept:

Sport is the new gay porn. Sportsmen on this side of the Atlantic are increasingly openly acknowledging and flirting with their gay fans, a la David Beckham and Freddie Ljungberg (the man who actually looks the way Beckham thinks he looks). Both of these thoroughbreds have posed for spreads in gay magazines … and both have welcomed the attention of gay fans because they “have great taste.” More than this, they and a whole new generation of young bucks, from twinky soccer players like Manchester United’s Alan Smith and Cristiano Ronaldo to rougher prospects like Chelsea’s Joe Cole and AC Milan’s Kaka, keen to emulate their success, are actively pursuing sex-object status in a postmetrosexual, increasingly pornolized world.

In other words, they’re not just sports stars, but sporno stars.

Simpson is at his best when he taking us through the visual imagery of advertising — and, since the article was published, he has tracked the presence of “sporno” on his blog. Although European audiences seem more accepting of the “sporno” image, it has appeared in American ad campaigns — such as this one from Hanes.

And Simpson wonders what will happen now that the biggest sporno star, David Beckham (”Beckham the virus” is Simpson’s new moniker for him), has moved his show to the “city of signs,” Los Angeles:

Whether or not he succeeds, America had better get ready for a little more soccer and a lot more metrosexuality and Sporno ….

America and Hollywood, so long at the cutting edge of commodifying masculinity, have fallen so far behind much of the rest of the world since the 1990s. Incredible as it may sound, American masculinity needs some tarty tips on how to tart it out more. Enter Becks, the tartiest tart in Tart-Town.

This is why Beck’s friendship with Hollywood’s box-office king/queen Tom Cruise is more than just another footballer going celebrity chumming. Cruise, the all-American Dream-boy gone wrong, needs Becks more than Becks needs Cruise who is now globally rather less popular than Becks. Because this is about media power rather than political or military power, that’s to say the New Power, it’s the inverse relationship of Bush and Blair.

In almost all his commentary, Simpson deftly moves from an Oscar Wilde-esque irreverence and cynicism to revealing close readings of a wide variety of texts. Just check out his latest look at “Speedophobia” — or the metrosexualization of James Bond.

What I believe he has to offer our discussion of John Amaechi is an understanding of the thin line between homophobia and homosocial and/or homoerotic behavior — all of which comes together in our paradoxical marketing of sports stars.

Changing the atmosphere of our locker rooms will not come from a rhetorical denunciation (or avoidance) of hate speech — nor will it come from an increased “tolerance” of a homosexual presence in formerly sacred heterosexual domains.

It will only come from the recognition that we all — homosexual and heterosexual alike — adore male bodies, especially male bodies in action — and that our adoration is a good and beautiful thing.

That’s the only way the tension, which we see in overdetermined advertising campaigns and that is behind all that locker room ridicule, eases. That’s the only way American men stop living their collective lie.