One green ball. One blue ball. Twenty-four students at Yale raring to get off their asses. In other words, pandemonium.
We’re in Payne Whitney playing Two-Ball, aptly named because there are two balls: one we may only kick and one we may only throw. Our goal is total annihilation, i.e., using both balls to knock over an army of foam rollers. We stop at nothing. Chris screams as he grabs the blue ball. Emma lunges for the green ball. I leap to intercept, looking like a rabid dog. And leading the vanguard is Aron, our instructor, who is perfect. They dart around, kicking and tossing like the balls have personally wronged them. To add insult to injury, they look like a Greek god under the evening light streaming through the windows. The fucker.
This is Thursday night Bootcamp. Every week, Aron teaches high-intensity interval training to a motley crew that just happens to be quite queer in composition: hunky lesbians, band-playing fems with bangs, tote-bag carrying Australians with mullets, plant-loving gays who study the queer swamp ecology of Doechii’s Alligator Bites Never Heal, enthusiastic allies, and malnourished twinks (me). After warming up, we launch into the sort of games we haven’t played since we were eleven: Two-Ball, dodgeball, Pizza Tag. Then comes the main workout, where Aron reveals their sadistic tendencies. This week’s workout is a mini-version of Hyrox, a fitness competition featuring eight weighted workout stations that are really more like medieval torture racks. So, half an hour after Two-Ball, I am on my hands and knees attempting something that somewhat resembles a pushup, dripping all over the floor, nostrils vacuuming up all the dirt and shoe dust.
I remember my first Bootcamp. I was but a spritely young flower who feared their ass had started to sag. In a last-ditch effort to salvage any remaining gluteal perkiness, I looked for a class under the Payne Whitney catalogue that would force me to move. There Bootcamp was, conjuring images of camo uniforms, combat boots, and a detestable, screaming sergeant who was also kind of sexy. Aron was not detestable and neither did they scream, but they were kind of sexy, making us run and leap down the length of the hall with a chirpy “Alright, my friends!”
Painful? Yes. Do I still go? Absolutely. It’s not just about exercising—if that were true, I’d already be besties with gym bro alphas. No, the difference in Aron’s class is that we’re all moving like kids. “I really do believe there’s a 5-year-old part of you, who’s a really natural mover, who just got very self-conscious,” Aron says. “What if the gym becomes a place where I enjoy moving my body?”
At the end of class, after the cooldown, Aron makes sure to high-five everyone—a little affirmation after they have systematically torn apart our muscle fibers. These high-fives are contagious. It’s like, we just did a hard thing, but we did it together. There’s no better way to bond.
“When we sweat together, it’s a different type of quality time,” Aron says.
That magical formula of moisture, body heat, and bacteria makes us close fast. We go out to Three Sheets for a beer every other week. We gab about The White Lotus predictions, the massive prosthetic penis in Nosferatu (the real star of the show), and the sexual proclivities of Italians in the School of Management. This type of bond is only possible when we lose ourselves in the movement. For an hour each week, we almost forget it’s a tough time to be queer. Drag queens are pedophiles, trans people are evil, the children, the children—! We leave all of that at the gym doors and run. Leap. Scream. Pant. High-five. Lunge for green balls and blue balls like rabid dogs. It’s how we survive. ∎
Ethan Kan is a sophomore in Saybrook College and publisher of The New Journal.
Illustration by Amy Xiao.
