A pair of men on the Minnesota Vikings cheerleading squad who have been deluged with often homophobic hate online from the right have come back with a tongue-in-cheek response to their critics.
“Wait…did someone say our name?” the Vikings’ Blaize Shiek posted on Instagram on Saturday, standing with cheer teammate Louie Conn.
The pair, whose season with the Vikings began in April, became the objects of a right-wing online pile-on last week, with conservative commentators and former athletes raging against the presence of male cheerleaders in the NFL.
“I’ve been a Vikings fan all my life… sigh,” actor Kevin Sorbo wrote on X last week in response to a video featuring the cheer team. “I need a new team now.”
“Don’t think for a second the enemy is defeated. We have finally begun to fight back,” commentator Jesse Kelly wrote on X in response to another video. “We are finally engaged. Smile about that. But we have much, much work to do.”
Former NFL wide receiver Antonio Brown also joined in, using a homophobic slur on X on Sunday in response to a video of Conn performing.
The Vikings organization has rallied behind Shiek and Conn in the face of the outrage.
“Every member of the Minnesota Vikings Cheerleaders program has an impressive dance background and went through the same rigorous audition process,” the team said in a statement last week, adding, “We support all our cheerleaders and are proud of the role they play as ambassadors of the organization.”
Shiek has said he’s long been a fan of the Minnesota team.
“I went to a lot of Vikings games with my family, mainly my dad,” he told NBC News. “I was definitely watching the cheerleaders thinking, ‘I wish I could do that,’ being that role model for other little kids who don’t know that this is an option.”
About one-third of NFL clubs have male dancers on their cheer teams, a practice which began in the 2018 season, with the Los Angeles Rams.
In 2022, the Carolina Panthers became the first squad with an openly transgender cheerleader.
Male cheerleaders have long been part of the sport at the collegiate and high school level, and former Republican presidents George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Dwight Eisenhower were once cheerleaders.
The fierce reaction to the Vikings cheer team comes as conservatives push to reinforce traditional gender norms throughout professional and amateur sports.
In February, the Trump administration signed an executive order aimed at forcing schools and athletic organizations to bar transgender girls and women from playing in women’s sports.
The NCAA and NAIA colleges athletics conferences have banned trans women from competing in women’s sports.
The NFL has struggled in recent years to balance calls for progressive messaging and practices with the more conservative ideals of large parts of its fanbase and ownership class.
The league was involved in a highly publicized controversy throughout the 2016 season after then-San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick and fellow Black players knelt during the national anthem to protest systemic racism. Kaepernick has said he believes the protest cost him his spot in the league.
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