Maverick isn’t secretly gay, but the purpose of the oiled up men playing volleyball isn’t entirely platonic either.
If you look at memes about Trump or the manosphere. There’s a latent Freudian sexuality in spaces that promote extreme forms of masculinity. You might imagine direct or inverse correlations between gender identity, sexuality and sociality, but these can be inversely correlated or u-shaped. Gay men are often depicted as being more heterosocial than straight men. But men and women I think can both see homosociality as the gate to sexuality. Men who obsess over muscles and women who get really good at fashion and Makeup aren’t doing so to attract the opposite sex. But this homosociality isn’t strictly absent sexuality.
Men who watch Andrew Tate, while I don’t think they secretly want to have sex with Andrew Tate. The nature of that atttraction isn’t binary. And when Andrew Tate jokes that wanting to have sex with women is actually gay; he’s contributing to this idea, it’s not strictly speaking a joke.
But the point is that none of this resolves cleanly. All of this is taboo, but you see echoes of this throughout history in depictions of Greek culture, the navy, etc.
According to this line of thinking, anything involving men competing against each other means there is somehow sexual attraction.
This is as offensive as saying that lesbeins just haven't found the right man, yet perfectly acceptible.