Making a splash – the Warwick Rowers 2020 calendar – Scene Magazine

The buff boys from Warwick Rowers, a sports-based campaign for gender equality, LGBTQ+ inclusion and better male mental health, can be found in all their glory splashed throughout their Worldwide Roar 2020 calendar. Formerly known as the Warwick Rowers, they’ve relaunched as Worldwide Roar their 2020 instalment shows men from Warwick University’s rowing team most, but not all, of whom are cis hetro men and the top stars from the GB rowing team along with the very first trans man to pose along with some gay and bi members.

The calendar features polished images of nude men for every month they have stripped for a great cause, with 10% of the publisher’s sales being donated to Sports Allies, a registered charity to make sport an active part of combating homophobia and promoting gender equality.

The aim of this year’s campaign is to promote LGBT rights and gender equality but to also change the way men are viewed by society.

‘We started Warwick Rowers to challenge homophobia. But research at Sport Allies, the registered charity that now receives all WR profits, shows that homophobia is part of a bigger problem; straight men still get a different deal to everybody else,’ said project founder and creative director, Angus Malcolm.

“We need to keep challenging homophobia and promoting LGBT rights, but we also need to address gender inequality and encourage better male mental health.

We believe the calendar is a relevant yet engaging way to confront how we feel able to look at men, and how men see themselves. Happily, both our participants and our supporters around the world seem to agree.

Warwick Rowers aim to show what healthy masculinity looks like: men who are happy to be vulnerable, happy to be naked for you, regardless of your sexuality or gender, and happy to get close to each other.”

Despite all the great work Worldwide Roar is doing, there’s still a lot to be done regarding homophobic and toxic masculinity that occurs every day, especially within the world of sports. One of the key things that Malcolm highlights is men becoming more “conscious of the rules that operate, particularly when men are together in groups, and being prepared to challenge those rules, even when it’s not comfortable to do so.

I think that’s part of what makes the nudity in the WR project so meaningful – these are men stepping outside their comfort zones and potentially inviting the criticism of other men by breaking unspoken rules about intimacy and vulnerability between men,” he says. “It’s about visibility, too. If you care about your values, you have to prove them … you cannot hide in the shadows. Stand up for the person who is being bullied, at the time that it is happening.

By asking an apparently simple question about how we can look at men, we aim to show how much the heterosexual male gaze continues to dominate our culture,” notes Malcolm. “We want to draw attention to the privilege that many men, particularly heterosexual men, still take for granted. We aim to highlight the inequality and injustice on which that privilege is based, and how it affects every one of us, men included.”