With his regular-season NFL action on the horizon, Vikings male cheerleader Blaize Shiek has decided to give his nearly 77,000 Instagram followers an inside look at his pre-game and halftime “makeup routine.”
While the makeup routine is a large portion of the video, the post also gives Shiek’s followers a glimpse at his entire gameday ritual.
Shiek joined the Vikings cheer squad before the start of the 2025-2026 season. As of last year, nearly a third of NFL teams had male cheerleaders on their rosters. However, some teams, such as the Green Bay Packers, only use male cheerleaders in their traditional role of performing stunts alongside their female counterparts.
Shiek, instead, is part of a growing trend in recent years in which male cheerleaders perform as dancers.
While dancing male cheerleaders have become more commonplace, they have not yet gained universal acceptance, as social media users’ responses suggest.
“You’re a dude. Why tf are you doing that. Ppl are fkn weird,” one user wrote.
“You’re going out of your way to include a demographic that hates you and excluding the demographic that buys tickets. Ban straight hate. This isn’t what a father shows his son at the game,” opined another.
Still, not all the comments were negative.
“Male cheerleaders have been around for decades, so idc so long as he isn’t in the women’s locker room or claiming to be a woman. Otherwise, this isn’t news; let the man be,” one woman opined.
“He is gay and not claiming to be a woman; what’s the problem?’ asserted another.
The Vikings will open the season on the road this year, when they travel to Lambeau Field to take on the Green Bay Packers on September 13.