Seth Pamperin is openly gay college tennis captain: Interview

By Cyd Zeigler

Photo credit Tyler Berry

Carroll University tennis captain Seth Pamperin is the latest in a growing list of college athletes to come out of the closet publicly. He has played the last two seasons openly gay, but this is the first time he has come out in a national publication. Under his leadership the team posted an impressive 16-6 season in 2011. Just this weekend Pamperin won the NCAA Div. III Midwest Conference No. 2 singles consolation title. Pamperin talked with us about his four years in conservative Wisconsin, keeping a rainbow ribbon attached to his tennis bag, fighting homophobia in college residences and the power of stereotypes. And, like virtually every athlete we have talked to in the last 10 years, he has experienced no negative repercussions whatsoever coming out in sports.

Outsports: When did you realize you were gay?
Pamperin: I had always known since I was young that I was different. In middle school I had thought about it and in high school I knew. About my sophomore/junior year I had a firm understanding I was. That’s when I came out to my parents and a couple of close friends.

Can you recall the first time you told a teammate or coach you're gay?
I first came out to a teammate, my captain specifically. He thought it was great! He told me he had never had a gay friend and had a couple of generic questions. I was so happy I had been able to confide in my captain my freshman year. His positive reaction helped me have a positive outlook on being gay on the team.

Have you had any negative reactions from being openly gay in sports?

I haven’t had any external negative reactions. Internal reactions have been tough. My junior year I had to fight for LGBTQ equality on my campus which trickled over to my season which did not help because I was still focused on what I had done to help my university change for the better.

What have been some of the most positive reactions you've had?
My coach and boss at one of the camps I worked gave me a great reaction. He immediately started talking about Billie Jean King, which I kind of thought was funny. He said she overcame so much in her career and that I can do the same. My coach in college also has helped me develop not only as a tennis player but as a man. He has seen me at my worst on the court and he has seen me at my best. When I came out to him I was having a hard time connecting to my team and he helped me turn that around. I probably was the first person that had come out to him and I could tell he was a little nervous, but since then our relationship has steadily improved. 

My team is supportive in my accomplishments and knows I’m gay. I’m thankful I can confide in my teammates some of the things in my personal life. I am continually growing and maturing. I know my teammates will stick up for me if they hear someone say “that’s so gay” or any other negative comment. I think that I am a strong captain on my team and it definitely changes some views about gay men. Knowing that I am a strong, talented and positive leader in my team’s eyes helps break some stereotypes they otherwise would have kept on believing.

You're competing this year openly gay. Do you fear any kind of retaliation from other teams? Have any of your competitors commented, positively or negatively, about your sexuality?
I competed last year out and proud. I had a rainbow ribbon attached to my tennis bag that I carried on court. I have never feared any retaliation from other teams. Frankly I use the fact that I am gay to help drive me to my success. Knowing that people have stereotypes about gay men and not being in sports and being sissy’s makes me want to work harder and boost my confidence. I can’t say a competitor has commented on my sexuality because they might not know. It’s not like my coach introduces the line-up along with our sexual orientations.  I am not your typical gay man, I’m not (too) flamboyant while on the court, though I definitely have some quirks.

Have athletes from other teams or schools reached out to you because you're gay?
I wish I could connect with other gay athletes in my conference. I’m sure there are some but my gaydar just hasn’t registered a reading in a very long time while playing tennis.

How "rural" is the area around your school?
My school is located in one of the most conservative counties in Wisconsin. We are in a suburb of Milwaukee with a population of about 60,000. We are surrounded by a neighborhood. This campus is fairly small and you could walk the entire campus in about 15 minutes. Milwaukee is just a 15-minute drive.

Have you met other gay men at your school or nearby?
I have met a few gay men at my school, but we are very few and far between. There are about three besides myself that are out, and we have an out lesbian professor as well as a librarian who have proven to be excellent resources for myself and others.  As far as athletics I am the only known out gay man on this campus. Since we live in close proximity to Milwaukee my friends and I have made it a point to get out there. This past summer I was involved with the Milwaukee Metro Tennis Club, which is a primarily gay tennis league. I wasn't looking for competition but more of a community. This club consists of guys a couple years older than me but helped me feel like I had a community. I made friends with a few of them and we still get together once in a while to hit.

Tell me about what you're doing on campus to fight for gay visibility and equality.
I have taken a back seat fighting for equality and visibility on my campus. Last fall I had to work with Student Affairs at my school in order to make sure LGBTQA Safe Space training is mandatory. Numerous negative events have happened to myself and other LGBTQA people have occurred on this campus and we are in the process of building a safer community. I strongly believe that I have helped bring a sense of awareness on this issue to the administrations attention. They have shown me that they are now more than ever dedicated to bringing equality to this campus.

You said numerous negative events have happened at your school. Can you describe them?
Some of the negative events that have happened towards the LGBTQ community on this campus were insensitivity in resident life. Resident life had sporadically done Safe Space training for its new Resident Assistants but last fall did not. The previous year I had overheard a conversation involving my RA and a fellow resident and they were discussing homosexuality. My RA asked the resident what he thought about homosexuality and he replied with "Well I think we should just kill them all." I thought to myself "ok, fine people are entitled to their own opinion, but really?" At a time my RA could have responded with some knowledge of the LGBTQ community he decided not to.

At the time I was on the Student Conduct Board which is a part of Resident Life and I asked my advisor what I could do in order to report this discussion. I had a couple of talks with my Area Director of the building as well as the Director of Resident Life. The conversations always led to "what are we supposed to do about this?" They didn't know how to handle the situation and I didn't either because I was mere sophomore and had never had to deal something like this. It was a first for both of us. However, that RA was never given any extra training on LGBTQ sensitivity and that was that. After returning in the fall of 2009 and hearing that Resident Life did not provide Safe Space training I was disheartened and decided to take things into my own hands.

I met with the Director of Resident Life numerous times and he pointed me in the direction of one of the Area Directors who was coordinating RA training. Along with the Area Director of the building I was living in, I also enlisted the help of my great friend who had also been out at Carroll and seen the negativity towards the LGBTQ community at Carroll. Together we created the Safe Space training that we would present at the annual Wisconsin Association of Independent College's and Universities (WAICU) Conference. Carroll was the host that year.

At the end of the conference we were awarded the "Best Program" that year. It was a great boost of confidence and the Director of Resident Life decided that Safe Space training would be permanently implemented into the Resident Assistant orientation. It is safe to say that I have left some sort of legacy at Carroll because every time an RA puts up their Safe Space sign on their door, it is because of the work my friend and I did. Carroll has improved quite a bit since I've been here, but there is still room for improvement.

Since last year I have taken a back seat to Q&A due to my other activities, being an Assistant Women's Tennis College Coach, Athletic Event Fellow, finding internships, playing in my final season and of course focusing on my education.

Do you think gay men make better athletes? Worse athletes? Does it matter?
I think gay men can use the stereotypes of being “effeminate, having a gay lisp” to their favor. I’m not your typical gay man. I play sports, I wear sweatpants regularly (but not too often), I am aggressive (on the court). I don’t let my sexuality define who I am, I let what I have accomplished and what I strive for define who I am. I think young gay teens often are ostracized for liking “feminine” sports such as tennis, swimming, volleyball, dance, etc…. They need to see that it’s perfectly fine to enjoy that sport.

I try and break those stereotypes by working to be the best in my sport and I have done so. My sophomore year I was named “Midwest Conference Player of the Week.” It was an honor and validated all my hard work. I thought to myself when I read the article “This isn’t for me, it’s for my team, all my coaches, my supportive parents, and all the gay athletes that go unrecognized.”

I don’t think gay men make worse athletes. I think that you can be great in any sport and be gay, straight, bi, or whatever. It just so happens that I play tennis and that I’m gay. I think I connect more with tennis than I do with my sexuality. Tennis is a huge part of my life. My roommate, best friends, team and anyone that has seen me with my tennis bag on campus can attest to that. People say that men think about sex every five seconds, well I like to think that I think about tennis every five seconds.

Why do you think no pro male tennis players have come out?
Bill Tilden supposedly was a gay player, but it was back in the 1920s. Since then no professional male has come out of the closet. There has been speculation about some players but nothing ever concrete. I think one hasn’t come out because in pro tennis players are, like other athletes, under a magnifying glass. When Amelie Mauresmo was pulled out of the closet some people thought she was going to lose her endorsements, but on the contrary they celebrated her as an athlete. I really look up to her and she is still one of my favorite players. I could see myself in her during her matches.

I wish a male pro tennis player would come out, but then it would be blown out of proportion. Since tennis is such an individual sport it might be hard for a player to deal with it alone on the court in front of thousands of people. It would be on everyone’s mind at that match. It could consume and destroy that player if it got to him. I think it would take a very mentally strong guy in order to do it. Ever since coming out, it gets easier every time I come out to someone.

What is your major? When will you graduate? What do you want to do next?
I will be graduating in December of 2011 with a degree in Recreational Management. This summer I will be the Competition intern with the United States Tennis Association Southern Section in Columbia, South Carolina. I hope to continue coaching collegiate athletes and one day be the head pro at a tennis facility. I will continue to be an advocate for LGBTQ athletes and I think what Hudson Taylor and his Athlete Ally program is exactly what the sporting world needs.

You can reach Seth via email or follow him on Twitter.

http://www.outsports.com/os

Salvation Army International(u thought it was usa?) Gays Can Be Cured

The Salvation Army’s all-inclusive congregation policy does not extend to homosexuals, Swedish broadcasters TV4 claimed on Sunday evening.

During an undercover news report broadcast on one of Sweden's biggest channels, Salvation Army leaders told a covert journalist working for news programme “Kalla Fakta” (Cold Facts) that he, being a gay man, could not join the army originally formed in London in 1865.

Instead, an officer offered to “cure” him through prayer.

The programme also claimed that the Salvation Army was involved in an agreement with Africa's Malawi Council of Churches, which comprised of voting for the imprisonment of gay men.

Despite Sweden being the first country in the world to remove homosexuality as an illness, local SA officers told the journalist that homosexuality is “fundamentally wrong”.

“The Salvation Army’s basic position is that homosexual sex is a sin. The Bible says a man shouldn’t sleep with a man in the way he sleeps with a woman,” one chapter leader told the TV4 reporter.

“Anatomically we are not shaped that way, so in that sense I do think it is wrong,” another soldier said.

The Salvation Army now accuses the Swedish TV programme of infringement.

“There is no revelation, there is no surprise, there is just a cheap but costly straining after sensationalism,” a Salvation Army spokesperson in Sweden said.

“We interpret the Bible in a way that defines sex as something that should happen within marriage and as something between a man and a woman.”

The top officer of The Swedish Salvation Army appeared live in the programme on Sunday, ignoring questions about whether homosexuals were included in their “all inclusive” policy. She claimed no knowledge of the MCC agreement.

The Salvation Army was founded by William and Catherine Booth in London in 1865 and are although describing themselves as “mainstream protestant” considered to be practising Biblical literalism.


Bella Qvist




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The Secret guys That Killed bin Laden

 By Marc Ambinder

 

The two sides of the Joint Special Operations Command Challenge Coin, which was given out by the
JSOC commander Vice Admiral William McRaven.

 From Ghazi Air Base in Pakistan, the modified MH-60 helicopters made their way to the garrison suburb ofAbbottabad, about 70 miles from the center of Islamabad. Aboard were Navy SEALs, flown across the border from Afghanistan, along with tactical signals, intelligence collectors, and navigators using highly classifiedhyperspectral imagers.

After bursts of fire over 40 minutes, 22 people were counted, and five were killed. One of the dead was Osama bin Laden, done in by a double tap -- boom, boom -- to the left side of his face. His body was aboard the choppers that made the trip back. One had experienced mechanical failure and was destroyed by U.S. forces, military and White House officials tell National Journal.

Were it not for this high-value target, it might have been a routine mission for the specially trained and highly mythologized SEAL Team Six, officially called the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, but known even to the locals at their home base Dam Neck in Virginia as just DevGru.

This HVT was special, and the raids required practice, so they replicated the one-acre compound. Trial runs were held in early April.

How did the helos elude the Pakistani air defense network? Did they spoof transponder codes? Were they painted and tricked out with Pakistan Air Force equipment? If so -- and we may never know -- two other JSOC units, the Technical Application Programs Office and the Aviation Technology Evaluation Group, were responsible. These truly are the silent squirrels -- never getting public credit and not caring one whit. Since 9/11, the JSOC units and their task forces have become the U.S. government’s most effective and lethal weapon against terrorists and their networks, drawing plenty of unwanted, and occasionally unflattering, attention to themselves in the process.DevGru belongs to the Joint Special Operations Command, an extraordinary and unusual collection of classified standing task forces and special-missions units. They report to the president and operate worldwide based on the legal (or extra-legal) premises of classified presidential directives. Though the general public knows about the special SEALs and their brothers in Delta Force, most JSOC missions never leak. We only hear about JSOC when something goes bad (a British aid worker is accidentally killed) or when something really big happens (a merchant marine captain is rescued at sea), and even then, the military remains especially sensitive about their existence. Several dozen JSOC operatives have died in Pakistan over the past several years. Their names are released by the Defense Department in the usual manner, but with a cover story -- generally, they were killed in training accidents in eastern Afghanistan. That’s the code.

JSOC costs the country more than $1 billion annually. The command has its critics, but it has escaped significant congressional scrutiny and has operated largely with impunity since 9/11. Some of its interrogators and operators were involved in torture and rendition, and the line between its intelligence-gathering activities and the CIA's has been blurred.

But Sunday’s operation provides strong evidence that the CIA and JSOC work well together. Sometimes intelligence needs to be developed rapidly, to get inside the enemy’s operational loop. And sometimes it needs to be cultivated, grown as if it were delicate bacteria in a petri dish.

In an interview at CIA headquarters two weeks ago, a senior intelligence official said the two proud groups of American secret warriors had been “deconflicted and basically integrated” -- finally -- 10 years after 9/11. Indeed, according to accounts given to journalists by five senior administration officials Sunday night, the CIA gathered the intelligence that led to bin Laden’s location. A memo from CIA Director Leon Panetta sent Sunday night provides some hints of how the information was collected and analyzed. In it, he thanked the National Security Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency for their help. NSA figured out, somehow, that there was no telephone or Internet service in the compound. How it did this without Pakistan’s knowledge is a secret. The NGIA makes the military’s maps but also develops their pattern recognition software -- no doubt used to help establish, by February of this year, that the CIA could say with “high probability” that bin Laden and his family were living there.

Recently, JSOC built a new Targeting and Analysis Center in Rosslyn, Va. Where the NationalCounterterrorism Center tends to focus on threats to the homeland, TAAC, whose existence was first disclosed by the Associated Press, focuses outward, on active “kinetic” -- or lethal -- counterterrorism missions abroad. 

That the center could be stood up under the nose of some of the nation’s most senior intelligence officials without their full knowledge testifies to the power and reach of JSOC, whose size has tripled since 9/11. The command now includes more than 4,000 soldiers and civilians. It has its own intelligence division, which may or may not have been involved in last night’s effort, and has gobbled up a number of free-floating Defense Department entities that allowed it to rapidly acquire, test, and field new technologies.

Under a variety of standing orders, JSOC is involved in more than 50 current operations spanning a dozen countries, and its units, supported by so-called "white," or acknowledged, special operations entities like Rangers, Special Forces battalions, SEAL teams, and Air Force special ops units from the larger Special Operations Command, are responsible for most of the “kinetic” action in Afghanistan.

Pentagon officials are conscious of the enormous stress that 10 years of war have placed on the command. JSOC resources are heavily taxed by the operational tempo in Afghanistan and Pakistan, officials have said. The current commander, Vice Adm. William McRaven, and Maj. Gen. Joseph Votel, McRaven’s nominated replacement, have been pushing to add people and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance technology to areas outside the war theater where al-Qaida and its affiliates continue to thrive.

Earlier this year, it seemed that the elite units would face the same budget pressures that the entire military was experiencing. Not anymore. The military found a way, largely by reducing contracting staff and borrowing others from the Special Operations Command, to add 50 positions to JSOC. And Votel wants to add several squadrons to the “Tier One” units -- Delta and the SEALs.

When Gen. Stanley McChrystal became JSOC’s commanding general in 2004, he and his intelligence chief, Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, set about transforming the way the subordinate units analyze and act on intelligence. Insurgents in Iraq were exploiting the slow decision loop that coalition commanders used, and enhanced interrogation techniques were frowned upon after the Abu Ghraib scandal. But the hunger for actionable tactical intelligence on insurgents was palpable.

These technicians could “exploit and analyze” data obtained from the battlefield instantly, using their access to the government’s various biometric, facial-recognition, and voice-print databases. These cells also used highly advanced surveillance technology and computer-based pattern analysis to layer predictive models of insurgent behavior onto real-time observations.The way JSOC solved this problem remains a carefully guarded secret, but people familiar with the unit suggest that McChrystal and Flynn introduced hardened commandos to basic criminal forensic techniques and then used highly advanced and still-classified technology to transform bits of information into actionable intelligence. One way they did this was to create forward-deployed fusion cells, where JSOC units were paired with intelligence analysts from the NSA and the NGA. Such analysis helped the CIA to establish, with a high degree of probability, that Osama bin Laden and his family were hiding in that particular compound.

The military has begun to incorporate these techniques across the services. And Flynn will soon be promoted to a job within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, where he’ll be tasked with transforming the way intelligence is gathered, analyzed, and utilized.

CORRECTION: The distance between Islamabad and Abbottabad was corrected.

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