"When will a gay pro [big-four, American, male] athlete come out?"
New York Magazine re-asks the question:
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| Illustration by André Carrilh |
returns to the tried-and-true question in a pretty thorough
way. Here's a particularly interesting extract:
The biggest issue for an openly gay pro athlete would
not be the “Neanderthals”: It would be the Evangelical
Christians. Particularly the African-American ones.
When Will Sheridan, a former basketball player at
Villanova, came out in May, he said that because
religion generally plays such a central role in
African-American culture, many African-American
players reject homosexuality simply because the
church says they should. A poll earlier this year
showed that 60 percent of African-American Baptists oppose gay marriage.
It’s not even just players: Tony Dungy, the former Colts coach who is now a commentator
for NBC and an adviser to several players, has openly embraced a ban on gay marriage.
“I think that religion has become a socially acceptable way to be a homophobe” [Gay Games
Ambassador] Amaechi says. “I think religion has far surpassed those notions of masculinity
and jock culture as the single most homophobic aspect of sports. Do I think without the
religious aspect sports would move more quickly and naturally along like the rest of the
culture? Yes.”
Still: An openly gay athlete is an inevitability, and his coming out may not be so difficult
after all. “I can’t imagine a player being treated the way Jackie Robinson or Bill Russell
was,” says Jared Max, the ESPN Radio New York morning sports personality, who came
out on the air in the wake of Barkley’s comments. “I don’t think that that’s going to go
on now.” So who will it be? Max thinks it’ll have to be a superstar. “It’ll have to be an
All-Star,” he says. “Someone with status. Someone whose teammates will be like, ‘As
long as he wins.’ ”
Buzinski agrees, but notes that in many ways, once the player comes out, he will be so
embraced—not just by the sports media, but by the larger culture (it is not difficult to
see the first openly gay pro athlete landing on the cover of Time magazine) that it will
become difficult for a player’s team to cut or trade him. This is a funny idea. It sounds
like the premise of a bad sports comedy, in which a straight player must pretend to be
gay to keep his job.
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