Why Does an Athlete Like Derrick Gordon Comes Out
When Derrick Gordon came out as the first openly gay men's basketball player in Division I basketball this week, his experience followed a familiar pattern for Cyd Zeigler, a manager of OutSports.com, who covers LGBT issues in sports on a daily basis.
"Before the athlete comes out, they hear homophobic slurs in the locker room and that stuff pushes them deeper into the closet and makes them feel their team will not accept them," Zeigler tells USA TODAY Sports. “But then when they actually tell their teams they are gay, the teams, every single time I know of, embrace them for their honesty and their courage."
Zeigler, who wrote the story on Gordon, a sophomore guard at the University of Massachusetts, says OutSports has told stories like Gordon's roughly 200 times since 1999, from high school to college to the pros, from a range of sports such as tennis, football and swimming, and from almost every state. The common thread, Zeigler says, is that the athletes almost always heard homophobic slurs in the locker room before they came out and almost never after.
"It virtually entirely disappears," Zeigler says. "Athletes get it. When there's friendly banter and teasing and tossing around — not just slurs, but saying things like, 'That's so gay' — people who say it don't mean it the way gay people hear it. So when somebody who is in the closet hears that, they hear, 'I hate gay people.'
"What the person means is, 'You're weak.' In the language there is unconscious homophobia, but they're not meaning to hurt someone. That's the difference. When the teammate comes out, they think, 'I can't say that anymore.' We have seen this over and over again for 15 years."
The first of these stories was a high school football captain in Massachusetts in 1999. Zeigler says teammates sang Village People songs on bus trips after he came out as a way to have fun and celebrate their friend. They already knew him and liked him as a teammate before he told his truth.
"We show up everywhere — in your workplace, in your family and on your team, and you get to know us before you get to know what makes us different," Zeigler says. "I think that's powerful."
Changing attitudes on gay rights in the wider culture have accompanied changing attitudes in locker rooms.
"We've seen advances in marriage rights, Ellen DeGeneres and Neil Patrick Harris coming out, or just your next-door neighbor, and it changes people's perspectives because they see in every corner of society that we don't have eight arms or horns growing out of our heads," Zeigler says. "We're just like them."
Zeigler says he talked to NFL owners and general managers at the NFL owners meeting last month and that he has talked to NFL players as well about Michael Sam, the Missouri defensive lineman expected to be taken in the upcoming NFL draft.
"They all say it's going to be no big deal," Zeigler says. "The only ones who think it's a big deal are the media. At some point, the media is going to have to start doing its job and report on what really is, instead of these old notions from 30 years ago about gay people being unable to play sports or unwelcome to play them."
Zeigler says athletes who approach OutSports take as little as three weeks, such as Gordon, or as many as six or seven years before coming out, if they ever do. "It depends on how ready they are before they come to us," Zeigler says. "We take care to craft their stories and reflect who they are as a person beyond, 'Hey, I'm gay.' "
Zeigler cautions against thinking stories like Gordon's are now commonplace. He points out that openly gay athletes in male major league pro sports and in the top levels of college football and men's basketball remain relatively rare.
The next frontier, Zeigler thinks, is coaches and transgender athletes.
"Coaches face different pressures," he says. "If they are high school coaches, they face pressures from parents who might have visions of a predator trying to catch glimpses of their son in the shower. In college, it's recruiting issues. With transgender athletes, people do not understand issues of competitive fairness and how science mitigates that. Those are hot places we will be focused on in the coming years.”
and OutSports
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