Michael Sam’s ‘The Kiss'

                                                                               

Over the weekend, television aired a real-life version of a stock Hollywood movie scene: The phone rings and an all-American young man learns he's been drafted by a professional sports team. He kisses and embraces his college sweetheart.

In this case, the athlete is Michael Sam, a standout defensive end at the University of Missouri, and his sweetheart is Vito Cammisano, who was on Missouri's swim team — making it an image that in years past might have been unlikely to go out over the airwaves.

Not anymore. Activists trace the gay liberation movement to the Stonewall riots of 1969, when patrons of the New York bar of that name fought cops trying to arrest them. At the time, the police regularly raided establishments with a gay clientele, but in the backlash of that one, gay rights groups sprang up in every major American city.

•  “Forty-five years separate Stonewall and the gay kiss that went viral. That could seem an eternity to those who lived through it burdened with anti-gay prejudice and hostility. But measured against the longevity of other prejudices, it’s not that long"

Slavery was not fully abolished in the United States until the 13th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1865, but Jim Crow and segregation relegated African-Americans to second-class citizenship until the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Women arrived with the Mayflower but couldn't vote in some states until 1920, when the suffrage movement led to the 19th Amendment.

By comparison, the gay rights movement has gone from zero to 60 like a souped-up race car. Gay marriage is legal in 17 states, in addition to the District of Columbia. In the first five months of this year, judges have ruled unconstitutional seven states' bans on gay marriage.

And now, with the St. Louis Rams drafting Sam, there has been a victory on an unlikely battlefield: the locker room.

Football is the ultimate bastion of pumped-up machismo and unvarnished mayhem. As the late coach Vince Lombardi once noted, it's a game of blocking and tackling — that is, of slamming people to the ground, then saluting the achievement like a Roman gladiator. Some hate the thought of sharing those traditions with gays. Several NFL players are in hot water for publicly sharing their aversion to gay teammates. But others cheered the milestone. When Sam was passed over through round after round of the draft, retired NFL superstar Deion Sanders tweeted: "Some team needs to draft Michael Sam and be real the kid can play! Truth."

In hindsight, prejudice against gays seems to have been akin to a boil that is about to burst. Virtually overnight, opponents of gay marriage have gone from gloating to playing defense. What was the game changer? Perhaps, as in sports, stats tell the story. Sex researcher Alfred Kinsey thought 10 percent of American males are homosexual; subsequently his research methods have been called into question and other sex researchers and gay advocates have offered higher or lower estimates. So let's assume Kinsey got it right. That implies that if there were, say, 10 males at a poker game, one is gay.

Of course, that's only true on average, and maybe Kinsey's educated guess was too high. But cut it in half, and the likelihood remains that you know someone — a family member, a colleague at work — who is gay. That wasn't so for most white people back when prejudice against African-Americans was rampant. Segregation meant white Americans had little firsthand knowledge of blacks against which to test the derogatory stereotypes.

Yet while heterosexuals worked alongside gays and shared family gatherings with them, there wasn't a vocabulary to discuss homosexuality.

Such was true in the Ivory Tower, otherwise a bastion of progressive thought. At one university where I taught, gay professors were referred to as "bachelor faculty." At another where professors' children got medical and educational benefits, we debated whether that was equitable to "nonbearing faculty" — as if we were taking about steel I-beams instead of humans.

That lack of vocabulary left a mother with a gay son little to say when asked why he wasn't married, except perhaps: "The right girl hasn't come along yet." Gay children couldn't talk to parents about a important fact of their lives. Relatives and friends of gays had to squelch the impulse to say, "Knock it off!" when someone told a joke that demeaned gays.

Of course, one gay football player does not a social revolution make. There will still be snickers, and expressions of outright hatred. That's been the case when other lines were crossed, noted Arkansas state Judge Chris Piazza, who ruled earlier this month that Arkansas' gay marriage law is unconstitutional. He recalled that the hatred that greeted the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court decision invalidating laws against interracial marriage has essentially vanished. The same, he predicted, will be true for same-sex marriage.

"It is time to let that beacon of freedom shine brighter on all our brothers and sisters," Piazza said. “We will be stronger for it."

By Ron Grossman

Ron Grossman is a Tribune writer and former history professor.