"with 'i'm gay', a sports barrier is broken'. that's the headline on the front page of the online version of the new york times today, which is, honestly, a little confusing. we'll get to that in a second though. we all know the build-up is the best part.
i have a conflicted relationship with sports. when i was a kid i read the sports page every morning. i was a dedicated celtics and red sox fan. i knew a lot about my teams. i went to games. i also played basketball and softball for years. i was an umpire and ref too. i was all about it. i stopped in high school. for a lot of reasons. since distancing myself from the world of competitive sports, i have ambled back in a few ways. one of the ways was through starting to follow women's sports like roller derby and the wnba.
i lived in seattle for three years, and the storm is a fierce team of talented athletes. they won the title. twice. still, i couldn't tell you how many times i have overheard conversations from folks bemoaning the fact that seattle doesn't have a professional basketball team since they lost the sonics. apparently, the storm doesn't count.
in the past few weeks i've read a number of articles pondering over the lack of out gay male athletes in professional sports. especially after brittney griner, a ncaa champ and #1 draft pick for the wnba, came out this past month. when she made her announcement, sports media asked: when will a man come out? until today, there were no active professional male athletes who were out, but there are a whole bunch of active professional female athletes who are and have been for years. it's just that no one (aka the media) really cares.
for comparison, the headline of the article covering griner's coming out was: female star comes out as gay, and the sports world shrugs. female athletes are, in large part, expected to be gay. by participating in spaces that are overwhelmingly considered to be male, they are transgressing gendered boundaries and thus not 'appropriately' performing femininity. women who play professional sports are like tomboys who never grew up. they either need to prove their femininity by being really 'girly' (since somehow mainstream society still doesn't understand femme queerness) or they need to prove their heterosexuality by being hetero-coupled. if they don't, they are read as masculinized women and assumed to be gay. when they come out, no one cares because a) they already expected it b) no one watches their sports anyway and c) why care about women's sport if you're not attracted to the women (and you can't be attracted to gay women; that's wrong).
there are numerous issues with a system that 'forces' all people who are not the 'dominant' sexuality to come out and identify themselves to begin with. that's a bigger issue than this post, and i'm not going to address it right now. i think it's great that jason collins has come out. maybe he will be a great role model for young gay (male) athletes. it's important to note, however, that he is not the first out professional athlete. there have been many before him, and the mechanisms that contribute to their invisibility are real. so for all three of you who read this post, i'd like to make some of these female athletes a little bit more visible. here's a link to a list ellen made of some out athletes. check it out:
http://www.afterellen.com/content/2012/05/12-our-favorite-out-athletes-last-40-years?page=2,0
