Photo caption: Morning on Fire. January 2007
Former NBA basketballer John Amaechi came out last week, as in announcing to the world that he's gay. This shouldn't be a big deal except that there is no place in the world where homosexuality is more feared than in a professional sports locker room. I know. I've been there.
The good news for current NBA ballers is that Amaechi is no longer actually playing anymore . Whew! Their masculinity is safe for the moment, but S.O.L. wonders how long it will be until a current pro athlete can be a gay and nobody gives a shit. I predict the Cubs will win the World Series long before that ever happens.
But in perusing the web about this story this week, I saw more than a few message board comments about womens' pro athletes -- the gist of which is they're all lesbians. Um, could we all try to be a little less fucking ignorant?
Supposedly educated folk are not immune apparently. I belong to a private message board of professional writers and we have a sometimes lively discussion about the sports world. When someone posted about Amaechi's outing himself, it didn't take long before the thread turned into a guessing game about which women pro athletes are gay -- and how, really, everybody knows how most of them are. (I can't share any of the specific material here because I'm bound by the site's TOS rules so you'll just have to take my word for it.)
Labeling women pro athletes as gay may well be the last, best safest place for bigots to be out loud and proud. Even Wikipedia has a ridiculously biased (and unconfirmed) reference page on this subject.
For straighter dope, check out this book or the Women's Sports Foundation, which has long been a reliable place to get the truth out on this subject. In fact, there's a very thoughtful piece here that goes into all the ways women athletes are misrepresented or marginalized.
I have personal experience on both sides of the coin, having played sports as a child and then later covering womens athletics as a sportswriter. When I was nine years old, I was among the first girls in New York to play Little League Baseball with the boys. I'm happy to report that for the most part, my presence wasn't a big deal to my teammates and opponents. It was their parents and other adults who felt the most threatened.
One man, a gym teacher no less, once told my mother that her daughter shouldn't play baseball because and I quote, "she might slide into second base and get breast cancer." Mull on that heaping plate of stupid for a second. I was told to "go back to the kitchen" and was labeled a "tom boy" and a "dyke" -- I admit to the first but as for the second, well I'm here to report that playing sports did not turn me into a Lesbian. Not that there would be anything wrong with being gay, but seriously folks, for the vast majority of us, your sexuality is hard-wired into your DNA - you either is or you ain't and there isn't much you can do to change it.
There's a lot wrong about the way women are portrayed in the media in general -- I'm not sure you can be too thin in America today -- but one thing you can't really argue with is that being active is a good thing for everybody -- mentally and physically. The last thing a girl needs to worry about when the time comes for her to sign up for a sports team is whether it's going to make people question her sexuality.
