If you’re from Chicago, last football season’s big news was “Da Bears” road to the Super Bowl. But everywhere else people were tuning in to the fact that it was the first time in National Football League history that a Black coach brought a team to the Super Bowl. Actually, Black coaches brought both teams to the Super Bowl, making the occasion even more historic.
This moment in NFL history was treated as an indicator of the times, purportedly proving to us that sports is the great equalizer—society’s level playing field in our battle for equality. Sports’ faith in skill above everything else, it is said, has made it a site of racial progress in a systematically racist society.
This is not true, nor has it ever been. The Bear’s Lovie Smith and the Colt’s Tony Dungy are two a very small number of Black coaches and even fewer Black owners in the NFL, or any other sports franchise for that matter. In sports, the bosses are mainly white.
While there has been some very slow progress towards racial equality, the situation for women and LGBTQ people in the sports world is even worse. When former NBA player John Amaechi came out of the closet this February, it became clear that much of the sports world is not ready to be a progressive leader on gender and sexuality questions, as coaches, players and much of the public handled the question of homosexuality among players with expressions ranging from discomfort to homophobia and hate.
Amaechi said that, while some of his teammates surprised him with their accepting attitudes, there is still an overriding culture of homophobia and fear within the sports world.
Speaking of closeted gay athletes, he told ESPN, the sports network, “It's a frightening prospect. It's terrifying. There are people for whom their entire world is based around this idea that people will look at them and when they look at them, they are NBA superstars, NBA players. And any change to that would be physiologically devastating. Emotionally devastating, financially devastating.”
Guylaine Demers, PhD, a professor at the Department of Physical Education at Canada’s Laval University agrees. “There can be no doubt that [the problem of homophobia] exists, that it is found in all sports, that it is experienced by both men and women athletes, and that it also affects coaches and sport administrator,” she wrote in the April Canadian Journal for Women in Coaching.
“Most authors agree that the proportion of homosexuals in sport must be at least as high as the proportion generally attributed to society as a whole, which is one in every 10 people,” she writes, noting, however, that because of the fear factor, very few of them are out.
Professional contact sports have been almost exclusively “male zones.” From the way they are advertised, celebrated and represented in pop culture, sports are for men. While this is somewhat of an oversimplification, it nonetheless rings true overall. National women’s leagues have only recently been validated in the sports community and the public. In every way beyond, of course, player skill, they lag behind male leagues. They lag in everything from the amount players are paid to how much public attention they receive.
Even at the elementary and high school levels, where substantial gains have been won through struggle, female students, by choice or design, are not joining or participating in contact sports teams at the same rate as boys. When they do play, girls’ teams are less likely to get the level of attention or support as boys’ teams in the same sport. Though we all know this is unfair, we also often accept it as normal because we are socialized to view sports as a “guy thing.”
“Fear and misunderstanding about sexual orientation lead to harassment, uneasiness, anxiety, isolation, and violence,” Demers adds. “Behavior and feelings of these kinds create unsafe environments that impede learning, adversely affect friendships, and hurt teams, athletes and coaches alike.”
An interesting aspect is the attitudes around sexuality and gender in men’s sports versus woman’s sports. Men’s sports are known as a straight space, and the intense homophobia expressed in and around men’s sports acts to keep it that way (at least on the surface).
“Female athletes are often called lesbians in an attempt to cast doubts on the validity of their performances and discourage them from competing,” says Demers.
Paradoxically, the arena of women’s sports is considered a much more “safe space.” For the men, society assumes that the athletes are straight. However, in women’s sports the athletes are assumed to be lesbians. There are many factors that go into this assumption. The assertion that skills related with sports—strength, speed, stamina—are masculine implies that female athletes are masculine, and masculine women are often (mis)characterized as lesbians.
At the same time, participation in “masculine” activities is empowering to women, whether they are LGBTQ or not. Thus, the WNBA’s fans are largely women, and there is an emergence of “new” LGBTQ spaces other than the traditional bars, music festivals, or internet sites. With the assumption that WNBA players are lesbians and the presence of the LBGTQ community in the stands, WNBA games have become the place to go for some queer folks. It is different venue from the more traditional hangouts because it is “safe” while not LGBTQ exclusive. Unfortunately, as we have noted above, these venues are relegated to a “second-class” status in the sports world.
It would be nice if sports actually were that equal playing field, that vacuum free from society’s influences or perceptions, that they are said to be. But as a product of modern capitalism, they fall short. However, there are benchmarks we can be excited about. The establishment of the Gay Olympic Games in 1982 in San Francisco began to chip away at the hetero-only sports world. Since the founding of the Gay Games, they have become the largest non-professional sports event in the world. Regardless, the sports media, including ESPN, had almost nothing to say about last summer’s Games.
That ‘level playing field’ is constantly being defined and deconstructed by talking heads, fans, and anyone with a television. But in reality the way we see sports, especially the players, supports the overall expectations generated by sexism, homophobia and racism. When an NBA or NFL player comes out some folks say, “Good for him,” or “That guy is a role model;” others say “It does not matter.”
However when there are only six out professional male athletes in the history the NHL, MLB, NBA, NFL, some of whom came out in retirement, coming out on the field matters. Clearly, there is still a way to go.
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Dynamic Magazine
