Out in Sport

The experiences of openly gay and lesbian athletes in competitive sport

Eric Anderson, Rory Magrath, Rachael Bullingham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138182219
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317295419
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios LGBT

Research has shown that since the turn of the millennia, matters have rapidly improved for gays and lesbians in sport. Where gay and lesbian athletes were merely tolerated a decade ago, today they are celebrated.

This book represents the most comprehensive examination of the experiences of gays and lesbians in sport ever produced. Drawing on interviews with openly gay and lesbian athletes in the US and the UK, as well as media accounts, the book examines the experiences of 'out' men and women, at recreational, high school, university and professional levels, in addition to those competing in gay sports leagues.

Offering a new approach to understanding this important topic, Out in Sport is essential reading for students and scholars of sport studies, LGBT studies and sociology, as well as sports practitioners and trainers.

1

STUDYING GAYS AND LESBIANS IN SPORT

This book represents the most comprehensive examination of the experiences of gays and lesbians in sport ever produced. Unlike previous works that have focused on only men (i.e. Anderson 2005a) or women (i.e. Griffin 1998), and unlike research that has only examined recreational athletes (i.e. Hekma 1998) or closeted athletes (i.e. Pronger 1990; Denison and Kitchen 2015), this research examines both men and women, at the recreational, high school, university and professional levels of play who are out of the closet, as well as those competing in gay sports leagues. It is a scientific endeavor based in empirical research conducted in both the United States and the United Kingdom.

Throughout this book, we highlight that social matters for lesbian athletes, and particularly for gay male athletes, have dramatically changed for the better over recent decades (Anderson 2015a). This is not to suggest that gay and lesbian athletes play without any difficulties, nor is it to suggest that homophobia has decreased to a level that permits inclusivity within all geographical sporting spaces within these two countries—declining homophobia is an uneven social process—but it is to suggest that the older research on the topic of gay men and lesbians in sport is now not only dated, but irrelevant. Accordingly, while the cultural change we examine in this book is steady, if at times gradual, we argue that research on the topic should be divided between that which occurred prior to and after the turn of the twenty-first century.

Illustrating this shift, researchers who examined the issue of gay men in sports in the waning decades of the twentieth century largely agreed that organized sports were a highly homophobic institution (Bryant 2001; Clarke 1998; Hekma 1998; Pronger 1990; Wolf-Wendel, Toma, and Morphew 2001). Hekma (1998: 2) wrote that “Gay men who are seen as queer and effeminate are granted no space whatsoever in what is generally considered to be a masculine preserve and a macho enterprise.” And Pronger (1990: 26) agreed: “Many of the (gay) men I interviewed said they were uncomfortable with teamsports . . . orthodox masculinity is usually an important subtext if not the leitmotif in teamsports.”

Although women have traditionally maintained more progressive attitudes toward sexual minorities (Loftus 2001), matters were not much better for lesbian athletes. Krane (2001: 118) wrote that “Although there is greater acceptance of females engaging in sport behaviors, there still are limits as to how much athletic prowess and muscularity are socially acceptable.” Griffin wrote (1992: 252), “Because lesbians were assumed to be masculine creatures who rejected their female identity and roles as wives and mothers, athletic women became highly suspect.”

We argue that the research prior to the twenty-first century also varies on another important dimension of homophobia in men’s and women’s sport. Namely, female athletes are suspect of being lesbian simply for their participation, regardless of their gendered performance. Conversely, male athletes are assumed to be heterosexual unless they violate gendered norms. Burton-Nelson (1994: 1) nicely captured this twentieth-century prescription on women playing sport: “If you grew up female in America, you heard this: Sports are unfeminine. And this: Girls who play sports are tomboys or lesbians.”

Accordingly, female athletes who challenge the norms of femininity by playing competitive team sport often use homophobia in order to distance themselves from being thought lesbian (Lenskyj 2003). In order to distance themselves from being socially perceived as lesbian, female athletes wear feminine clothing and jewelry, and use makeup, despite its sporting impracticality (Krane 2001). Griffin (1998) gave the example of a female basketball coach pacing the paraffin courtside lines wearing high heels and a miniskirt, suggesting that coaches do this because sporting women who do not hyperfeminize themselves face increased suspicion regarding their sexuality (Cox and Thompson 2001). This gendered phenomenon is described as apologetic (Felshin 1974), and exists as a tool of marginalization to police orthodox gender roles (Anderson 2009a).

Once a lesbian athlete came out of the closet, they faced both overt and covert forms of discrimination (Griffin, 1998). However, it was impossible to study openly gay men’s twentieth-century experiences, as too few came out at any level of sport (recreational, educationally based or professional). This is why in Pronger’s (1990) treatment of the subject he wrote only of closeted athletes’ fears of what coming out would be like—he could find no gay men who were out in sport.

Although scholars did not identify or recognize it this way, studying gay and lesbian athletes prior to the new millennium was not only done in an era of high homophobia, but also an era of high homohysteria. This is a concept that we flesh out in Chapter 4, but the general idea is that a homohysteric culture is a homosexually panicked culture in which suspicion of homosexuality permeates. In other words, because heterosexuals cannot socially prove that they are not gay, in a culture of high homophobia, they attempt to prove their heterosexuality by aligning their gender and sexual behaviors in opposition to whatever is deemed homosexual.

We show that cultural homohysteria in America escalated rapidly in the mid-1980s, partially as a result of heightened cultural homophobia that combined with the HIV/AIDS epidemic and a revival of fundamentalist Christianity. This means that there was cultural awareness that homosexuality existed as a stable orientation within a sizeable percent of the American population, which was ‘morally’ opposed to it; heterosexuals thus feared being thought a sexual minority.

However, unlike the male scholars who studied homophobia in sport at the time (i.e. Pronger 1990), in 1998 Pat Griffin suggested that if gay male athletes, who are stigmatized as being feminine can be as strong and competitive as heterosexual male athletes, they may threaten the perceived distinctions between gay men and straight men, and thus the perceived differences between men and women as a whole. While this contention did not receive much attention in the world of sport scholars, French theorist Pierre Bourdieu (2001) agreed.

Bourdieu maintained that the gay male was uniquely situated to undermine masculine orthodoxy because of his ability to invisibly gain access to masculine privilege before coming out as gay. Because of this, Bourdieu theorized that the gay male may be positioned to align with feminists in a terrain of progressive coalition politics to symbolically attack male and heterosexual dominance. Thus, gay male athletes—who are seen as a paradox because they comply with the gendered script of being a man through the physicality involved in sports, but violate another masculine script through the existence of same-sex desires—may threaten sport as a prime site of orthodox masculinity and masculine privilege. It is perhaps for this reason that Clarke (1998: 145) wrote that gay males are perceived, “largely as deviant and dangerous participants on the sporting turf . . . in that they defy culturally defined structures of hegemonic masculinity.”

Examining gay and lesbian athletes in contemporary sport

Since Griffin in the 1980s and 1990s surmised that gay athletes could be key in reducing the binary ways of thinking about sexuality and gender, she has been proved correct. Anglo-American culture has changed its disposition toward homosexuality rapidly, and progressively, in the intervening years. If there is one thing that we are certain of, this shift is happening so fast it is hard to keep up with.

This argument might seem oxymoronic to most readers. Public perception that sport is a highly homophobic institution remains high. This is fueled, largely, by the near-total absence of openly gay male players in sport (less so for lesbians). Here, there are contradictory messages: on the one hand, broadcast media and popular opinion (Denison and Kitchen 2015) are often quick to decry homophobia due to this absence. On the other hand, the absence of gay male players in sport is not evidence of homophobia.

Gay men, as we are readily aware, are over-represented in art, dance, music, theatre and multiple individual and aesthetic sports. This over-representation must be met with an under-representation elsewhere: in other words, gay men are a finite resource. To be more specific, although we do not have precise data to support our claim apart from some data on cheerleading (Anderson 2005b) and ice-dancing (Adams M.L. 2011), it is not something many would contest if we stated that gay men are also over-represented (i.e. more than 2.8 percent of the population) in gymnastics, diving, swimming, twirling and perhaps some individual sports like weight-lifting and distance running. This suggests that, whether a product of biology or social construction, sporting taste is related to sexuality.

Further evidence supporting our hypothesis of diminished homophobia in sport comes from the experiences of professional gay and lesbian athletes who come out of the closet in recent years has been overwhelmingly positive. Rather than being drummed out of sport after coming out, professional soccer player Robbie Rogers received a standing ovation when he took the field for his first match as an out player, while out NBA player Jason Collins was invited to meet the President.

In July 2015, the United States Women’s Soccer Team won the Women’s World Cup. The US team had three openly lesbian players, and it was also led by an openly lesbian coach: Jill Ellis. In fact, after winning, one of the players, Abby Wambach, ran over to kiss her wife Sarah Huffman, in a photo that set social media networks ablaze with grandeur and the Twitter trending of #lovewins. The event came only a week on the heels of the US Supreme Court’s decision to legalize gay marriage across the United States.

How then do we make sense of perceptions versus reality?

Adding to this complex situation, Denison and Kitchen (2015) released a non-academic study on the perceptions of homophobia across multiple Western countries and according to multiple age categories. Their findings are rather complex, and this is partially due to the complex design of their study. The study, available online as “Out on the Fields,” claims to represent the “First International Study on Homophobia in Sport.” However, we highlight a number of problems: first, the study permits people to retrospectively account for their experiences in sport (closeted or out). To this we argue: if you ask 60-year-old men if sport is homophobic, they will undoubtedly say “yes.” For example, one question asks if you have ever “Witnessed or experienced homophobia in a sporting environment.” This is an entirely misleading question, for it does not reflect contemporary experiences. With more than 80 percent of their respondents (9,500) being older than 21, people can reflect upon experiences from even decades ago and these show as current results. Seeing an act of homophobia three decades ago does not mean that sport is homophobic today. Sociologically speaking, seeing an act of homophobia even today does not make sport a homophobic enterprise.

Second, the study conflates the experiences of heterosexuals, bisexuals and transgendered people with gays and lesbians. Yet considerable research has shown that the experiences of bisexuals and, particularly, transgendered individuals are far worse than gays and lesbians in Anglo-American and Western European countries (Robinson and Espelage 2011). But the experience of boxing promoter Frank Maloney, whose gender reassignment now sees her go by the name Kellie Maloney, as well as that of retired American athlete Bruce Jenner, now known as Caitlyn Jenner, suggests that this inclusivity could also now extend to transgendered individuals.

Third, the inclusion of heterosexuals in this questionnaire also generates bias. In all likelihood, the only heterosexuals that would be interested enough to complete a survey about the experiences of gay and lesbian athletes would be ones that are so politically aligned to supporting LGBT rights that they would over-report the negative and under-report the positive. The victimization framework (declaring how awful society is for gays and lesbians) is one way leftist individuals, and particularly left-leaning heterosexuals, prove their left-wing credentials. It sounds conservative to say that homophobia is not a problem. Taking this framework thus biases one’s perceptions.

Fourth, the study also conflates witnessing an act of homophobia in sport with experiencing one—an egregious error that fails any standard of academic accountability. Worse, the same question—“Have you witnessed or experienced homophobia in a sporting environment as a player or spectator?”—conflates one’s recreational participation with professional sporting environments: so someone who plays sport without incidence for 30 years, but once, 31 years ago, saw one homophobic act in professional sport counts.

Fifth, the study had no controls or measures on who took the survey. Anyone, including a jokester, can take the study and distort its results. Equally, just as you are much more likely to fill out a customer feedback form if you’ve had bad service than good, one is much more likely to take this survey if they feel victimized by sport than if they have not been. Thus, the study had no controls to approximate a general survey of the population.

Thus, Denison and Kitchen’s 2015 report was very much a “hearts and minds” study of perceptions and fears, not necessarily reflecting empirical realities. It was a piece of advocacy work, more than one of academic rigor. For example, it takes homophobia as granted, asking participants to answer, “Thinking of all sporting environments where homophobia could occur, where do you think it occurs most often?” Yet none of the answers permit a respondent to say that it does not occur at all, or that it is highly unlikely. Furthermore, the question does not separate out the sport that one actually plays versus professional sport.

Perhaps the best example of the study’s measuring of fears, and not realities, comes from the question about whether people perceived that openly gay or lesbian people would be safe at a spectator sporting event. Here, 83 percent of American participants said that they would not be very safe. Interestingly, at the same time the survey was released, the LA Dodgers “kiss cam” (available on YouTube) showed two gay men in the audience kissing. In response, the crowd audibly cheered two or three times louder than they did for any of the heterosexual couples kissing, in an overt display of support.

Highlighting the broader perception of fear over reality even among those central to the issues of gays in sport is the story of baseball’s first openly gay umpire, Dale Scott, compared to gays-in-sport activist, Dave Pallone. Pallone was pressured to resign from baseball in 1988 after he was outed in a New York Post article. He has fought for equality in sport since. However, when Scott came out as an openly gay baseball umpire in 2014, there was no pressure to retire. At the time, Pallone said that “He’s going to find out how much hate there really is out there.” Yet, in a June 11, 2015 article on Outsports.com, Scott reports that after both spring training, and completing the first third of the baseball season, he has had no difficulties whatsoever—that he has not even heard a single gay slur. These cases thus highlight the perception of the lingering fear of homophobia, versus its reality. As we argue in this book, this is a generational phenomenon: in general, older men expect homophobia and younger men do not.

This book therefore takes a different approach than fear-mongering, or seeing the world through the lens of victimization....

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Out in Sport
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Figures
• 1 Studying Gays and Lesbians in Sport
• 2 The Link Between Sport and Homophobia
• 3 Homohysteria and Declining Homophobia
• 4 Openly Gay Athletes in High School and University Sport
• 5 Openly Lesbian Athletes in High School and University Sport
• 6 Openly Lesbian and Gay Male Athletes in Recreational Sport
• 7 Openly Gay and Lesbian Elite Athletes
• 8 Impact of Team Climate and Language on Gay and Lesbian Athletes
• 9 The Impact of Diminished Homophobia on Straight Athletes
• 10 Cooling Down
• References
• Index