News
2005-11-18
Lesbians in
sports—still an issue
It really
shouldn't matter by now, but apparently it still does. For
two very different reasons, it matters greatly to
Sheryl
It really
shouldn't matter by now, but apparently it still does. For
two very different reasons, it matters greatly to
Sheryl Swoopes and Laila Ali. And even though we live
in politically correct times, it seems to matter to a
lot of America's sports fans too.
Lesbians play sports, which by itself is no big
surprise. The L word has hovered around women's
sports since the days when players in the All-American
Girls Professional Baseball League wore long skirts to
make them look more feminine.
The bigger surprise is how often the issue keeps
coming up. And for this discussion, we won't even
count the two Carolina Panthers cheerleaders recently
caught in a bathroom stall. "There is this fascination with
the sexuality of women athletes," said Todd Crosset, an
associate professor of sports management at the
University of Massachusetts. "If a woman is really
good at her sport, people will question her sexuality."
That fascination has been fueled in recent
weeks, most notably by Swoopes when she came out of
the closet and announced not only that she is a
lesbian but also that she is involved with one of her now
former coaches. "I feel like I've been living a lie,"
the WNBA's best player said. "I'm finally OK with the
idea of who I love, who I want to be with."
Ali had an announcement to make last week too.
She announced that she isn't a lesbian, debunking
Internet rumors to the contrary. "I am not dating, nor
will I ever be dating, a woman, because I am not gay,"
Ali said.
That Ali had to come out and make such a
statement reflects as much on the sport she's in as it
does the fact that people who cruise the Internet
often aren't able to distinguish truth from the blogging
rumor mills. She's a boxer. Gay boxers, even if
they're women, don't sell. So she took it upon herself
to say something, even though she should have had no
reason to say it. Mike Piazza faced the same issue a few
years ago when he held a press conference to announce
he dated women, not men. Michael Vick found himself
forced to do the same.
There's a big difference, though, between the
sexes when it comes to same-sex attraction. Any male
athlete who came out—and so far no current
player in a major sport ever has—would likely be
ostracized by teammates and mocked by fans.
NBA commissioner David Stern recently said a gay
player would be a nonissue because his teammates would
simply judge him on his production. That was the PC
thing to say, but the real answer came later from Celtics
coach Doc Rivers. "They would kill him," Rivers told the
Boston Herald.
On the other hand, there are already women like
Swoopes and golfer Rosie Jones who not only feel
liberated by declaring that they are gay but are
profiting from it. Both have endorsement deals with a cruise
line that caters to lesbians. "It says volumes that
Swoopes came out and she came out with a sponsor,"
Crosset said. "Why not use your body to sell products?"
It's hard to imagine any mainstream companies
jumping on that bandwagon. Being a gay athlete carries
a big stigma, as tennis player Martina Navratilova
found out when her endorsement deals vanished after she
acknowledged she was gay in the 1980s. One look into the
stands at a WNBA game speaks volumes about the dilemma
faced in marketing female athletes. While there are
families with children and men who simply like
basketball, there's also a big contingent of lesbian fans
who keep the league alive.
Three years ago a group calling itself Lesbians
for Liberty staged a kiss-in during time-outs of a New
York Liberty game to get the team to acknowledge
lesbians' presence. The Los Angeles Sparks, meanwhile,
marketed the team at gay bars in Southern California.
And while the first major championship of the
PGA season is played in Augusta, Ga., the LPGA
equivalent is the Nabisco Championship in Palm
Springs, Calif. Not coincidentally, the tournament week is
also known as "Lesbian Spring Break," and gay couples
party in the clubhouse when the day's play ends.
If it weren't for those fans, women's sports
would have had a lot tougher time getting the small
foothold it has. "There used to be such a stigma about
lesbians in sports that you really have to give credit to
the lesbian community for keeping women's sports,
particularly collegiate sports, alive in this
country," said Crosset, who wrote a book on the LPGA Tour.
The stigma, though, is still there. A former
Penn State player recently claimed that she was tossed
from the team because the coach mistakenly thought she
was a lesbian. She, like many female athletes, must defend
their sexuality on a continuing basis.
That's reality, no matter how many ways you spin
it. (Tim Dahlberg, AP)
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