Check out my new article today in Salon about homophobia in women's sports--especially in basketball, as we've seen from Coach Rene Portland's infamous "no drinking, no drugs, no lesbians" policy, to the fact that there is one (1) openly gay coach out of 350 Division One teams, to the use of homophobic slurs to denigrate any female in sports (gay or not), to the sad over-compensation of some women's teams to glam up their athletes. What's especially sad? The closeting is so thick as to silence any conversation about it, as we saw this month when the Women's Basketball Coaches Association refused to show the documentary "Training Rules"--a film that tells the story of Coach Portland and its toxic consequences--at its annual convention, saying that the WBCA job was to "protect the coach and the profession."
From the article:
Homophobia is not particular to women's sports; the machismo of men's sports, too, offers precious little room for gay and bisexual athletes to be out. The brave and few who have come out tend to do so after they are safely retired. Ed Gallagher, an offensive lineman for the University of Pittsburgh in the late 1970s, attempted suicide in 1985 by jumping off a dam -- twelve days after his first sexual encounter with a man. He was left a paraplegic and has said that before his suicide attempt, he simply couldn't reconcile his gay desires with his image of himself as an athlete.
But what is particular to female athletes is that they bear an additional burden of having to constantly justify their game. Women's sports are compelled to prove again and again that they are worthy of attention, fans, and funding. As Kate Harding pointed out in Broadsheet, female athletes can't win for winning: even as the University of Connecticut women's basketball team pounded its way to its 78th consecutive win and the NCAA championship this season, it was criticized as actually being bad for women's sports. The contention was that UConn's dynasty somehow proved that women's sports aren't competitive -- a notion that elides the profound impact of dynasties in developing men's sports. UCLA's men's basketball team had a legendary 88-game winning streak between 1971 and 1974 and cultivated a fan base that feeds March Madness to this day. Nobody argues the UCLA streak was evidence of men's basketball being weak. Indeed, it is celebrated as one of the greatest achievements in all sports.
With such absurd day-to-day defenses foisted on women's sports, it seems that few gay athletes and coaches are inclined to meet additional backlash by coming out. It's hard enough to validate women's sports; to embrace women's sports that include out lesbians seems to be too much to ask. Indeed, validating LGBT people may be viewed as an affirmation of the epithets used to denigrate women in sports.
About the Image: The Indiana Fever and the Phoenix Mercury tip off in the final game of the truly thrilling 2009 WNBA championship series. Getty Images.
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