1 dependence of macro and micro trends. The current trend in skirt length, whatever it happens to be, is modified by an array of other trends, including everything from the macro trend toward women wearing less and less to the rising popularity of physical conditioning for women. The chances are slim that skirts will get briefer and briefer until they dis- appear. Other factors will blunt the trend well before nudity becomes common- place. Well, you may be wondering, where does this leave us? An especially smart and erudite friend of mine – you’d know his name immediately if I mentioned Andy Hooper – I Hope This Isn’t a Trend chided me for not writing articles “about things” for fan- I’m starting work on the second issue about a week closer stuff. I didn’t point out that fanstuff is about the people, to my target release date. 1f I lose a week of prep time each institutions, history, experiences and interactions of Fan- issue, it won’t be long before the deadline will arrive be- dom. fore I’ve even started/. Now, this section of “Filibuster” is probably more like When I embarked on this project, I promised myself that what my friend had in mind. It isn’t really about anything wouldn’t happen, so this issue had better not lead to an- in particular, nor does it lead to some thunderous conclu- other week’s delay for #3 or I may surrender to panic. sion. Or I may *not*. And yet… It depends on which choice strikes me as having he Let’s recap. greater humor potential. That’s the fanzine game for you. It opens with a self-effacing reference to eve-of-deadline Well, that’s how it is for me, publishing. It makes me seem anyway. almost human and leaves you I’ve got the option, because with a vague feeling of indul- I’m more or less kidding. gent superiority. Strangely, some people actu- Then the section eases ally try to use this simplistic into a discussion of trends and approach to make serious pre- their role in predicting the fu- dictions. ture. Not only does it prompt a “If this goes on” is a good succession of erotic mental springboard to satire, but a images, but the principles may poor method of foretelling the possibly form the foundation future. of the New Science of Psycho Trends don’t usually continue Fanhistory! Just call mw to absurd extremes, unaffected “Hari,” because my predictions by other trends and develop- “Selden” come true. ments. And finally, with an More often, as a trend gains affectionate tweak of the esti- steam, it fosters a counter- mable Hooper, comes this trend. If the pendulum swings witty self-analysis. back far enough, a counter Well, at least half- counter-trend almost always slows and ultimately reverses witty, eh? it. Trends in the length of women’s skirts demonstrate this One Man’s Claptrap back-and-forth process. When skirts hit the floor and can’t As you’ve already noticed, \ Claptrap #2 ’s graphic theme get any longer, the hemlines head skyward. is the Rosicrucians. He bearers of the mental secrets of the The length of women’s skirts also illustrates the inter- Ancients have a long association with the world of science

Claptrap #2 G is a more-or-less monthlyfanzine (April, 2014) edited and to some extent written by Arnie Katz ([email protected]). It is distributed by direct email and also through the kind auspices of Bill Burns of efanzines.com Published 4/24/14,

Member: fwa Supporter: AFAL

2 fiction, because there was a four-decade stretch during which it seems like every SF magazine had an ad for the organization. Why, the Rosicrucians are as much a part of Sci-Fi as flying saucer nuts, The Shaver Mystery and Phil Seuling! That justification – Claptrap is the fanzine where every- thing is justified except the margins – notwithstanding, I’m In This not singling out AMORC. It’s simply its turn. Fandom’s Ghods willing, a lot of other forms of claptrap will get a turn on the griddle. CLAPTRAP The Plain Truth is that I’m a thorough skeptic. I don’t believe in anything that can’t be observed and verified. As an agnostic, I don’t disbelieve things that can’t be observed and verified. I withhold opinions about such things. Filibuster I know that one person’s claptrap is another’s Flame of Truth. I’ve listened to people defend the most blatant pyra- Arnie…..2 mid schemes with fanatic passion. I think it’s likely that there’s a form of claptrap out there, waiting to captures each of us. Even hard-headed Bill Kunkel became a sucker for a tricked-out version of nu- Styx & Stones merology. (I don’t think I’ve encountered my claptrap yet, unless it's Fandom.) Eric Mayer…..6 There are two types of beliefs. There are beliefs that can’t be validated or disproved. I have no quarrel with anyone who holds such a belief, even though I personally prefer not to embrace anything that can’t be proved. And then there are beliefs that violate one or more ele- End of a Woman ments of reality. Everyone has the right to champion dis- Arnie…..8 provable beliefs. You can believe that the Earth is flat or that it came into existence 6,000 years ago – and I have the right to think you’re deluded.

To Be or Not to Belize Listen to Yesterday You never know what topic will take over the living room at a Vegrants meeting. The congregation of mighty Thorns on the Rose intellects and diverse interests is liable to fasten on even Arnie…...10 the most esoteric subject. At the March 15 th Vegrants, for instance, it looked like the heart of the evening’s living room conversation would be a detailed examination of Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land . Unexpectedly, talk veered from RAH to the Speaking of Sports relative insignificant Caribbean nation of Belize. Even though no one present had a shred of knowledge Closet Homophobia about Belize’s history, culture or location, some of Trufan- Arnie….. 14 dom’s finest minds spent the next couple of hours relent- lessly churning out such gems as “Daydream Belizer,” “Do You Belize in Magic?” “I’m a Belizer” and “Roxanne” by the Belice. We even formed a club, the True Belizers. no more. So far as I know, Forry Ackerman never even I wish I could tell you the whole lurid story that engen- visited Belize. dered all this alleged levity. It’s a multi-faceted mess with Alas, I can’t tell you the bizarre tale that one of the Ve- something for every perverse taste. There’s a feckless pub- grants told that night. An internet search might turn up the lisher, a two-timing girlfriend who is a call girl on the side, genzine edition of Claptrap and the participants in this epic plagiarism, a triangle that broke up a celebrity couple, in- farrago might be able to recognize their own names if I ternational politics and Forry Ackerman. used them. That, in turn, might rebound negatively on the 4e, I must explain, was not involved in this un-Belize- raconteur. able yarn. His name came up when someone made a par- So I can’t tell you about Belize. You probably wouldn’t ticularly feeble pub and someone else said that Forry Belize it anyway. would’ve liked it and wasn’t it a putty that Ack fanacked

3 Bhye, Bhye Bhob of the market, but we were close Word of Bhob Stewart’s death enough to the peak to come away reached me a few days after the with some money. Now, we’re actual passing. I was staying away exploring the possibility of buy- from my email inbox and the ing, due to the still-depressed real Internet, so I didn’t get the sad estate prices and relatively low news until JoHn Hardin told me at interest rate the sad news. Whether we actually buy Bhob Stewart was already a depends on finding a house in our legend by the time I joined the price-range that we like enough. Fanoclasts in April, 1964, He no Joyce and I hate moving; she’s longer attended meetings regu- still hoping to purchase the place larly, but he did make periodic we rent. Guest Appearances. Looking for a house is Though somewhat shy and quiet like baseball’s spring training. in person, his wild side came out When teams converge on Florida in his artistic creations. He did and Arizona, every team is ready everything from the cartoons on to contend for the pennant and the backs of baseball cards to un- every kid who goes 2-for-4 or derground comics to those side- pitches four acceptable innings is splitting multi-page cartoon cov- on his way to Cooperstown. ers for Void . Those covers, espe- It’s the same with adver- cially the one on #28, impressed tised houses. They are all beauti- Lenny Bailes and me so much ful, well-maintained and in lovely that we collaborated with Ross surroundings. Currier and Ives Chamberlain to produce a sequel have nothing on skilled house for the first issue of Quip photographer. And let’s not forget Bhob Stew- Until you investigate. art’s avant garde film, The Year That’s when you find out the Universe Lost the Pennant . about the crack house next door, Mike McInerney and, possibly, the carpet trashed by incontinent rich brown took me to see a per- pets, the string of break-ins o the formance. Bhob stood beside the block and other deflating facts. screen and interacted with the House hunting is a time filmed portion of the presentation. to yearn, to indulge visions of a One scene in this surreal film happier life. The prospective showed Bhob riding a film cart buyer can scoff at the houses that with his foot behind his ear. That are too little or otherwise unsuit- was Bob’s “party trick” and I saw able and dream of idyllic life as him do it at a Fanoclasts meeting you wander through fields of while hopping around on one dream homes. foot. He not only accomplished We currently have three this impressive athletic feat without breaking any bones or bedrooms, one of which is my office. Joyce has a two- demolishing Ted White’s living room. desk set-up at one end of the over-sized dining room. When I was editor-in-chief of CollectingChanne.com a Our living room is lined with bookshelves and is a little decade ago, I had the pleasure of hiring Bhob Stewart as a smaller than we’d like. Ads for four- and even five- staff editor. He turned out a number of excellent stories bedroom houses within our price range conjured about comic and cartoon collectibles. We also brought him thoughts of a separate office for Joyce. to Las Vegas for the company meeting. My staff had so And if we did, somehow, get a fifth bedroom, what many wellknown fans on it that the festivities included a would we do with that? My imagination filled the wish- decidedly unofficial, but extremely pleasant, informal con- room with a large N-gauge model train layout. vention. Reality is probably more along the lines of a library, though Joyce’s goal is a room that looks like a bus stop Castles in the Mind on a particularly pretty street. Her plans are quite de- We’re officially house hunting. We rent our present tailed. Her indoor version of the outdoors would have a home, having sold 3701 Bridgeglen about 10 years ago. blue ceiling with a few white, fleecy clouds, artificial We needed to sell when we did, but circumstances turf and the bus shelter and a simulated road for the forced us into exquisite timing. We didn’t unload at the top imaginary bus.

4 The search for a new home has begun. I’ll report if, and when, we find something that inspires us to relocate.

Nature has already made him a favorite at to my editorial authority. He’s now content to watch me commit fanac without active interference.

— Arnie

5 circle, temperatures during the day struggled to reach fifty and that was in the house. Outside, overnight, it was well below zero. I could empa- thize with those wretched souls encased up to their necks in the icy Cocytus lake. At least they deserved their fate. And they don't need to pay our propane bills either. The worst part is how do they wipe their noses? The cold must make them run. When I have to trundle the trash down to the road around dawn on pickup day my nose and eyes stream the mo- ment the cold hits them. A sign of age I guess. Mary and I have managed to keep our noses Incontinence of the eyes and nasal passages. above the snow and ice these past few months, It was more pleasant warming myself over the just barely. It's been a rough winter in the north- boiling pitch in the eighth circle. I reached that east especially out here in the sticks. Or should I level about the time New Jersey Governor Chris say Styx? Christie's machinations were being exposed and I Although it feels like we've been living a tale couldn't help imagining the devils plying their of the Yukon by Jack London, in fact, during the pitchforks to push him back down like a big last cold snap, I was reading Dante's Inferno . As dumpling into the bubbling stew of corrupt politi- I followed the two old poets down into the ninth cians. One of my favorite cantos was the one where Dante and Virgil were double-crossed and pur- sued by the Malebranche ("Evil claws" -- what a great name for devils.) who patrol of the pitch lake. Plot twists, action, danger! Here's a confession, whereas many readers approach every book as if it were a literary novel, alert for symbols and psychological in- sights, I read classics as if they were genre nov- els. I grew up on genre fiction -- science fiction and fantasy and then mysteries -- and I never did outgrow those kinds of stories. So to me the horror at the end of Heart of Darkness is worthy of Stephen King. Conan the Barbarian would have been right in his element hacking away in the middle of the bloody chaos in The Red Badge of Courage . The dark, per- verse romantic triangle described by Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter might have served as a noir plot device for Cornell Woolrich. And what is Crime and Punishment except a long example of the "inverted detective story" for which R. Austin Freeman is famous amongst mystery aficiona- dos? I know I should be paying more attention to Dante's allusions to the classics rather than being entranced by the amazing fantasy world he cre-

6 ated. Yes, I am studying the footnotes. But how many people today are familiar enough with ancient Roman poets Classical mythol- ogy and the Bible -- not to mention thir- teenth and fourteenth century Italian artists and public figures -- to read The Inferno as Dante intended? How much of the popula- tion of Dante's time was educated enough to read it as he intended, or to read it at all? What an author purposely puts into words is only a part -- and probably a small part -- of what readers experience. We all bring our own learning and memories, our own approaches to literature. Different people will look for different things from the same book and find them. To the sur- prise of the author who had no idea he'd written any such things. Maybe I'm just trying to excuse my read- ing Dante's Inferno as if it were Jules Verne's J ourney to the Center of the Earth . Be that as it may, when Dante describes the shades fully covered by ice but visible as wisps of straw in glass, I can feel the un- bearable cold stinging my soles, can see below my feet ghostly distorted forms, sus- pended at all angles and different depths, exactly like the goldfish, invariably trapped and frozen in the pond where I ice skated as a kid. I am out of the Inferno now, and halfway through Purgatorio which is not nearly as exciting. Still plenty of cliffs but no cliff- hangers. On the first terrace the proud are bent over by the weights of huge stones on their backs. I know how they feel. Every morning it feels like I have to push off a boulder along with the covers, in order to get out of our warm bed and face another freezing day. Luckily we are not con- demned to suffer winter for much longer. Soon I will start on Paradiso and hope for spring. — Eric Mayer Curt Philli[s for TAFF

7 mended The Lord of the Rings to Joyce – and then watched her turn into a religious fanatic. Joyce left her Baptist upbringing and Jewish con- version far behind since she found the Gospel of Alluvatar. Yet Don, though innocent of malicious agenda, indisputably gave her that first, fateful shove. The three of us were sitting in my office, lis- tening to music and wrestling with the Monu- mental Questions of Contemporary Fandom. We couldn’t find a cure for the N3F, the SFWA or WSFS, Inc., so Don decided to lighten the mood by presenting his theory of the creation of the universe. Joyce drank in every drop of Don’s glass-half-full postulate. A look of horror gradually crept over her ace as Joyce ab- sorbed the details of Don Miller’s debunking of the Big Bang The- ory. The End Is Near. I didn’t learn this fromsome Joyce seized upon what she considered Don’s slogan-shouting zealot, but from unsettling main postulates: events in my own life. I feel like it’s creeping closer, growing increasingly threatening. That is, of course, true. If there is a future Doom waiting for humanity, every passing sec- ond brings us nearer to it. Except that isn’t what I mean. Most potential cataclysms are extreme longshots. That doesn’t mean something won’t wipe us out before I com- plete this article, but it’w much, much more likely that I’ll finish my time on earth before something finishes everyone. No, the source of my mounting apprehension is my beloved wife, Joyce. Not to mince words, she has become a catastrophe addict. Her Fine Mind, once a-swirl with thoughts of weighty fan- nish matters and the acquisition of vast hoards of sparkly baubles, now wanders the dark corridors of potential annihilation. Where there’s an addict, there must be a pusher. In this case, the person who lured Joyce into her current obsession was my good friend Don Miller. I believe in my heart that he didn’t mean her harm or intentionally lead her in this dangerous direction. I empathize with Don, be- cause I myself had a similar experience. I recom-

8

• The Universe may not be as old as we think • The Universe may not be expanding • The Universe may end a few billion yers sooner than the Big Bang Theory sug- gests.

After Don verified her conclusions, Joyce an- nounced: “I guess I’ll stop writing.” “Stop writing?” I said, my voice louder than strictly necessary.“What’s the use if the Universe is going to end sooner,” she lamented. “Why write anything if it’s just going to perish?” “Even if Don’s right, that won’t happen for billions of years,”I countered. “But my words will be losrt,” she said. “So will everything else,” I said. I though it was important, at that moment, to assure Joyce that her writing wasn’t singled out for destruc- tion. “When the Universe ends, Joycie, it’s the end of everything in it.” “But that’s wrong!” Joyce protested. “My writing must survive!” Don paused his pondering of prodigious problems to ask, “Why?” “What happens after the Universe ends?” Joyce asked. “We don’t know,” Don admitted. Press Exchange and Claptrap readers know, “Maybe a new Universe begins,” I offered. Joyce has now resumed her writing. “And will that Universehave sentient be- Sadly, this doesn’t represent a recovery. ings?” Joyce continued Socratically. Joyce, like all addicts, has developed tolerance. “Maybe yes, maybe no,” I replied. “We don’t The End of the Universe no longer has the know which natural laws will be active in a new wallop it once did for her. It’s too remote, to Universe,” I said. nebulous. “But even if it tqkes a few cycles, isn’t it Joyce now inhabits a frightening world of likely that some form of intelligence will exist near space objects, solar flares, cataclysmic cli- again?” mate change gamma bursts, rogue black holes, “OK, let’s say it will,” I answered. the Yellowstone Culdera and other extinctions “I hate to think of that intelligence rising, too awful to contemplate and too bizarre to men- growing, developing without the benefit of my tion. writing,” she said. What about me, trapped near the epicenter of “Sooner or later, everything is going to end,” all this? I said, hoping to console her. I’m still more worried about the N3F, SFWA “Not my writing,” she insisted. “If it’s just and WSFS, inc. They all pose more immediate going to get destroyed, I’m not going to do any threats than super volcanoes and stellar colli- more of it!” sions. As members of the Trufannish Electronic — Arnie

9 worked wonderfully for sellers, but not for old time radio fans. Cost limited most collections to a few hundred programs. The introduction of the MP3 file format, the rise of Internet sites like Internet archives and the de- velopment of a supporting Fan- dom revolutionized the hobby. Content acquisition shrank from being the focus of OTR activity into a minor side=issue. The MP3 format did for OTR Fandom what the mimeo- graph did for science fiction fan- dom. The greater capacity of an MP3 disk deflated the pricing structure so thoroughly that the price of a full run dropped to about 15-20% of the price of 12 half-hour episodes on cassette or audio disk. Next to Fandom, Old Time Radio is about my Internet sites further widened access to pro- favorite hobby. My love of OTR has little to do gramming. Hundreds of thousands of episodes with nostalgia. I heard of little network radio are now available as streaming audio and free when I was very young, but I’m definitely a download on Internet Archives and other sites. member of the first generation that grew up with Some companies still prey on the ignorant, but television. Almost all of the great radio series had even a cursory online search is sure to unearth signed off long before they might’ve com to my free alternatives. attention. No, I like the programs for the simplest and Not that OTR is a rose without thorns. There most straight-forward reason: they’re entertain- are definitely some aspects of old-time radio that ing. TV’s talent competitions and “reality” shows are considerably less than ideal. bore me; OTR programs are a splendid replace- Let me tell you about some of them: ment. The nature of the OTR hobby has changed dramatically since I became actively interest in antique radio shows 10-15 years ago. Back then, it was basically a collecting hobby, like stamps, coins and pulp magazines. OTR fans spent most of their time searching for episodes of their favorite series. Usually, that meant swapping files with other fans or buying programs from one of the small companies that clustered around the hobby. And unless you were plugged into the nascent OTR Fandom, you had to pay roughly $35 for a dozen half-hour shows on cassette or CD. That pricing structure

10 Despite the greater availability of known shows, the OTR fan’s greatest frustration is the thou- sands of lost episodes. Some may be found in coming years, but it’s likely that most are gone forever. Networks and stations didn’t go to the trouble of preserving what they broadcast and home re- cording off the radio was primitive. Even after CBS lured Jack Benny and other stars from NBC in 1948 by paying them for previously broadcast programs, many radio shows weren’t saved. Even the most successful, long-running pro- grams are missing a significant number of epi- sodes. Notable series like The Whistler are miss- ing hundreds of episodes. (I’m pleased to say that science fiction and fantasy programs survived better than most.) If lost episodes are tragic, then badly recorded ones are downright infuriating. High-bias re- cording tape didn’t hit the US until after World War II, which limited home recording. The prac- tice of recording without a cable between the ra- dio and recorder captured lots of static and inter- ference along with the show. Often, the most ea- gerly anticipated episodes are just the ones with the worst technical difficulties.

Comedy series suffered from an array of prob- lems that didn’t trouble anthology shows and dra- matic series to nearly the same degree. Notions about maintaining internal consistency developed after the number of new episodes per season dropped from 39 to 22-24 and reruns gave fans the chance to study a series’ minute details. During radio’s golden age, a season had 39 epi- sodes and there were virtually no reruns. Series like Amos & Andy and fre- quently re-did popular episodes and re-cycled choice bits of business, but actual reruns were extremely rare. These practices created some weird situations. Two episodes of Amos & Andy , aired a year or two apart, chronicled Andy’s courtship of the same young heiress who takes a blue-collar job to find a man who isn’t a fortune hinter. The plot and dialogue overlapped enough to create a feeling of déjà vu – and makes contradic- tions stand out. For instance, the original script had the girl working as a bus driver, while the

11 younger until she’d regressed to the 10 th grade. Leroy’s lot was sadder. Gildy’s nephew crossed the puberty line more often than a dope smuggler crosses the Mexican border. Leroy’s age problem reached com- plete absurdity in the 1950’s, when yet an- other age rollback made Leroy too young to have been born before his parents perished in a train wreck. Series felt no compulsion to stick to back stories, either. Amos & Andy told at least half-dozen stories about how Andy Brown met George “Kingfish” Stevens. The original version had Andy meeting Kingfish shortly after he came up North from Georgia. (Andy was gawking at a skyscraper construction site, reached into his pocket and shook hands with George.) One of the later versions had them meeting as eight-year-olds in Marietta, GA! ’s My Favorite Husband takes honors for he single most stunning breakdown in continuity in the history of ra- dio. The series’ first season or two showed promise, but it didn’t qualify as a real hit. The show’s creators change the family name from the ethnic-sounding “Cougat” to “Cooper.”

Censorship and prudishness had a strong effect on old time radio. Blue noses revision put her behind the wheel of a taxicab. claimed the right to keep radio on a short leash, Even the best comedy series occasionally came citing the fact that the medium brought programs up with a previously unmentioned siblings or a right into listeners’ homes. suddenly missing pet. As is so often the case, radio censors concen- The Great Gildersleeve , though excellent in trated on preventing “naughty words” many ways, had some jarring continuity quirks, from assailing the listeners’ sensitive ears. Curses some of which persisted for the 16-season (460+ and blasphemies were totally forbidden – and so episodes) run of the show. were words like “pregnant. The strongest exple- The creative team couldn’t decide any charac- tive you were likely to hear was ter’s age nor settle the issue of whether charac- bellowing, “Gad!”” ters should stay one age or grow older. In addition, comedies often had pseudo-banned The result was chronological chaos. words that characters would almost say to titillate Gildy was pushing 60 in 1940, but he shed the audience. On Our Miss Brooks , for example, years until, by 1950, he was only in his early 40s. characters frequently started to say “guts,” but Gildy’s niece and nephew fared even worse. never got to that final “t.” Marjorie was in her mid-20s and dating a lawyer Sometimes the pre-show script review slipped at the start of the series, but she grew ever up, at least in the opinion of the censors. Mae 12 West, in an “Adam and Eve” skit with Don Ameche, gave the seemingly in- nocuous script such a sex-drenched reading that network radio blackballed her. (I think it’s interesting that radio’s censors never punish the writers and other behind-the-microphone people actually responsible for content.) Comedy series clung tenaciously to a particularly joyless and stiff-necked brand of “public morality. This often put characters into situations that may seem ludicrous to modern listeners. This problem is so pervasive and per- sistent that I invented the OTR Sexual Translator. The idea for the OTR Sex- ual Translator came from my habit of figuring the 2014 value of money amounts mentioned on old programs. When a character goes wild over get- ting $1,000 in a 1942 show, it helps to think of it as equivalent to $8,000 - $10,000. The OTR Sexual Translator performs the same kind of adjustment for physi- cal expressions of love. One of those lunging kisses on the cheek, therefore, counts as a real kiss. Several kisses become a necking ses- sion. A prolonged bout of smooching is heavy petting. And so on. It probably seems like a small thing, true, but it makes many comedy episodes a lot second glass of Coke occurred regularly through livelier. the entire run of the series. Characters in dramas could drink oceans of Typical of minor irritations is what I can Radio martinis and Manhattans, but comedies some- Vision. Sometimes, scripters put together scenes times went to ridiculous lengths to preserve so- as if the characters were on the radio. briety. The most glaring example is when a character Fibber McGee and Molly substituted root beer answers the door and can’t recognize a familiar for all forms of alcoholic beverages. The McGees person standing inches away from them. and their friends swilled cases of the stuff, some- times in the form of a concoction called “hot but- The positives of Old Time Radio greatly out- tered root beer,” at picnics, ballgames and fish weigh the problems. Still, I’m hoping that some- fries. one does find a couple of dozen more episodes Denizens of The Great Gildersleeve treated each of The Whistler and Our Miss Brooks. Coca-cola as though it was Scotch or Vodka. Scenes of a melancholy character sitting at a -- Arnie drugstore soda fountain and seeking oblivion in a

13 upturned hand and the other on their hip giving the infamous “two in the pink and one in the stink” sign has undoubtedly fattened the univer- sity’s bottom line. Sam, a defensive end for the University of Mis- souri, is the first male partici- pant in a major sport to reveal his homosexuality. The the media and alltoo many fans freaked. You’d think the popular student athlete had proclaimed proclaimed his devo- tion to cannibalism or pyroma- nia. Sam actually informed his U of Missouri teammates that he is gay last August, before the start of the college football season. He asked them to keepo his secret so that he could make his announcement at a timeof is The one constant of life is change. The Victo- choosing. rian concept that civilization had attained perfec- Surely, there were players who had trouble with tion and must be held at that point is gone, sup- Sam’s gayness, but they all honored his wishes. planted by our more modern view of life as a Sam led the team go from being doormats to na- complex interplaty of shiftingtrends. tional ranking, the South East Conference cham-

Just when you may’ve thought that our society was progressing toward fair and humane treat- ment of homosexuals comes evidence that we still have a very long way to go. Reaction in the wake of Michael Sam’s an- nouncement that heis homosexual demonstrates that a lot of people are still crouching in the cel- lar surrounded by their dogmas and talismans. That’s carefully worded, but it has to be in or- der toalso be true. Athletes in individual sports have acknowledged their sexual preference, as have retired football, basketball and baseball players and women playing college and team sports. It’s also likely that there are gay men on pro and college sports teams who haven’t announced their preferences. And let’s not forget the cheerleaders of the Wichita State Shockers, whose Special Gesture exploded across the Internet as the Shockers bas- ketball team steamrollered all opposition. Sales of the poster that features cheerleader side by side in the identical pose wit a basketball in one

14 pionship game and a major post- season bowl. Michael Sam was named SEC co-defensive playerof the year.Yf the Dallas Cowboys locker room can survive the presence of a player whose drunken driving killed a teammate in 2012, I think it can deal with a teammate who dates guys in his hours away from football. At a time when football players are getting arrested for stiff crimes like assault, vehicular manslaughter and domestic violence, the worry over what might happen when Sam joins whatever NFL club drafts him looks like homophobia in a not-so-Clever Plastic Disguise. Hypocrasy lurks beneath the exag- gerated hand-wringing of some me- dia pundits. If a team of collee kids at Missouri, a school not especiallt noted for progressive attitudes on social issues , accepted Michael Sam as their teammate, why should a team composed of allegedly mature professionals have trouble? Those multi-million- The analyst then gave his reasons. He said dollar paychecks ought to provide incentive for that Sam is a “tweener,” meaning that he is not getting along with teammates. quite big enough for a pro defensive lineman and Some radio/TV sports analysts and show hosts not quite fast enough to be an outside linebacker. were content to applaud Sam’s bravery and ex- I haven’t checked, but I don’t think Michael press the hope that things would go well for him in Sam is any smallernow than he was a couple of pro football. Some others seemed so agitated that months ago. Leaving aside the question of foot you’d have thought some homosexual bogyman speed, the three most similar players taken in the had jumped them in an alley. previous two drafts are pro bowlers. Put that to- Prior to MichaelSam’s announcement, the two gether withhis award as co-defensive player of major draft analysts had estimated that he would the year in the toughest college football confer- be selected between the third and sixth rounds. ence and he ough to get icked by round five and- The day after, I heard an analyst explain that might go as much as two rounds sooner. Sam could go undrafted. He added that if that hap- Michael Sam is not a surefire star, which pre- pened it shold not be seen as an indictment of the cludes first0 or second-round selection, but a league. number of teams should be interested enough to Bullshit. take a chance. Prior to Sam going public, everyone agreed that If no team drafts him, then it would be reason- he was a mid-round draft pick. It’s true that some able to suspect collusion among NFL owners. teams are so hot through with prejudices that they You know, the same kind of “gentleman’s agree- mightpass on him, hich could push his selection a ment” that kept African-Americans out of the little later NFL for so many years, But out of the draft entirely? Not unless there is a widespread blackball.

15 Your Title

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