Rusty Lockers: An American History of Homophobia in Sports from 1975-Present and Why Gay Athletes Remain Marginalized in a Progressive Society Hayden Anderson UWEC Department of History HIST 489-002 Professor: Dr. Eugene Pinero Cooperating Professor: Dr. Joseph Orser December 12, 2013 Abstract Throughout history, sports in the United States have been fairly progressive. With African Americans fighting for equal rights, Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in sports. Women’s sports have also taken off, demonstrating gender equality ahead of the rest of American society. However, when it comes to gay athletes, the institution of sports is behind the times. This paper looks at how gay male athletes have been treated by American society over the past 40 years. Four case studies are used: Dave Kopay, Greg Louganis, Mark Tewksbury, and Jason Collins. Once they have been compared and contrasted, the topic moves to trying to answer the question, “Why do homosexual males feel the need to keep who they are a secret while playing?” High school athletics are looked at to determine that the reaction of teammates and coaches play a large role in an athlete coming out or staying in the closet. The role of homophobic language is discussed before finally going into a discussion about how the idea of masculinity is what ultimately prevents homosexuals from feeling welcomed in the world of sports. The paper reaches the final conclusion that while progress in terms of gay rights in sports can be seen throughout time, it does not reflect the values of the United States, even though in the past sports have always done just that. Table of Contents Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………....1 Historiography………………………………………………………………………………....4 Case Studies……………………………………………………………………………………7 Pressures Keeping Gay Athletes in the Closet………………………………………………..22 Masculinity…………………………………………………………………………………....31 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………….38 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………...41 1 Introduction When one thinks of the classic history disciplines, the fields that often come to mind are ones such as political history, economic history, military history and perhaps a few others. Rarely do people think of sports history as an important topic of study. However, this is slowly changing in our society today. Studying the institution of sports allows us to view the field as a microcosm of American life because of its tendency to be composed of the very fibers that the United States is made of. Sports are a direct reflection of society; the things we are proud of, the things we are ashamed of, the importance of various aspects of our everyday lives are all reflected in the sports that we watch on TV. They can influence us in ways that no other social institution is capable of, making us buy products we do not need, making us forget about all of the chores that need to be done, making us, for a reason that no one can quite understand, truly care about the results of a game when in reality what happens on the field or court has no impact on us at all. Sports, in its own American way, show us what society cares about. Sports can therefore tell historians quite a bit about the time period that the games were played in. For example, Jackie Robinson’s struggle to start his professional baseball career in a league without a single other African American reflects what was going on in the United States in the 1950s regarding racial equality. What historians often fail to look at, however, is how the institution of sports itself has changed over time and what factors contribute to that. Sports have evolved from an incredibly segregated form to one that includes people of all races and nationalities without question. The recent successes of women’s sports have shown that barriers that often kept women from competing at a professional level are beginning to fall. Yet there is one group in America that has not been present in the sports world throughout history. These people have often been feared by the American public when it comes to sports, and members of 2 squads often express their concern that these people are among their teammates. They can be found at all levels, from high school all the way to professional, locally and around the world. Yet the public does not know about these people because they try to keep their identity a secret out of fear of what will happen if other people know about them. This all refers to, of course, gay athletes. Sports as a whole does not accept homosexual males into its supposedly all inclusive membership. This can be seen throughout the history of the United States, but especially during the past thirty-eight years while the gay rights movement has been ramping up. Equality for gays has been accepted into many parts of American society, and one would be hard pressed to find a homophobic institution the size of sports anywhere in the United States. However, that is exactly what sports are. While the rest of the country has been moving towards homosexual equality, athletics has remained a sort of “last bastion” for old school, conservative homophobia. In a study done by the USA network in 2005, the statement “What athletes do in their private life is their own business” was given to a random sample of the American public. Sixty- seven percent of the respondents believed that the statement was correct,1 which is not all that surprising. The American public tends to ignore the things that athletes do off the field. Take Tiger Woods for example. He cheated on his wife with many women, and if he was not as famous, rest assured that the people that knew him would never be able to forgive what he did. However, few people seem to remember the moral lines that Woods transgressed because he is such a well known and loved athlete.2 In the same poll, the statement “It would hurt an athlete’s career to be openly gay” was given to the same sample. Sixty-eight percent agreed with that 1 PRNewswire, “Comprehensive Poll on Homosexuals in Sports Reveals Bias Against Gay Athletes,” poll conducted by USA Network, PR Newswire (April 12, 2005): http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/comprehensive-poll- on-homosexuals-in-sports-reveals-bias-against-gay-athletes-54278182.html (accessed 4 April, 2013). 2 Heidi Parker and Janet Fink, “Arrest Record or Openly Gay: The Impact of Athletes’ Personal Lives on Endorser Effectiveness,” Sport Marketing Quarterly 21 (2012): 70-76. 3 statement, while only twenty-one percent disagreed with it.3 This clearly shows at the very least that the general public understands that homophobic nature of sports, and at the worst that the public itself is homophobic when it comes to who plays the game. Perhaps the most important statement that the poll gives is “Openly gay athletes should be excluded from playing team sports.” The vast majority of respondents, eighty-six percent, believed that this was an incorrect statement. Still, fourteen percent of the general American public, according to this source, believes that if an athlete is openly gay, they should not be able to participate in a team sport for that sole reason. This blatant homophobia is seen in a contemporary time frame when gay activists across the United States were beginning to pick up steam in their fight for equality. Yet in the institution of sports, it was clearly a very different story. On this particular topic, sports do not reflect what is happening in the larger society. It goes against the general trend and remains socially a fairly conservative establishment. Why is that? What about sports makes it so prone to homophobia even when people are fighting across the nation for equal rights for gays and lesbians? This research paper will focus on how sports have developed throughout the past forty years in America when it comes to gay athletes and how they have been treated and viewed by the public and teammates across various levels of sports. Hopefully by doing this it will become less of a mystery as to why sports have lagged behind the rest of society in terms of treating homosexuals equally and give the historical world a better understanding of the progress that has or has not been made when it comes to sexual orientation equality in the athletic field.4 3 PRNewswire, “Comprehensive Poll.” 4 When talking about homosexuality, it is impossible to get away from the arguments that religions make against such a lifestyle. In this paper I made the conscious decision not to address such arguments. I fully understand that religion has a large role to play in how the public feels about homosexuals, and thus gay athletes as well. However, 4 Historiography By generally looking at the study of sports history, it is made clear that the institution has been quickly advancing. Historical scholars have only just begun to take sports history seriously in the past two decades. The earlier history of sports works, from around the 1950s to the 1990s, rely heavily on primary sources.56 The authors are almost all looking at newspaper articles and interviews, leading them to then make their own original arguments based off of the information that they found. Few secondary sources had been created at that time, driving the need to do this sort of basic research. However, out of this basic research came the possibility to open up many new doors. Little research had been done up until the start of the 1990s, making it an exciting time to be a historian. New information was coming to light on a regular basis, greatly expanding the knowledge in various fields of study.