Reasons for optimism despite intolerant climate for gay athletes in America
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Version 0 of 1. The life Brad Thorson built had no room for the questions swirling in his mind. He was a college football player – first at Wisconsin and then Kansas – and that status brought a defined list of who he was supposed to be and what he was supposed to do. He lifted weights. He watched game film. He drank beer. He went out with girls. At times he wondered why his dating life failed to bring him the same spark his teammates claimed to feel. He considered he might be gay but rejected the thought almost as quickly as it came. Being gay was not an option. He was a football player, an offensive lineman with a reputation for confronting anyone lined up across him. His best friends were football players. Someday, he was going to be a professional football player. And he knew professional football players weren’t gay. “I guess there was an inability for me to associate being gay with someone like me,” Thorson tells the Guardian. He had an image of gay, one that was born from a childhood in rural Wisconsin where men drove trucks and spit tobacco. Gay to him was Liberace with sequined jackets and fingers filled with rings. He did not feel like Liberace. He liked football. He liked beer. He was a regular guy playing one of the most regular guy positions in sports. He had a refrain he repeated to himself every time felt unsure about his attraction to women: “I can’t be gay. I’m not like that.” One year ago this weekend the St Louis Rams drafted Michael Sam, making him the NFL’s first openly gay player, breaking a barrier that many thought would never fall. Now a year later, the organizers of the Bingham Cup – the world cup of gay rugby – have released Out on the Fields, a study on homophobia in sports that concludes the United States has the most intolerant culture for gay and lesbian athletes in a major English-speaking nation. The study, overseen by a panel of college professors in six countries, interviewed close to 9,500 gay, lesbian, bisexual and straight people from the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and Canada, and portrays the US as still inhospitable to gay and lesbian athletes. According to the study, 60% of gay and lesbian athletes in the US believe they are either “not accepted at all” or “only a little” in their sports and that 70% of the gay and straight Americans surveyed see homophobia as more prevalent in sports than elsewhere. Both were the highest percentages of any of the six countries. For someone like Thorson, who announced he was gay last 4 July, these are significant numbers. It wasn’t that he feared being excluded from football for being gay, rather the football culture never allowed him to consider the thought. “I think Michael Sam probably shortened his career by coming out,” Thorson says. “In the NFL your career is already short. Most teams aren’t trying to build camaraderie. You can be there for two weeks or two months. The number of roster moves a team makes a year is overwhelming. You want to keep your head down and not give teams a reason to cut you.” Sometimes Thorson asks himself what would have happened if a player like Sam had come out in 2010 – while Thorson was still playing college football – would he have understood his confusion better? Would he have understood he was gay? He still doesn’t know. He would like to think the answer is “yes” but he is unsure. He figures he might have told a few teammates, wrapping his career in a vague half-closeted-half-out status, trusting his secret to those who would not reveal it. Because of this, he quickly agreed to tell his story when asked to do so by the Bingham Cup people. He doesn’t want other players coming up through high school and college to have the same confusion as himself. He wants them to see someone they can relate to, someone who is like themselves. “It’s important for kids to think they don’t have to fit one particular box,” he says. “I don’t know if I would have had the courage to come out but I would rather have not waited until I was 23 to figure out I liked sleeping with men.” Thorson’s acceptance of his sexuality came after football. His NFL dream lasted nine days after the 2011 lockout when he broke his foot during training camp with the Arizona Cardinals. After working himself back into shape at Kansas he spent a few months with the Canadian Football League’s Saskatchewan Roughriders before realizing he would probably not be good enough to get back to the NFL and retired. Without the routine of a football life, those thoughts that never made sense before were no longer buried. He couldn’t shrug away his ambivalence for dating women by watching more game tape. He suspected that he had been using the demands football makes on a player’s time to stifle his growing suspicions about his own identity. Then basketball player Jason Collins announced he was gay in a Sports Illustrated story. Thorson has never been a great basketball fan. Despite being 6ft 5in and 310lbs when he entered the NFL, he was terrible at basketball. But the Collins story spoke to him in a way nothing had before. Suddenly there was an athlete with his own reputation for in-competition toughness, describing the same confusion Thorson had felt. The more Thorson read Collins’s words, the more he realized he was reading about himself. “It explained a lot of things to me that were in my head,” he says. “Then there were these disappointing feelings that I wasn’t going to be like everybody else. I didn’t realize the baggage and the stress I was carrying. I would do stupid things. I was scared to go to a gay bar thinking I would see someone I knew without realizing that he would either be gay himself or didn’t care since, after all, he was in a gay bar. You go through all these crazy thoughts when you are in the closet.” Around the same time, he took a job with a company that does native advertising for media sites. The job was in San Francisco. To replace the thrill of football he picked up rugby, a favorite sport of his sister. He joined the San Francisco Fog RFC, the partly gay team that once considered among its members Mark Bingham the former University of California rugby player and 11 September hero – for whom the Bingham Cup is named. He found the role models he never had as a college football player. Here were men just like him, regular guys who liked sports and beer who were happy to have a teammate who played college and professional football. Over the next several months he began to tell old teammates and family members that he was gay. He dreaded the responses, worrying that those close friendships built over football and beers would dissolve with the knowledge that he preferred to date men instead of women. Except something strange happened. They didn’t care. “I had this knot in my stomach but to them it was like ‘toss me a beer’ and then they asked me questions,” he says. “I think the fear was: ‘Is Brad going to be the same guy as in the locker room?’ Once they got over that fear it’s amazing how quickly it went back to the same old shit as in the locker room.” And football players being football players they asked him things his gay friends would never dream of asking – things they asked back when they thought he was straight but this time changing the gender of his partners. How many guys has he been with? What was it like? What did they … you know … do with each other? “Once they got over having [a former] teammate who was gay it became the same-old, same-old no matter how inappropriate the same-old, same-old is,” Thorson says. Then he chuckles into the phone from his office in New York, where he now works. “I’m going to get into so much trouble for saying this,” he says. But their reactions gave him confidence. He realized it didn’t matter that he was gay. It probably never mattered. The football culture that never allowed him to consider his sexuality also didn’t judge him because of it. He knows there are players who are gay in the NFL and he knows that those players’ teammates don’t have time to worry about who that player sleeps with at night. Their careers are too brief, the dread of being cut lingers everywhere. They need that player to be good so they can be good. Nothing else is important. “Those guys are going to say: ‘great dude, you’re gay, now go make that block on 3rd-and-1, after that when you go home whatever you do that’s fantastic.” He laughs again. “We’re millennials, we’re past it,” he says. So when the people from the Bingham Cup – in which Thorson played last year – asked him to speak about their report, of course he agreed. He understands all too well the fear that grips athletes who are questioning their sexuality and he wants them to know about his experience. He wants them to know their friends can still be their friends and their teammates can still respect them. The old culture is breaking. If Michael Sam could say something and Jason Collins could say something and he could too then others will as well. “I know my situation was lucky, my coming out experience was a good one,” he says. “But, shoot, the greatest American athlete is transgender. Bruce Jenner has done something that makes a more incredible impression than I did.” Then he pauses for a moment and laughs once more. “Consider all the weirdos you meet in a football locker room,” he says. “A gay teammate is nothing compared to all the characters in there.” Which is something he wishes he considered back when the questions swirled in his head and the culture of football allowed him to bury himself in game film, hoping he couldn’t hear them. |