Baseball guys gay things in locker room
A Shifting Playing Field: Coming Out As A Homosexual Athlete
These days, we're more likely to see professional athletes on products than protest lines. But it wasn't always this way. In the 1960s, sports stars were often as renowned for what they believed as for their home runs.
Back then, many athletes spoke out about civil rights. Muhammad Ali was stripped of his heavyweight title and threatened with imprisonment for refusing to fight in Vietnam, on the grounds of racial discrimination.
By the 1970s, the issue of the day was women's rights. Tennis player Billie Jean King used her fame on the court to clash for equal opportunities for female athletes.
Today, King is also an advocate for gay rights, but for most of her career, she stayed in the closet. Now, it's not uncommon for a female pro athlete to come out, but as of yet, no current male players of America's four major pro sports (football, basketball, baseball and hockey) has publicly said he's gay.
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Lacking A Role Model
Former Major League Baseball player Billy Bean spent nine years in silence about his sexual orientation in the '90s.
"For me, I was a baseball p
OUT OF THE CLOSET BUT NOT LOCKER ROOM
This may come as news to Tim Hardaway, but just because a man is gay doesn’t mean he wants to jump you.
On a Miami radio station last week, Hardaway said: “I hate gay people. … I don’t fancy to be around queer people. I’m homophobic.”
Nah. Really? Normally we would file this under “why athletes should not give prolonged interviews.” But Hardaway’s comments came during a water-cooler discussion period about gays in sports, thanks to a new book by former NBA player John Amaechi, who, with its publication, came out of the closet.
Since then, reporters have asked players, “How would you feel if one of your teammates were gay?” And amidst many politically correct answers (“We’ve gotten past that.” “None of my business.”), here came Tim, with some fine, old-fashioned dislike speech. And it was hate speech. He even used the word. He said of homosexuality: “It shouldn’t be in the world or in the United States.”
I’m not sure Tim realizes the planet is bigger than the United States. And the United States is bigger than a basketball league.
ByRickClemons for YourTango.com
Michael Sam made headline news when he shared a celebratory embrace with his boyfriend after hearing that he was joining the St. Louis Rams. With the soar in openly gay athletes participating in professional sports, many people are wondering if gay athletes are more or less prone to check out other athletes in the locker room. My answer?
Absolutely not!
The truth is, all guys check other guys out — and it doesn't have to be in a sexual way. I'm not saying the ripped Adonis walking around the gym locker room doesn't get a not many side-ways glances or boot start some bedroom fantasies, but mostly we're just looking at other guy's manliness to see how we stack up in comparison. And I'm not just talking about what's between his legs; pecs, abs, biceps, triceps, glutes, hair, and any other part of the male anatomy are all just game for looking.
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"As men we're all born with a competitive, masculine cruise, and are visual in nature," said Jos W. one of my gym mates. "It's not uncommon for guys to cast lingering glances at women, cars, food, you identify it. When a guy
For a while when I played in a men's hockey league in Los Angeles one of our regular opponents was an all-gay team called the Blades. That's right, they were the gay Blades.
One overnight we played in one of those dank old rinks where the locker room is dripping with rust and they never bare the barrels of wet athletic tape. The Blades were good, and to be honest they played a brief angry, as if they had something to prove. They beat us badly.
Later in the locker room I realized we had no shower. The guys started snickering that we had to go into the Blades locker room to shower and cracked the usual jokes about dropping soap. But it was an odd thought. Our team was loaded with young actors, writers and producers. They were a good-looking bunch of guys, some of whom went on to become household names and power players in Hollywood.
I wondered: If we walked into the Blades shower room, would they have the same reaction as if a naked woman walked into ours? Would we be the objects of sexual attraction?
I think of this now on the occasion of the National Football League drafting its first openly male lover player, which is treated like a major breakthrough. It's as if Michael S
On Monday, David Denson was attempting to return to daily life, after the warm and welcoming frenzy that followed his history-making coming out.
On Saturday, the 20-year-old Denson, via an extremely thorough and moving interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Tom Haudricourt, became the first openly gay active player on a team affiliated with Major League Baseball (MLB).
“Honestly, I’ve mainly just been trying to focus on baseball and trying to pay attention to things I need to serve on on the field,” Denson told The Daily Beast in a expression sent by his team’s spokesman, who added that Denson was “quite overwhelmed right now with the attention he has been getting the last two days.”
Meanwhile, in Britain over the weekend, Keegan Hirst became the first British rugby league player to come out as gay.
It had seemed “inconceivable” for a long time to Hirst, 27—he’s married to a woman; they hold two young children—that he could be gay, and he told the BBC that there had been a time where he could not voice the words to himself, permit alone the world.
What is most heartening at this early stage is the support offered to the two men by their teammates.
The hoary myth that