I had never been so excited to have anyone come out to me.
At 6:30 p.m. on a Tuesday night, I sat in Editor-in-Chief Ryan Knutson’s office, discussing the validity of basing the controversial gay athlete feature story on the testimony of an anonymous source talking about an anonymous source.
A former Oregon athlete who wanted to remain anonymous had told me about another former Oregon athlete whom she knew was gay, but whose name was never disclosed to me on the record.
Even describing that entire scenario right now sounds convoluted and flimsy. And I shudder to think that I might have had to put an entire feature story together while trying to distinguish one former athlete from the other, and do so with a modicum of clarity.
But that’s what I would have had to do if the gay former Oregon athlete who now plays for another school had not responded to my plaintive email asking if she would mind going on the record and describe her experiences as an out gay collegiate softball player.
I’d never expected to hear from her; hence the discussion with my boss about the possibilities of using two layers of anonymous sources.
Then she replied. And suddenly, I had a story.
Talking to her on the phone on Wednesday morning, I felt nothing but respect for this woman who did not know me, did not owe me anything, but was confident enough in herself and in her sexuality to come out to a complete stranger, and by doing that, come out to the world in a newspaper article.
This story has been one of the most challenging reporting features I’ve ever had to write. Everyone I talked to either gave me the runaround, or granted me an interview that I knew would simply be some variation of the party line.
I don’t blame them at all. Even the most honest and sincere coach wants to ultimately keep her job at the end of the day; no athlete wants a tiny slip-up or errant word to be misconstrued as a homophobic reaction to a sensitive topic.
And of course none of the actual gay athletes even thought twice about outing themselves for the story. Because regardless of the leaps and bounds of liberal thinking that have been made in the world between the 1950s and the present day, it can still be scary to be gay on a sports team.
It doesn’t matter how friendly everyone on the team is with everyone else, or how well you think you know your teammates. Unless you’re openly gay and completely out of the closet from the first time you set foot in the locker room on Day 1, the world standard assumes heterosexuality until proven otherwise – dyke-girl-athlete stereotype regardless.
And once you get comfortable interacting with people in that mold, once you form relationships with people in that mold, and the entire team is working well on the field and off, you’re reluctant to just announce your sexuality to the team for fear of throwing in a wrench that might disrupt the smooth-flowing rhythm of a competent, efficient working unit.
That’s why I never came out to my team over the three years that I spent playing club lacrosse.
For one thing, I wasn’t even out to myself until my sophomore year of college, and I was not really comfortable with my own sexuality until junior year – the last year that I played with the team.
Those girls were great, and toward the end of my time with the team, I ended up telling a couple of the girls whom I had close friendships with that I was bisexual, and yes I dated girls as well as guys.
I never got anything but support from the people whom I told. But I never even considered the idea of openly broadcasting it to the entire team.
My choice to remain mostly closeted was rooted in a desire to not rock the boat or risk making anyone uncomfortable around me. While the club team does not have a locker room like the varsity teams do, the team still spends long hours together traveling in vans. Sometimes we’d pack as many as six girls into a hotel room meant for two.
Part of me felt that my teammates probably wouldn’t care who I dated, and that outing myself would have no negative effect on anyone. And that was probably the case in reality. But there was always a “what-if” in the back of my head. Hence, despite a desire to be honest with my teammates, the tendency to avoid potential conflict won out over cognitive rationality.
So based on my own experiences, I completely understand why none of the varsity athletes who are actually gay – and thanks to the gay grapevine, I know for a fact that there are some – would considering coming out for the sake of a newspaper article.
Coming out to anyone is always tinged with a certain level of uncertainty: there’s always that split second when you wonder how people are going to take the news. That uncertainty is magnified about fifty times when you’re coming out to an entire team of people whose reactions matter to you, because you know that regardless of how they take the news, you’re still going to have to interact with them on a daily basis.
You might be convinced that your teammates won’t care, that everything will continue to flow smoothly. But for me at least, there was always that tiny but persistent “what-if” factor that cancelled out everything else.
Even now as a sports reporter, I’ve often omitted mention of pronouns when chatting with athletes about my personal life for fear that it might alter their perception of me or affect their ease around me.
But the exhaustive amount of research I did for the feature on gay athletes, and the difficulty I had in trying to find someone who would share their experiences as a gay athlete with me, made me realize that ducking around the issue will only serve to keep the issue hidden from view.
And that’s not the way it should be. Everyone should have the right to be open about who they are without worrying about whether anyone will judge them for it.
The former Oregon athlete who went on record for the sake of bringing the issue to light inspired me to take a step forward. We’ll see what happens next.
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