After Brendon Ayanbadejo, the most vocal of our three allies in pro football, was cut by the Baltimore Ravens, he went on MSNBC to discuss that, and the progress being made in the attempt to persuade one of the gay athletes currently playing a team sport on a professional level to come out, with Thomas Roberts. Yes, they are there, but it's like the military under Don't Ask Don't Tell, only nobody is running a witch hunt in the NFL or the NBA or MLB to expose them.
This ran last Friday but, as you all know, I've been away from my computer. In fact, this requires a h/t to Joe Jervis and a MAJOR h/t to steveningen who looked at me while we were watching it online and said, "I hope this is saying 'diary me' to you." Why? Because he didn't plan to write about it and because I'm a sports fan. This is one of the ways he and I divide what we write about in this area. So follow me past the great orange basketball netting for Ajanbadejo's remarks, and some commentary.
So here's the clip:
Watch it at your leisure, but be aware, he overpromises in it, possibly because Roberts is a well-known fan, both of Ayanbadejo and the Ravens. Here's the money quote, from an interview from the Baltimore Sun via SB Nation
"I think it will happen sooner than you think," Ayanbadejo said. "We're in talks with a handful of players who are considering it. There are up to four players being talked to right now and they're trying to be organized so they can come out on the same day together. It would make a major splash and take the pressure off one guy. It would be a monumental day if a handful or a few guys come out."
The gay blogs and the sports sites have been doing an excellent job covering this, because this wasn't the only interview he gave after the Ravens cut him.
As towleroad.com reports, Ayanbadejo also talked to Anderson Cooper, where he walked his estimate back significantly, and this is the money quote from that interview:
No, actually, what it is is, is there are organizations I'm in contact with, and there are individuals I'm in contact with and collectively we know of some gay players. And these players, some of them are anonymous, some of them we know who they are, but their identity is super secret and nobody wants to reveal who they are, and some of them don't want to reveal who they are, rightfully so because it's entirely up to them what they are gonna do.
What we want to facilitate is getting them all together so they can lean on each other, so they can have a support group. And potentially, it's possible, it's fathomable, that they could possibly do something together, and break a story together. And one of them had voiced that he would like to break his story with someone else and not do it alone....Not all these athletes are in the NFL. Some are in other sports as well.
That would be fine! This is a barrier that probably SHOULD be broken in more than one professional sport at the same time. Just football would probably make a raft of right wing commentators propose that we're all violent (as if anyone would believe THAT).
I was also -- I won't go as far as amazed because espn.com has provided some very perceptive coverage of gay and lesbian issues in sports -- pleased with how the sports sites are working with this. From espn.com, here's a SportsNation poll that over 4,000 people (at this writing) have voted in! You'll have to vote in it to see the results, and some of the questions show that at least some of the sports fans who visit espn.com are yahoos but there are many (like me) who aren't.
So I'll let the gay sports site, outsports.com, sum things up. They wrote about the walkback on Anderson Cooper's show too, but they went deeper. Cyd Ziegler, who facilitated the coming out of basketball player John Amaechi in 2007, is not pleased to be writing about this. Yes, coming out as a group WOULD take the pressure off the athletes involved, but there's no real point in our getting our hopes up. This doesn't help anyone, and he thinks it probably makes the people who might have been involved more nervous than they would have been without Ayanbadejo's earliest remarks. But Ziegler finds some hope in this:
The idea is now out there about multiple athletes coming out at once. It's a good idea, but the task is daunting. It's hard enough -- and until now it's been fruitless -- to find a single NFL player to come out publicly, let alone four. Still, if this idea makes several athletes more likely to live their truth publicly, that could be a good thing.
It will happen at its own pace. My guess is that any such announcement, if it happens, will happen in June, not because of anything the Supreme Court does, but because the parades in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco to commemorate the 43rd anniversary of Stonewall need grand marshals. What better way to come out than in a celebration of what coming out can mean? A boy can hope, no?
1:51 PM PT: I need to run a few errands, but I should be back by 6:30 Eastern/3:30 Pacific. Especially since it's my night at Top Commments.