University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

The out field: professional sports and the mediation of gay sexualities

(USC Thesis Other)

The out field: professional sports and the mediation of gay sexualities

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content

The Out Field:

Professional Sports and the Mediation of Gay Sexualities

by

Evan Brody

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMMUNICATION)

August 2016

Copyright 2016 Evan Brody

ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It seems almost impossible to recognize all of the individuals who have provided
guidance and assistance as I completed this project. No doubt someone’s impact will not
be properly recognized nor appropriately highlighted. But I cannot stress enough that this
project would not have been possible without so much assistance from so many: for that I
am forever grateful.
It probably goes without saying, but I am immensely appreciative of the
professors who have dedicated their time and energy to my project. In particular, I owe a
huge debt of gratitude to my advisor Sarah Banet-Weiser. Sarah’s mentorship, patience,
and much needed dinner discussions have made my work stronger and helped me to
better recognize the type of scholarship I hope to produce. She often identified the
importance of my work even before I did, and she always did so in a way that excited me
about my project at times when I needed an extra jolt of enthusiasm. She has always
pushed me to think more expansively and her guidance has left an indelible mark on my
work. In addition to Sarah, I was lucky to work with an incredible dissertation
committee. Thank you to Larry Gross, Jack Halberstam, and William Morgan for your
feedback on my work and your commitment to my dissertation. Each of you influenced
this project in a unique way and I cannot image the final product without your
contributions. I am also grateful to Mike Messner for his feedback on early drafts of my
work. Furthermore, I would be remiss in not also acknowledging Marita Sturken and Sue
Murray for guiding my earliest academic endeavors and for seeing promise in me far
before I did.

iii

In addition to these professors, my work benefited from the incredible resources
of the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of
Southern California and the generosity of the Annenberg family. In addition to
furnishing the material resources that allowed me to pursue graduate work, and this
project specifically, they also provided necessary day-to-day support (thank you Anne-
Marie Campian) and the opportunity for me to meet, and work with, some of the most
dynamic and supportive colleagues I have ever come across. To Brittany Farr and
Katrina Pariera; Lori Lopez, Allie Noyes, Garrett Broad, and Beth Boser; Ioana Literat,
Laura Alberti, Theo Mazumdar, and Inna Arzumanova; and Lyndsey Beutin and Kevin
Gotkin, thank you for your friendships. You have each contributed to my project, and my
professional development, in a variety of ways, and for that I am forever grateful. And of
course, I could no overstate enough the importance of friendships such as those I cherish
with Peilin Chen, Brian DeGrazia, Rachel Cooper, and Tal Rencus. You all have, in your
own way, influenced my work more than you will ever know.
Lastly, I want to thank my family for their continued support. In particular, to my
mother, father, and brothers, thank you for indulging me in all of my endeavors – I am
lucky to be a part of such a loving and supportive family and I cherish the time we spend
together. Many of my trips to Sleeping Dog as I finished this dissertation were a much
needed escape to contemplate my project while surrounded by family. And of course, to
my partner Daniel, thank you for always listening, for always trying to make my life
easier as I finished this project, and for always having a hot meal ready when I needed it.
Your contribution to the completion of this work might have seemed unnoticed at times,
but it was indispensable nonetheless, and for that I am eternally thankful.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ii
List of Figures vi
Abstract vii
Introduction: The Out Field 1
The First, But Not the First: Our Current Contradictory Moment 5
The Sports/Media Complex 11
Why Focus on American Men’s Professional Sports? 14
The Money is Where the Men Are:
The Economics of American Sports Leagues 15
Gay, LGBT, or Queer?: Brief Thoughts on Terminology 18
Queering ‘Coming Out’: Writing Against the Grain 21
Situating LGBT Sports Scholarship:
Distinguishing Between Heteronormativity and Homophobia 30
Sports and Sexuality Through the Optic of Disidentifications 39
Incorporating Nonnormative Sexualities: Navigating the Promise of
Sports and Sexuality Through Affirmative and
Transformative Frameworks 41
Choosing Homonormativity: ‘Coming Out’ in a Neoliberal Age 45
Reading Media Narratives of Sports and Sexuality:
Authenticity Versus Queer Realness 47
Methods 49
A Multiperspectival Approach 50
Discourse Analysis 54
Field Studies (Media Ethnography) 55
Structure of the Dissertation/Chapter Outlines 57

Chapter One: Historicizing Sports and Nonnormative Sexualities:
A Genealogy of Sports/Media’s Engagement with Gay and
Lesbian Sexualities and Bodies that Transgress 65
The Terrific Tomboy?: The Rise and Fall of Babe Didrikson 68
The Sturdy Spouse: The Rise of Babe Didrikson Zaharias 75
Another Bluebonnet Babe: Brittney Griner and
the Marriage “Proposal” 77
Sports Illustrated and the Crystallization of Normative Media Portrayals 82
The Soft American and National Security 84
Homosexuality and Lesbianism in
Early Editions of Sports Illustrated 89
Pride and Progress on the Gay Cable Network 93
Our Network, Our Issues 99

v

The Sports Report and the Lesbian and Gay Community 102
The Great Gay Hope or What to do About Homophobic
Language in the Twenty-First Century? 108
Anti-Gay Sentiment in a Post-Out World:
Rajon Rondon and Bill Kennedy 119

Chapter Two: Commodifying ‘Coming Out’:
Sports, Neoliberalism, and the ‘Coming Out’ Narrative 127
If You ‘Come Out’ It Will Change 130
‘Coming Out’ as a Political Act 133
Setting the Stage – The Last Closet Crumbles? 135
A Last, The Great Gay Hope?: Unpacking the ‘Coming Out’ 140
Narratives of Active Team Sports Athletes
Necessary Truth Production 142
I Want to Tell My Story, Not You or Who is on my Side? 145
Distancing Sexual Identity from Sports Identity 148
An Intersectional Approach to Athlete’s ‘Coming Out’ Statements 151
Disidentifications and ‘Coming Out’ 157
Complicating ‘Coming Out’ Through Gender 162
The Commodification of ‘Coming Out’ 172
‘Coming Out’ and Consumer Citizenship 175

Chapter Three: Challenging The Clubhouse: Outsports.com and Digital
LGBT Sports Scholarship 184
Sports and Digital Media: A Case Study of Outsports.com 190
Remote Intimacies on Outsports.com 193
Digital Acquaintanceships on Outsports.com 195
Templates, Site Construction, and the Production of Normativity 196
Language and Limits: Discursive Contestations on Outsports.com 201
Is an Act an Identity? Or How to Describe a Scandal 205
Shifting Sexuality, Shifting Terminology: What Tom Daly Fancies 208

Chapter Four: The Queer Clubhouse: Community, Consumption,
and Gay Sports Bars 218
A (brief) History of Bars and the LGBT Community 223
A (brief) History of Sports Bars 230
Unpacking Gay Sports Bars 231
Situating the Gay Sports Bar Through Advertisements 239
Situating the Gay Sports Bar Through Location 242
Negotiating Identity and “Authenticity” in Gay Sports Bars 244
They’re Trying Too Hard: The Art of Identifying an Act 248
I Can Be Me: Queering Normative Assumptions 252

Conclusion: Sports, Media, and Gay Sexualities: The Pleasure and the Pain 258

References 263

vi

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Opening Title Card for Pride and Progress 100

Figure 2: Title Card for “The Sports Report” with Bill Baumer 104

Figure 3: Megan Rapinoe 169

Figure 4: Items from the Nike #BeTrue Line of Products 178

Figure 5: Jason Collins Wearing Nike #BeTrue Clothing 179

Figure 6: Outsports.com Logo 197

Figure 7: Outsports.com Menu Bar 197

Figure 8: Advertisement for Champs Bar 234

Figure 9: Advertisement for Florent Restaurant 235

Figure 10: Nellie’s Sports Bar – Washington D.C. 237

Figure 11: Hi-Tops Sports Bar – San Francisco, CA 238

Figure 12: Advertisement for GYM Sports Bar – New York, NY 241

Figure 13: Advertisement for GYM Sports Bar – West Hollywood, CA 242

vii

ABSTRACT
In April 2013, Jason Collins became the first professional male athlete to
announce that he was gay, through media sources, while still actively playing in one of
America’s major team sports leagues. His announcement, unsurprisingly, was met with a
diversity of responses as to what the revelation meant to the larger discussion of sports
and gay sexualities.
This dissertation, through a combination of discourse analysis, field studies,
historical survey, and archival research, explores the complicated interplay between
media formations, gay sexuality, and sports culture across a variety of temporal and
spatial locations. The following chapters ask how, in a culture that more openly and
visibly engages with and mediates questions of sports and sexuality, is the discussion
made salient through media narratives and how does the LGBT community access and
engage with these mediations? Since media have become the main resource for
authorizing stories of sports culture and gay identity, this dissertation interrogates the
norms and epistemologies produced by these engagements and traces the ways they
circulate through mainstream and LGBT-specific media platforms and concretized sites
of LGBT community.
Through an examination of media artifacts, produced through a range of platforms
such as newspapers, television, and new media/digital sites, this dissertation maps the
ways that media workers and literature produced by media industries help to cultivate and
contribute to a discourse of sports and gay sexualities. It also interrogates the way in
which these platforms and artifacts are constructed not as neutral texts, but rather as
value-laden products that carry with them a wide-range of meanings about normative

viii

sexuality, patriarchal power, and the proper place of gay individuals within sports culture.
This focus then allows us to better understand how neoliberal ideologies influence our
cultural products and media artifacts and frames and, alternatively, allow room for
queered fissures. Put another way, the analysis of these media artifacts elucidates
dominant ideologies that maintain and, occasionally, disrupt a heteronormative market-
driven culture. It also allows us to begin to parse through the ways in which a former
focus on homophobia has obfuscated structural issues of heteronormativity within sports
culture. It argues that an overreliance on the ‘coming out’ narrative as an authoritative
announcement obscures the ways in which this process authorizes neoliberalism.
While media texts provide the majority of the resources analyzed in the first half
of the dissertation, the second half reinserts user engagements with sports and gay
sexualities that are produced by, and organized around, seemingly neutral spaces of
media production. By focusing on the experiences of LGBT sports fans and LGBT
media practitioners we see how they utilize disparate experiences across sports culture in
order to stitch together an understanding of sports and sexual identity. Central to this
argument is the way they use media engagements to dialectically question and destabilize
normative or restrictive understandings of LGBT personage and queerness. Furthermore,
even though LGBT stories are often configured as “out of place” within sports culture,
mediated and physical spaces are utilized not only as a way to reconfigure LGBT
experiences within sports culture, but also to expand the understanding of how we
establish norms and scripts that guide LGBT experiences. LGBT individuals find an
ability, through discursive formations and concretized sites of community, to question the
normative ideas that still guide the understanding of sports and sexuality.

ix

Key to this argument is that these mediations and experiences work in tandem:
they are woven into the fabric of both our digital and corporeal experiences as they work
to shape, question, and articulate LGBT identities. Using the tenets of queer theory and
an attention to the material consequences of configuring ‘coming out’ as a neoliberal act,
this dissertation acknowledges the ways that discussions of sports and sexuality both
reinscribe affirmative frameworks and gesture towards transformative possibilities.
Ultimately, this dissertation makes the case that most discussions of sports and the
LGBT experience rely on a common narrative of ‘coming out’ authorized through media
formations, but that any discussion that rests solely on the number of “out” professional
athletes is one that only attends to a small piece of the puzzle, and one that is not
representative of the vast array of ways that sports and homosexuality overlap and inform
one another in modern culture. It also ignores the fact that this particular type of
“outness” is not available to all individuals equally. Put another way, to rely solely on
visibility, here promoted by the media through the ‘coming out’ narrative, as a measure
of success ignores the uneven manner in which visibility is both deployed and taken up
by normative and non-normative sexualities alike.

1

The Out Field:
Professional Sports and the Mediation of Gay Sexualities

Introduction: The Out Field

In early April 2013, Jason Collins, a relatively unknown free agent center in the
National Basketball Association (NBA) appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated, the
most recognizable and popularly circulated American sports magazine.
1
Collins, a
former All-American athlete at Stanford, played professionally for over a decade, yet it
was not his actions on the court that landed him the cover story. Instead, it was his
announcement that he was gay that prompted the front-page placement.
But Collins was not the first gay athlete to play in one of America’s “Big Four”
men’s professional team sports, which consists of the NBA, the National Football League
(NFL), Major League Baseball (MLB), and the National Hockey League (NHL).
2
Not by
a long shot. Most LGBT sports historians attribute that distinction to David Kopay of the
NFL and Glenn Burke of the MLB, but these are just the first men whose have discussed
their homosexuality openly and have had these statements authorized by media sources.
Instead, Collins’s announcement garnered extensive attention because he was the first
active player in one of the “Big Four” American men's sports leagues to announce
publicly that he was gay while still attempting to play professionally.
3
As opposed to
earlier instances of players making these announcements in retirement, or living in an era
where sports media sources shied away from engaging with these narratives, Collins

1
The article was initially released on SI.com (the magazine’s website) and made the cover of the next
week’s print version. According to the Alliance for Audited Media in June of 2013 Sports Illustrated
ranked #14 of the most Top 25 U.S. Consumer Magazines by Paid & Verified Circulation (3,065,507)
compared to ESPN the Magazine which ranked #25 (2,128,345) (Lulofs, 2013).
2
This distinction is explored more in relation to their economic stakes and visibility within American
popular culture.
3
Collins announced his sexuality after his contract had expired at the end of the season, so while he was
still pursuing a contract for the following season, he was technically a free agent. To date, no player in the
big four men’s professional leagues has ‘come out’ while under contract.

2

capitalized both on a cultural ethos that more openly engages with discussions of
homosexuality, and a time when many posited men’s sports as the last remaining closet
in America.
4

The announcement, which was generally met with statements of support from
players, coaches, and even the President of the United States, did not, at the time, garner
him a contract offer during free agency to play the following season, nor was he the
recipient of unequivocal support from NBA players, coaches, and commentators.
5

Though Collins would eventually sign with the Brooklyn Nets midway through the
following season, he averaged less than eight minutes per game over 22 games, and, upon
his retirement in November of 2014, the “Big Four” American professional leagues had
exactly the same number of openly gay men playing sports as before: zero.
But that is not to say that there are not gay players in the “Big Four” professional
sports, just none that have announced their sexuality to the media while actively playing.
Collins was an outlier of sorts, the first to make his homosexuality visible through media
sources in such a choreographed and strategic way.
6
His announcement set off a tidal
wave of discussions in sports-specific, LGBT-specific, and mainstream media as to what

4
Former Washington Redskins running back David Kopay announced he was gay on December 11
th
, 1975,
after reading Lynn Rosellini’s series on homosexuality in American Sports. While the articles, published in
The Washington Star starting December 9
th
, 1975, were considered controversial, they did not gain real
notoriety until Kopay agreed to ‘come out.’ Many members of the sports world were quick to condemn
him for his actions, citing the affect his ‘coming out’ would have on children.
Glenn Burke was, more open with his teammates about his homosexuality while playing in 1976,
though journalists never wrote about his sexuality: “The media in general and the sports media in particular
found Burke's homosexuality an inconvenient truth. He told People, ‘I think everyone just pretended not to
hear me. It just wasn't a story they were ready to hear’” (Barra, 2013).
Additionally, the case study of Emile Griffith in chapter one gestures towards the ways that
journalists shied away from discussing confirmed homosexual athletes historically.
5
For examples of this see responses from then coach of the Golden State Warriors Mark Jackson and
current NBA analyst for ESPN Chris Broussard, and professional golfer Bubba Watson. These men
couched their disagreement with his announcement in religious language and contested whether Collins
could be both a Christian and a homosexual (Schilken, 2013).
6
The details of this coordinated event, and the others that followed, will be discussed more in chapter two.

3

it meant to have a gay player vocalizing their story so publicly. And it is this type of
visibility and mediation, produced through the ‘coming out’ process, and authorized
through media texts and organizations, that the following chapters trace, unpack, and
problematize.
The use of the qualifier mediated, which often stands in for terms such as openly
and publicly, might seem to dilute or confuse the importance of Collins’s and others’
announcements. But they are, in fact, quite pertinent to the current climate surrounding
sports and nonnormative sexuality and the focus of this dissertation.
7
In the following
chapters I use the term mediated or mediation to describe the way in which discussions of
sports and sexuality often rely on explicit invocations of sexual identity in order to
engage with the topic. Conversely, I also highlight the ways that members of the LGBT
community re/interpret this incitement to visibility and recast it through alternative
readings of the intersection of sports and LGBT sexualities.
8

My use of the term mediation builds upon the work of Livingston (2009),
Williams (1983), and Gray (2009). I use “mediations,” in the same way that other
scholars might use “mediatization,” “medialisation,” “mediazation,” or the “mediatic
turn” to highlight “what the processes of mediation reveal about the changing relations
among social structures and agents,” rather than simply describing the media or media
artifacts (Livingston, 2009, p. 4). Therefore mediation, in this estimation, encompasses

7
This connection is explored more, but a key question this dissertation contends with is how media texts
authorize ‘coming out’ in ways that ignore the diversity of ways that visibility and ‘outness’ are understood
by LGBT individuals.
8
Throughout this dissertation I use sexual orientation (or sexuality) and sexual identity as interchangeable
terms. Since this dissertation uses gay sexualities as the object of analysis, I am focused on the ways in
which these explicit invocations are interpreted within sports culture. When I use the term queer, I am
speaking to the specter of antinormativity that circulates in a far different manner than these overt cases.
An example of a text that combines athletic culture and queer imagery would be the musical number “Aint
There Anyone Here for Love” from Gentleman Prefer Blondes (1953).

4

both an identification and analysis of media texts and the practices of living that circulate
around and through these texts.
9
In particular, I move away from mediatization, which is
often posited as separate from an investigation into globalization or individualization,
because I believe these terms cannot be disarticulated from the questions I ask regarding
culture and communication, identity and inequality, and the reach of norms and power
relations authorized by heteronormativity.
10
This is an important approach to media
studies because I am interested in the way that values are mediated, not just through
media products, but through the very language and interactions used both to produce
media artifacts but also to wrestle with their significance.
11

Within my chapters, I rely on media artifacts, produced through a range of media
platforms such as newspapers, television, and new media/digital platforms, to map the
ways that media workers, literature produced by media industries, and published
comments by fans and those invested in the world of sports and/or LGBT culture, to
name a few, help to cultivate and contribute to a discourse of sports and sexuality. I also
interrogate the way in which these platforms and artifacts are constructed not as neutral
texts, but rather as value-laden products that carry with them a wide-range of meanings
about normative sexuality, patriarchal power, and the proper place of gay individuals
within sports culture. This focus then allows us to better understand how neoliberal
ideologies influence our cultural products and media artifacts/frames and, alternatively,

9
As Raymond Williams further adds, mediation provides a “formal way of directly expressing otherwise
unexpressed relations” (Williams, 1983).
10
I focus on the term mediation as a way to “recognize the horizontal and historical connections within and
across the expanding array of mass and new media in people’s communication environments” (Livingston,
2009, pp. 6-7).
11
Again, I turn to Livingston who writes that mediation “usefully highlights the artifacts and practices used
to communicate, it more readily invites analysis of the social and organizational arrangements through
which mediation is instituted (i.e. the micro and macro conditions in which otherwise separated parties
become interrelated), and it urges a critical focus on the expression of what is unexpressed or suppressed in
those interrelations” (Livingston, 2009, p. 10).

5

allow room for queered fissures. Put another way, I analyze these media artifacts to see
what they tell us about dominant ideologies that maintain and, occasionally, disrupt a
heteronormative market-driven culture.
12

While media texts provide the majority of the resources I analyze, especially in
the first half of this dissertation, within the second half I reinsert user engagements that
are produced by, and organized around, seemingly neutral spaces of media production. I
find this recognition similar to the media “in situ” approach utilized by Mary Gray that
focuses on how media engagements fit into the larger “mosaic of collective identity
work” (2009).
13
A media in situ approach is not just about the moment of production
and/or reception but about how these artifacts are made meaningful in everyday life: it
attends to context as well as text.

The First, But Not the First: Our Current Contradictory Moment
Surprisingly, Collins was also not even the first professional American team
sports athlete to announce their homosexuality in 2013.
14
Just weeks prior, Brittney
Griner, the number one overall pick in the Women’s National Basketball Association’s
(WNBA) 2013 draft, discussed her own homosexuality during a group video interview

12
Not content to accept these mediations at face value, I rely on a cultural studies approach to media
studies that emphasizes the often mystified articulations of unequal power relations in order to better
recognize the ways in which power is operationalized and contested both in media artifacts and in social
relations and identitarian practices organized by these texts.
13
In this estimation media is not just about providing effects or impact but rather is a part, rather than the
center, of sociality. It asks when media artifacts are made meaningful and when they become less relevant.
14
It should also be noted that American Soccer Player Robbie Rogers came out in February of 2013 as he
simultaneously announced his retirement from the English Professional Football League. He eventually
un-retired and signed with the Major League Soccer’s Los Angeles Galaxy in late May of 2013. His story
will be explored more in later chapters.

6

that aired on SI.com (the website for Sports Illustrated).
15
While Griner was the most
recognizable and talked about female college athlete in decades, her ‘coming out’
received far less coverage than Collins’s and was relegated to online-only status. In fact,
The New York Times chronicled the lack of attention in an article titled, appropriately
enough, “Female Star Comes Out as Gay, and Sports World Shrugs” (Borden, 2013). It
is also this inconsistency inherent to gendered discrepancies, and the stakes of American
professional sports, that the following chapters attempt to problematize and reconcile.
16

Over the past 5 years the intersection of sports and sexuality has become a more
popular and relevant topic of discussion. The ‘coming out’ of Collins and Griner,
followed by Michael Sam, were preceded by vocal support for gay marriage initiatives in
2012 by straight-identified athletes such as the NFL’s Brendan Ayanbadejo and Chris
Kluwe, although there were repercussions for their outspokenness. Both players were cut
from their respective teams soon after their advocacy work became more popularly
known and Kerry Rhodes, a highly rated safety, was unable to even garner a tryout
during free agency in 2013, despite his status as premier player, after intimate images
surfaced of him with his alleged boyfriend.
17

Often imagined as orthogonal concepts, the intersection of sports and sexuality in
men’s professional sports is now mediated, discussed, and understood in a more explicit

15
The interview was a panel discussion with Elena Delle Donne and Skylar Diggins; the number two and
three draft picks that year, respectively. Both of these two players identify as straight.
16
Proximity to sports currently, and historically, has produced very different narratives for differently
gendered athletes; however, sexuality, and more importantly homosexuality, is a constant factor in the
policing of normativity for both genders. While the intersection of sports and sexuality operates in
different ways its effect is often flattened into a neat, though overly reductive, experience: Male sports are
bastions of homophobia while female sports are completely supportive of nonnormative sexualities. While
these assumptions are not entirely incorrect, they paint a very distorted picture of the complexities of sports
and sexuality.
17
This support from allies, both historic and unprecedented, was not, obviously, the most radical of societal
reformations, but rather rested on the inclusion of LGBT individuals within heteronormative industries (in
this case referring to the institution of marriage).

7

manner than many of the historical moments offered in chapter one. But, as the
following chapters will argue, this unprecedented recognition of gay individuals by
mainstream sports culture rests on the ability of the gay individual to both produce
themselves as different, and as a particular type of homonormative “gay,” through
specific mediations of the ‘coming out’ narrative.
This explicit and yet precarious connection between sports, gay sexuality, and
visibility in our contemporary moment is seen in some of the conflicting statements about
the state of acceptance for gay athletes. Examples of these deeply intertwined though
contradictory moments include: a 2012 article published by the Associated Press that
argued that “Pro sports are more gay-friendly as athletes speak out” (Condon), just weeks
before an academic study identified sports as a realm in which “LGBT athletes are
harassed twice as often” as their heterosexual peers (Wolverton); public outrage over
anti-gay comments made by an African-American San Francisco 49ers player the week
before the 2013 Super Bowl, while similar anti-gay comments were generally ignored
and/or dismissed when made, at a similar time, by a white player on the opposing team
(the Baltimore Ravens); stories of NFL recruits at both the 2013 and 2016 NFL combine
being asked about their sexual orientation during job interviews, a clear violation of
employment nondiscrimination protections afforded by the state of New York which
oversees the NFL; the 2016 call from LGBT sports activist groups and ‘out’ sports
administrators for more individuals to ‘come out’ to affect change just weeks before a
former member of the MLB’s St. Louis Cardinals developmental program announced that
he stayed closeted because he worked in an environment in which coaches and players
discussed “killing gay teammates;” and the aforementioned “pinklisting” of active

8

athletes associated with pro-gay causes or who are identified, or perceived to be, gay
(Magary, 2013).
How do we begin to make sense of these conflicting statements in a climate where
it is easy to look to a mainstream recognition of assimilated homosexuals as
advancements in the fight for LGBT acceptance? How are these inconsistent ideas and
ideals imagined, represented, and reproduced through media formations and how do
LGBT individuals, not always content to accept the images at face value, receive,
reinterpret, and reuse the plethora of LGBT-themed cultural products aimed at them?
And how are citizens – gay, straight, and otherwise – expected to disentangle political,
economic, racialized, classed, and gendered discussions from the social and cultural
environments they undoubtedly affect?
It is this inherently ambivalent moment that provides the backdrop for this
dissertation. In the following chapters I explore the complicated interplay between media
formations, gay sexuality, and sports culture across a variety of temporal and spatial
locations. I ask how, in a culture that more openly and visibly engages with and mediates
questions of sports and sexuality, is the discussion made salient through media narratives
and how does the LGBT community access and engage with these mediations? Since
media have become the main resource for authorizing stories of sports culture and gay
identity, I interrogate the norms and epistemologies produced by these engagements and
trace the ways they circulate through mainstream and LGBT-specific media platforms
and concretized sites of LGBT community. As Angela McRobbie notes, “The media
have become the key site for defining codes of sexual conduct. They cast judgment and
establish the rules of play” (2007, p. 31).

9

I argue that the media has always had a fascination with sports and nonnormative
sexuality, but it is the entry point to these narratives and depictions that have changed
over time and when engaging with bodies that transgress normative understandings of
sexuality and gender. While the body is central, it communicates different narratives
through differently gendered and racialized forms and through differently mediated
contexts. This dissertation will argue that individual gay athletes, as seen in the reactions
to Jason Collins, among others, are hailed to produce a media narrative in order to be
counted. But what happens after coming out? What happens to the athlete, to the story,
to the league culture, and to the relationships between political, racial, and gendered
understandings of sexuality? Furthermore, this dissertation will interrogate the double-
bind of visibility produced through the ‘coming out’ narrative that both asks individuals
to be responsible for creating a visible and authentic notion of “truth” while at the same
time cultivating ideas that the individual should not take precedence over the team ethos
of sports culture.
Ultimately, I make the case that most discussions of sports and the LGBT
experience rely on a common narrative of ‘coming out’ authorized through media
formations, but that any discussion that rests solely on the number of “out” professional
athletes is one that only attends to a small piece of the puzzle, and one that is not
representative of the vast array of ways that sports and homosexuality overlap and inform
one another in modern culture. It also ignores the fact that this particular type of
“outness” is not available to all individuals equally. Put another way, to rely solely on
visibility, here promoted by the media through the ‘coming out’ narrative, as a measure
of success ignores the uneven manner in which visibility is both deployed and taken up

10

by normative and non-normative sexualities alike. As Joshua Gamson argues, “visibility
may be a necessity and a pleasure, but it guarantees nothing more than itself” (2000).
Rather, I argue that we must first unpack and interrogate the ‘coming out’ narrative and
critically assess its connection to both discursive practices and lived experiences from
institutional, cultural, and community approaches. One cannot be content to catalogue
the athletes and/or cull numbers – rather, they must unpack economic, political, and
social issues, in order to understand which images and narratives are mediated, how these
case studies become legible, and what people do with these stories. As we see in chapter
one, discussions of transgressive bodies or gay slurs have historically prompted stories of
sports and sexuality, but we have now moved into an era where we are reliant on ‘coming
out’ as the motivating factor for these discussions.
I make the case that this shift in representational practices and dominant
narratives is reflective of our neoliberal times. I argue that current discussions that
position ‘coming out’ as a panacea to change do so in the service of neoliberal ideologies
of personal responsibility, individual action, and market transactions. This understanding
of the contemporary “gay” as mainstreamed, assimilated, and devoid of radical or
nonnormative politics is what this dissertation turns to as a guiding force in many
iterations of gay sports narratives and, in particular, those that rely on the ‘coming out’
narrative and the production of individual claims to “truth” and “authenticity” as the
impetus for change. However, within these moments I also recognize the potential of
queered conversations regarding sports and sexuality that attempt to problematize both
the ways in which we discuss homosexuality in general and homosexuality as it relates to
sports.

11

Using the catalyst that “queer culture tends to expand the possibilities” of praxis
(Warner, 1999, p. 38) and the call that “queer cultural workers are able to detect an
opening and indeterminacy in what for many people is a locked-down dead commodity”
(Muñoz, 2009, p. 9), I set about to rethink how we might queer an investigation of LGBT
sports cultural production in order to locate spaces within heteronormative society that
are not arenas where individual identities ask for recognition but rather territories where
possibilities for queered engagements can arise. Even though these sites are often buoyed
and/or encapsulated by acts of consumption, desire, and the linearity of heteronormative
time (Halberstam, 2005), I look to see how they might also be arenas for disruptions that
contest the normative, readings that manifest themselves as strategies that resist
conceptions of power as fixed discourses.

The Sports/Media Complex
Though often dismissed as pure entertainment, I believe sports culture is a unique
site through which to understand sexuality because of its ubiquity as a national meeting
place and its long history of conflicting assumptions about its proximity to queerness and
LGBT images and community. Sut Jhally defines this conversion of sports culture,
capitalism, and media as the “sports/media complex” (1984). He argues that sports
should only be considered within the conception of the sports/media complex since the
majority of sports are consumed through mediated sources and, from a financial point of
view, “sports are dependent upon media money for their very survival and their present
organizational structure” (Jhally, 1989, p. 78). This can be seen not only in the financial
terms I lay out later but also in the fact that sports governing bodies, such as the NFL,

12

NBA, NHL, and MLB set executive salary compensations based on comparisons with
media organizations (Kimes, 2016).
18

Sports culture, and its subsequent effect on American culture more broadly,
should not be relegated to the arena or field of play, but, as this dissertation will show,
extends through the proliferation of mediated content throughout a diverse array of
spaces. This conception of sports culture can no doubt be traced to cultural studies as a
field interested in a new space of political and theoretical engagement, one that is
uniquely concerned with and motivated by the reimaging of what and who “counts” in
the production of culture. Here, I draw upon Stuart Hall’s notions of articulations as a
way to connect seemingly disparate spaces of sports and LGBT cultures. In Hall’s
estimation, the idea of articulation “has the considerable advantage of enabling us to
think of how specific practices articulated around contradictions which do not all arise in
the same way, at the same point, in the same moment, can nevertheless be thought
together” (1980, p. 69).
Further support for the importance of mediations as a site of inquiry are explored
in each chapter, but I believe Nancy Fraser provides a useful lens to view these artifacts
as productive of cultural/symbolic injustices, which she contrasts to socioeconomic
injustices. The latter is rooted in the political and economic structure of society and
includes exploitation of labor for the benefit of others, economic marginalization, and
deprivation (Fraser, 1997). These are no doubt important instances of injustice, and
sports culture is an area rife with examples of unequal distribution of economic surplus
and exploitations of labor through class and racial inequities. However, this dissertation

18
For example, the commissioner of the NFL’s salary is decided upon based on comparisons with the
president of companies such as ABC and Viacom.

13

takes the former injustices, which are “rooted in social patterns of representation,
interpretation, and communication” as the starting point for its discussion of mediations
of sports sexualities.
19
While these two types of injustice, economic and cultural, are no
doubt connected in practice, the separating of the two for analytical purposes helps us to
understand how symbolic harm can have material consequences in everyday life. As
Fraser further argues, the most likely resolution for economic injustices involves the
redistribution of economic structures; however, the remedy for cultural injustices
involves the “wholesale transformation of societal patterns of representation,
interpretation, and communication in ways that would change everybody’s sense of self”
(Fraser, 1997, p. 15). It is this conception of social change and social justice that this
project works towards. By highlighting moments of inequity in representation, in speech,
in expectation, and in axiomatic narrative structures we can better focus on changing the
scripts that guide normative understandings of sexuality and self. Put another way, rather
than assuming that sports necessitates actions by gay individuals, or straight individuals,
this analysis points us towards the necessity of all individuals, players, reporters, fans and
nonfans alike, to question the structures that currently guide our normative and often
static understandings of the production of sexual truth. This estimation of sports media
as a contested terrain (Hartmann, 2002) forces us not to assume that sports culture is
always operating as a progressive or regressive social force. Rather, mediations of sports
become a site over which understandings of gayness and normativity can be struggled

19
Fraser further identifies the intricacies of cultural/symbolic injustice as including “cultural domination
(being subjected to patterns of interpretation and communication that are associated with another culture
and are alien and/or hostile to one’s own); nonrecognition (being rendered invisible by means of the
authoritative representational, communicative, and interpretative practices of one’s culture); and disrespect
(being routinely maligned or disparaged in stereotypic public cultural representations and/or in everyday
life interactions)” (Fraser, 1997, p. 14).

14

with.

Why Focus on American Men’s Professional Sports?
In order to begin to answer the questions and assertions laid out above, we must
first consider what stories are counted within this conversation. This dissertation focuses
on mediations of gay male athletes within the four major or “Big Four” American sports
leagues (NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL) not to ignore female athletes, but rather because of the
absence of research in the area of men’s sports due to a dearth of openly mediated gay
male professional athletes. Put another way, because 2013 marked the first time an active
male athlete ‘came out’ in one of these sports, there has been very little scholarship
devoted to these questions. On the other hand, investigations into mediations of lesbians
in sports are more plentiful, as seen in the work of Cahn (1994), Griffin (1998), Kane and
Lenskyj (1998), King (2009), Chawansky & Francombe (2011), Chawansky (2016),
Myrdahl (2011), Lisec & McDonald (2012), Birrell and Cole (1994), and Allen (1997),
among others.
20
Research that has focused on mediations of male sports has done so in
more general terms that focus on metrosexuality (Clayton, 2009), compulsory
heterosexuality or homophobia, as seen in the work of Hardin, Kuehn, Jones, Genovese
and Balaji (2009), Nylund (2007), Anderson and Kian (2012) and Anderson (2002),
among others. When research has focused on gay male athletes it often catalogues the
experiences of gay athletes, Anderson (2005), or of closeted athletes, Pronger (1990).
Recently, there have been important applications of queer theory to sports scholarship, as

20
Again, the focus here is on mediations of sports and sexuality. A far more exhaustive list is available for
scholarship that deals both with general questions of femininity and masculinity in sports and individual
experiences of former gay and lesbian athletes, though these investigations do not engage with media
portrayals.

15

seen in the edited volumes of Caudwell (2006) and Doyle (2013), though these
investigations are often centered on community sports engagements rather than media
portrayals. While this scholarship is important in expanding the growing field of
sexuality and sports studies, this dissertation is invested in a different set of questions
since the majority of these inquiries into male athletes utilize methods and research
questions that often focus on homophobia, rather than heteronormativity, a distinction I
attend to later in this introduction.
This dissertation focuses on mediations of openly gay professional athletes, but it
draws from the experiences of lesbian athletes in order to better understand how the
conversation of and about gay male athletes might be pushed to conceive of queer
potentialities and alternative constructions of experience. In particular, I move away
from a focus on homophobia within sports to interrogate how ideologies of
heteronormativity structure the very language we use to discuss ideas of acceptance and
call for ‘coming out’ within sports leagues. It is this very same focus on
heteronormativity that guides the later chapters that seek to reinsert the LGBT
community into narratives of, and contestations with, sports mediations of gay athletes
and LGBT issues.

The Money is Where the Men Are: The Economics of American Sports Leagues
This work focuses on specific sports leagues within the United States because of
their economic stakes. As the following chapters will reveal, American professional
sports are big business, and the viability of a gay athlete within these leagues is often
configured in economic terms. For instance, Mark Cuban, the owner of the NBA’s

16

Dallas Mavericks, stated that, “from a marketing perspective, if you're a player who
happens to be gay and you want to be incredibly rich, then you should come out, because
it would be the best thing that ever happened to you from a marketing and an
endorsement perspective” (ESPN News, 2007). In fact, the integration of baseball in
1947, which is often situated as one of the defining moments that show sports to be
socially progressive, was also configured in economic terms. When the Brooklyn
Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson, Manager Leo Durocher was famously quoted as saying
to players, “he can make us all rich. And if any of you cannot use the money, I will see
that you are all traded” (Kirwin, 2005).
Sports organizations, aided by lucrative media contracts, do make many people
rich.
21
For instance in 2014, the revenue for the NFL was estimated at $13 billion; the
revenue for MLB was estimated at $9 billion; the NBA was estimated at $4.8 billion; and
the NHL was estimated at $3.7 billion. Compare that to the estimated revenue in 2014
for the WNBA, which was a meager $35 million, and you can see the vast discrepancies
between the economic viability of men’s and women’s professional sports in the United
States (Brown, 2014).
22

These figures are intimately tied to the sports/media complex since large portions
of these revenues come from television deals. For instance, the NFL receives about $3
billion per year from deals with Fox, CBS and NBC for Sunday games (Maske, 2011)

21
I offer a caveat to this statement in that many of the people who profit the most off of sports are not
players, but owners. When studies do look at player salaries it finds that the huge contracts of star players,
which garner the most media attention, often overshadows the fact that many players, while compensated
well, are not paid nearly as much as the public believes and the playing career window for many of these
athletes is very short.
22
It is also worth remembering that sports were created with male attributes in mind. I engage with this
more thoroughly in chapter one; however, sports privilege both social attributes seen as compulsory in men
and physical attributes more commonly associated with men. So the fact that there is more money to be
made in men’s sports should not be seen as an objective claim about athleticism in general.

17

and in 2016 CBS and NBC agreed to pay roughly $450 million combined each year to air
Thursday night games for two years. This means that each network’s five Thursday night
games each season netted $45 million per game and a total of $900 million over the life
of the deal (Pallotta & Stelter, 2016).
23
The NBA recently signed a new contract with
ESPN and TNT to air their games for $2.66 billion per year (ESPN News, 2016). This
averages out to $15.8 million per game (100 games on ESPN and 64 on TNT) and $86.7
million per team per year.
24
By comparison, the WNBA’s deal with ESPN is worth $12
million per year. This averages out to $400,000 per game and $1 million per team per
year. In the United States, media organizations value a single men’s professional
basketball game more than an entire season of women’s professional basketball games
(and this is only looking at the broadcast revenue, not the accompanying ancillary
revenue from merchandise sales, corporate sponsorships, etc.). And these valuations are
reflective of the ways in which men and women’s sports are regarded differently within
American culture.
These economic inequalities also effect popular discourse, as a recent study that
looked at how often professional sports teams are “Googled” found that the most popular
team in American women’s sports, the WNBA’s Seattle Storm, generated only about
one-quarter as much search traffic as the least popular “Big Four” team, the NHL’s
Columbus Blue Jackets (Silver, 2014). In fact, of the top 100 most searched teams on
Google in the United States, 93 are members of the NFL, NBA, MLB or NHL. The other
seven are members of Liga MX (Mexico’s professional soccer league). Meaning that

23
As a note of comparison, obtaining the rights to Thursday Night games was so important to CBS that it
did so knowing that it would have to reschedule The Big Bang Theory, which was not only CBS’s most
popular show but also the most popular show on all of broadcast television.
24
And this analysis does not take into account the lucrative deals team’s make with local market stations to
carry all games for local teams.

18

Major League Soccer (MLS), the WNBA, and the National Women’s Soccer League
(NWSL) – other professional sports not considered part of the “Big Four” and yet the
only American professional team sports leagues with openly mediated gay athletes – did
not even break the top 100 of most popularly searched teams.
As the following chapters will show, these economic disparities play a huge role
both in decisions for athlete’s to ‘come out’ but also in how leagues handle issues of
homophobia and ideologies of heteronormativity. It also affects the importance we place
on individual ‘coming out’ narratives and their relative importance to larger questions of
LGBT acceptance. But recognizing these market constraints should not, as William
Morgan contends, mean a wholesale dismissal of professional sports since even though
“the facts are not especially encouraging, neither are they so damning that we simply
have to write off sports as a lost cause” (2006, p. 50). Rather, we must continue to
critically investigate these areas as important cultural artifacts and reflections of current
American ideologies.

Gay, LGBT, or Queer?: Brief Thoughts on Terminology
Throughout this dissertation I deploy different terms to categorize the sexual
identities and structures of feeling that organize particular groups. It is my intent to move
between these terms deliberately as they each refer to something different. Since many
of the case studies revolve around gay sexualities, I utilize the term “gay” to reference
men who identify as such. I use “lesbian” in the same way to speak to women who
engage in same-sex desire or consider themselves as part of the larger community of self-
identifying lesbians. When I use the term LGBT or LGBTQ it is meant to reference the

19

many different sexual identities that fall into the umbrella terms of Lesbian, Gay,
Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer. However, since this dissertation does not engage
bisexual or transgender experiences directly, I try not to use LGBT as a blanket term
without recognizing that the most marginalized members of that community are often
elided when the term is used indiscriminately.
In order to deploy these specific descriptive categories, I must, as others have,
give in to a bit of essentialism since it necessitates the fixing of boundaries by these
terms. However, as theorists have argued, even those who self identify as a particular
sexuality usually understand their positionality through a variety of inconsistent or
contradictory identities that continue to change and reconfigure themselves (Epstein,
1992). Put another way, “fixed identity categories are both the basis for oppression and
the basis for political power” (Gamson, 1995, p. 391). Consequently, this rendering of a
politically motivated and socially fixed identity runs the risk of essentializing through
analyzing that which it is attempting to expand. As Steven Seidman writes:
positing a gay identity, no matter how it strains to be inclusive of difference,
produces exclusions, represses difference, and normalizes being gay. Identity
politics strains, as well, toward a narrow, liberal, interest-group politic aimed at
assimilationism or spawns its opposite, a troubling ethnic-nationalist separatism.
(1993, p. 135).
The establishment of a specific gay identity runs the risk of limiting, in this case,
the homosexual as a transhistorical subject rather than specifying particular iterations and
experiences of sexuality and difference as distinctive to the particular site of their
production and the social factors at play. As queer theorists have argued, social identity

20

is conditional on space, place, and time and a dependence on identity forms rigid
frameworks that try, often unsuccessfully, to contain difference as a solution to the
chaotic fragments of imagined and lived identifications and differences. It is not my
intention to lose sight of the fact that these static categories often crystalize and are
constituted by social forces and structures of power. It is my hope that the overriding
investigation of this dissertation into unequal binaries produced through culture will
continue to be read alongside my use of the terms. Using this framework means
deploying questions of who identity is produced for, how stable identities are managed,
whom they serve, and, who is left out of these renderings of static identity production at
the same time as the terms are utilized.
A turn to Stuart Hall’s theorizing of identity is useful here because he recognizes
the “arbitrary closures” necessary to make sense of certain forms of identity. These
closures, which produced communities of identification, were arbitrary in that they
necessitated the limiting of certain aspects of identity in order to produce fixed
oppositions. Hall suggested that new conceptions of identity must be self-reflexive and
aware of their contingent nature; furthermore, he posited that these new identifications
would necessarily overlap and must not be tied to “fixed, permanent, unalterable
oppositions” wholly defined by exclusion (1997, p. 138). However, Hall was hesitant to
suggest this notion of “identifications” as a solution since he felt that it still existed within
relations of power. Ultimately, this approach to identity allows intellectual work to
question both the theoretical saliency and political promise of identity while
simultaneously recognizing the necessity of identity to shore up dominant modes of
normative coherence.

21

With regards to queerness, I use the term queer, as Michael Warner explains, “in a
deliberately capacious way… in order to suggest how many ways people can find
themselves at odds with straight culture” (Warner, 1999, p. 38). Furthermore, “queer
culture tends to expand the possibilities” of praxis (Warner, 1999, p. 38) and “rejects a
minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political interest-representation in favor of a
more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal” (Warner, 1993, p. xxvi). I think of
queerness not as oppositional to straightness, but rather as oppositional to normativity.
While there are certainly many who use queer as a descriptor for identity, I use it within
this dissertation “to question the uniformity of sexual identities and to replace a list of
relatively fixed identity categories with a notion of flexible, antinormative, politicized
sexualities” (Duggan, 2003, p. 58).

Queering ‘Coming Out’: Writing Against The Grain
Media studies research within the cultural studies tradition takes as a starting
point the idea that if we are to believe that the media are a central site for negotiating the
meaning of identities and for making particular identity categories available in the first
place, then we must also believe that media descriptions, templates, and repetitions guide
us towards those normative understandings of sexual categories. This repetition is seen
in the constant reproduction of the ‘coming out’ narrative. As scholars such as Kevin
Barnhurst (2007) have noted, these ‘coming out’ stories often tend to follow the same
path. First, they feature a “state of being closeted” which is positioned as perilous and
isolating. Second is a “liminal state of translating self-recognition into recognition by
others” and lastly, they feature an open and freeing state of being “out.” This story is

22

replicated and repeated as a natural part of the identification process for nonstraight
individuals, and while it continues to serve as the starting point, the axiomatic grounding
for mediated stories of sports and sexuality, there is little questioning of the process itself.
As opposed to scholarship that relies on the cataloguing of the amount of these instances
to make claims of political progress, this dissertation engages with and problematizes the
process itself in order to better understand how the ‘coming out’ narrative, and its
corporeal embodiment, is intimately tied to relationships of unequal power produced
through discursive knowledge and social and historical contingencies.
25

This estimation of ‘coming out’ as a discursive production, crystalized through
repetition that begins to stand in for the idea of an essentialized truth, can be seen in
arguments made by theorists such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick, among others. For Foucault, discourse is inherently important because it
produces power through the creation of knowledge and socially constructed “truths.” He
argued that Victorian-era repression created sexuality by promoting a discourse that
aimed to speak about sexuality, but in fact served to create sexuality instead: “The
society that emerged in the nineteenth century… did not confront sex with a fundamental
refusal of recognition. On the contrary, it put into operation an entire machinery for
producing true discourses concerning it” (Foucault, 1980, p. 69).
This discourse leads to a standardized and ‘productive’ concept of sex and
sexuality, of which deviations are immediately noted and categorized as unnatural. The
notion of sexuality becomes not a component of the deviant but rather an all-

25
Historically speaking, the process of ‘coming out’ and the closet, despite its ubiquity, is far from natural.
As George Chauncey (1994) argues the concept of ‘coming out’ has changed drastically over the past
hundred years since ‘coming out’ originally referred to early twentieth century galas in which gay men
were formally presented to audiences of mainstream gay and heterosexual partygoers. This notion of
‘coming out’ referred not to exiting a ‘closet,’ but rather to coming out into the gay world.

23

encompassing matter that influences their being in totality; they are not shaped by
unnaturalness but rather composed of it. However, in an attempt to exclude these
unnatural sexualities, the production of knowledge instead served to undergird their
existence by solidifying each one. Again, one of the main sustainers of this discourse is
the discourse itself. ‘Normalized’ relations are defined by discursive knowledge and
slotted into unequal binaries.
Of particular consequence to the ‘coming out’ narrative is the way in which the
person who is announcing their sexuality does so in a confessional manner. This
revelation of sexual truth is what Foucault argued was invented to serve as a production
of knowledge that would tell the ‘truth’ of sexuality; however, though confession was
meant to represent a voluntary avowal in actuality it was truly a one-sided admission.
The obligation to acknowledge sexual deviance has become so ingrained in society that it
now feels naturalized and no longer as a power that constrains us; “but its production is
thoroughly imbued with relations of power” (Foucault, 1980, p. 60). Confession was
positioned as a system of uncovering truth, though there is a compulsive quality to this
liberation.
26
Confession is now seen as producing a fetishized and privileged locus of
sexuality rather than another construct of knowledge and power.
This version of confession is further complicated by the recognition that one does
not make this ‘coming out’ admission in solitude, but rather this event unfolds within a
power relationship – though one that is unequal. This vocalized sexual truth production
is only expected of those who are considered to have a nonnormative sexuality. Though
heterosexual relations are produced and made visible through a myriad of performative

26
Additionally, the notion of confession, which has positioned the idea of sexuality within medical,
psychological and pedagogical discourses, imbues the event as problematic.

24

and socialized situations, they are most often part of a process that naturalizes
heterosexuality implicitly rather than explicitly.
27
Furthermore, one must confess in the
presence of an “interlocutor” who is cast as an authoritative individual, one who will
assess the confessional truth production before eventually judging, punishing, forgiving,
consoling or otherwise asserting their privileged status. Significantly, the interlocuter’s
position is bolstered by the reception of this new information.
For example, the first article published by The New York Times regarding Michael
Sam’s ‘coming out’ was entitled, “N.F.L. Prospect Proudly Says What Teammates
Knew: He’s Gay” (Branch, 2014). While some of Sam’s teammates assumed that he was
gay, based on their perception of his relationship with a male member of his university’s
varsity swim team, this knowledge was not based on any empirical evidence, but rather
born out of the silences of not discussing his sexuality. There was still the expectation
that Sam would confirm his nonnormative sexuality through a necessary vocalization to
his straight, all knowing, teammates. And yet one could ask, if they already “knew” why
would Sam need to vocalize his sexuality? Why would he need to validate their
assumptions before they cultivated a space of inclusion? These are the questions this
project struggles with, and yet remembering the importance Foucault places on
confession as a ritual of performative language helps. We often consider ‘coming out’ to
be a liberating process that allows individuals to express themselves freely, but this
ignores the external consequences of the expression, that it “produces intrinsic
modifications in the person who articulates it” all the while masking the power dynamics
imbued in this type of forced sexual truth production (Foucault, 1980, p. 62).

27
For a paradigmatic example, one can look at the diamond ring industry and its related advertisements.

25

The process of ‘coming out’ then discursively produces knowledge though it does
so by mystifying the experience as the revelation of an innate truth or inner core of self.
28

Butler further complicates this estimation of ‘coming out’ by attending to the
performativity of the event itself.
29
Butler argues that words, acts, and gestures, which
seemingly attempt to establish and define one’s inner core, are in fact the result of
discursively preserved systems prescribed by heteronormative regulations. That these
acts:
Produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface
of the body, through the play of signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal,
the organizing principle of identity as a cause. Such acts, gestures, enactments,
generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that
they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained
through corporeal signs and other discursive means. (1990, p. 185)

Therefore, we must rely on performative language to ‘bring into being’ a reality which
both masks and ignores its lack of veracity, and its fixing of sexual identity, in favor of
ideological assumptions.
30
Put another way, Butler questions the very essence of

28
Butler argues that the gendered, or as it is pertains to this argument, sexualized self is constituted by
socially and discursively established and limited acts that serve as a production of reality. In actuality these
performative acts bear no relation to the corporeal substance of one’s self and instead weaken one’s ability
to establish an ontological status; the “displacement of a political and discursive origin” of identity allows
the disarticulation of heteronormative suppositions from entering into the definition of self (Butler, 1990, p.
186).
29
It is important, however, to separate ideas of performativity from the notion of performance. While
many queer and LGBT individuals might ‘put on a performance’ in order to hide their sexuality, this is not
quite the same concept this dissertation is invested in.
30
This idea of performative language comes from J.L. Austin’s theory of performative language. Austin
wrote that there were two types of language: constative language that was descriptive, an example of which
would be “the sun is hot,” and performative language, which does not just describe, but rather brings things
into being and existence, such as “I now pronounce you man and wife” (Austin 1962). However, a critique
of this theory is that the performative language is reliant on an individual who has is authorized in some
way to make this declaration.

26

‘coming out’ as a production of truth, since she posits that if acts of identity are in fact
the result of social performance then there can be no true or false understanding of self;
the conjecture that “true” identity exists is but a fantasy.
By attending to her conception of performativity, it allows us to question the
repetitive actions that ‘coming out’ necessitates to legitimate its existence. That repeated
acts seek to “approximate the ideal of substantial ground of identity” and it is society’s
acquiescence to these ideological assumptions that works to undergird their existence
(Butler, 1990, p. 192). Here again we see how the idea of ‘coming out’ is naturalized to
such a point that it feels as though this process is essential to one’s state of being.
Performativity forces the individual into a discourse that subordinates while it
naturalizes; the ingrained and constructed event is itself the performative ritual. So while
‘coming out’ has been positioned as a production of truth, the question must be asked,
“whose truth is it?”
This problematizing of the acts and truths often unquestioned in the ‘coming out’
narrative are further undergirded by Sedgwick’s claim that modern understandings of
homosexuality, and specifically ideas of the closet, have been related to “wider mappings
of secrecy and disclosure… that were and are critically problematical for the gender,
sexual, and economic structures of the heterosexist culture at large…” (Sedgwick, 1990,
p. 71). This return to secrecy and disclosure, truth and dishonesty, brings us back to
Foucault’s claims of the productive nature of discourse. As we see in later chapters, the
‘coming out’ narrative then produces the language of candor, “I can finally speak my
truth” for example, in order to sustain itself as a necessary practice. But it is not just
these speech acts that work in the service of ‘coming out.’ Implicit in this argument is

27

the idea that the closet itself is produced through the silence of not speaking. As
Sedgwick notes, “‘Closetedness’ itself is a performance initiated as such by the speech
act of silence” (Sedgwick, 1990, p. 3). This again relates back to Foucault’s argument
that repression works not to quell, but to construct.
And while Foucault, Butler, and Sedgwick offer important and foundational
understandings for the contingent and socially constructed nature of sexuality, and how
the metaphor of the closet structures knowledge about the self and the world, we must
also complicate these arguments by recognizing that this production of knowledge has
particular ramifications for the constitution of race, gender, and class. Put another way,
though queers of color experience heteronormativity in similar manners to those who
identify as white and LGBT, they must also contend with the circulation of white
normativity and recognize the multiple antagonisms that class, gender, and race, among
others, bring to bear on discussions of sexuality.
As we will see in chapter two, recognizing the differences of black male sexuality
within the concept of ‘coming out’ and the politics of visibility, along with the potential
and necessity of disidentifications for queers of color, is vitally important. As Roderick
Ferguson asserts, “African American culture has historically been deemed contrary to the
norms of heterosexuality and patriarchy” since their “fitness for citizenship was measured
in terms of how much their sexual, familial, and gender relations deviated from a
bourgeois nuclear family model historically embodied by whites” (p. 20). Therefore, we
cannot speak of ‘coming out’ as a universal trait or expectation of nonstraight bodies
without also attending to how this type of visibility and self-identification carries with it
cultural and historical specificities based on these intersecting groupings of difference –

28

power must be conceptualized differently across differently marked and unmarked
bodies.
And visibility is of key concern to these arguments since it has become a stand-in
for social change, one that often goes unquestioned. As Herman Gray argues, “rather
than struggle to rearticulate and restructure the social, economic, and cultural basis of a
collective disadvantage, the cultural politics of diversity seeks recognition and visibility
as the end itself” (2013, p. 772). This type of visibility as political action is intimately
tied to notions of ‘coming out.’ Mary Gray (2009) makes a useful intervention into the
visibility debate, one that is certainly applicable to issues of sports and sexuality, in her
suggestion that we need to create a politics that does not rely on visibility as its primary
goal; that we need altered tactics of recognition. This notion, which is inspired by Lisa
Duggan (1992), is in direct opposition to those that would suggest ‘coming out’ as a
panacea to issues of homophobia or heteronormativity. While it does not dismiss
‘coming out,’ nor does it preclude moments of engagement with productive visibility, it
does suggest a recentering of LGBT politics that is not reliant on visibility as an end goal
itself.
Therefore, this dissertation takes ‘coming out’ as a starting point for mediated
stories, but necessitates a questioning of this quotidian process. It offers a queer critique
of ‘coming out,’ from a sports media perspective. As theorists have argued, and as is
outlined above, ‘coming out’ is a social construct. That while we typically think of
‘coming out’ as revealing a truth about our identity, it rather creates an identity rooted in
sexuality. And the media works to prescribe frameworks by which LGBT individuals
make sense of their own circumstances, their own experiences, and their own emotions

29

by circulating ‘coming out’ narratives. Media narratives of ‘coming out’ become the
central organizing discourse for LGBT identity. It works as performative language by
cultivating a set of meanings and practices that circulate around the social experience of
‘coming out’ to not only make it appear to be natural, but also as an announcement that
brings ephemeral, theoretical, and/or fluid identity into static being. Put another way, the
media’s focus on the necessity to both ‘come out’ and confess ones homosexuality has
further compounded the understanding that this declaration is a natural part of sexual
identification and mystified the inherent unequal power dynamics built into the process.
31

‘Coming out,’ then, does not weaken the closet through liberation or
transformation, but rather it reinforces the metaphor, through affirmation, as a central
organizing principle for understanding sexuality. The closet also creates an expectation
that sexual minorities must announce their sexuality by ‘coming out’ to an audience of
straight individuals. These announcements work in the service of delimiting who is
straight and who is not, but straight individuals are never obliged to make the same type
of sexual truth production. While there are certainly implicit rituals that dictate
heterosexual life there are not the same narratives that culminate in a verbal confession.
Such a necessary public proclamation by heterosexuals is almost unimaginable.
32
The
‘coming out’ process continues to reinforce the expectation that the LGBT individual is
responsible for liberation rather than requiring the system to take measures to eradicate
the closet and the need to announce one’s sexuality in the service of truth. Furthermore,
while there is much attention paid to the moment of ‘coming out’ there is little attention

31
When placed in the context of sports culture, this announcement takes on a double-bind, since an
announcement of sexuality is then configured as anti-team since the individual is placing unnecessary focus
on themselves
32
Instead, heterosexuality is “announced” through heteronormativity. Through the multiple ways that
heterosexual relations are built into the structures of everyday life.

30

paid to what comes after coming out. Recently, journalistic accounts of sports and
sexuality have begun to stretch their understanding of what counts as a part of the story of
sports and sexuality. The before, and, dare I say more importantly, the after, are starting
to gain attention; however, they are still positioned relationally to ‘coming out.’
Metaphorically speaking, if sports and sexuality were our solar system, then ‘coming out’
represents the sun: the central point from which all other understandings of the
conversation rotate and are given life. And it is because this account has become a
comfort zone from which to discuss nonnormative sexualities, it also means that it
impinges on narratives that might offer up an alternative sketching of the intersection of
sports and nonnormative sexuality.

Situating LGBT Sports Scholarship: Distinguishing Between Heteronormativity and
Homophobia

Of key concern to this dissertation are the ways in which heteronormativity and
homophobia circulate through sports culture. While much scholarship and activism is
aimed at identifying, and condemning, homophobic acts, it often comes at the expense of
investigations that might question the larger structural qualities of heteronormativity.
Here, I am using homophobia to reference overt acts of bias against homosexuals.
Alternatively, heteronormativity is not just a bias related to sexual object choice, but
rather is the dominant and overarching temporal and spatial organization of the world as
heterosexual: the ways in which culture is oriented towards heterosexual structures of
existence and the ways that “the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical
orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent – that is, organized as
sexuality – but also privileged” (Berlant & Warner, 2000).

31

Within sports culture, an example of homophobia would be when Major League
Baseball’s Yunel Escobar played an entire game with the phrase, “tu ere (sic) marícon”
(You are a faggot) written on his eye black strips. Alternatively, an example of
heteronormativity would be the “kiss cam” which identifies opposite gendered
individuals at sports events and transmits their images onto video screens throughout the
stadium, while the crowd cheers them on until they kiss, no matter what their relationship
might be outside of their perceived gender and assumed heterosexual orientation.
Another example of heteronormativity can be seen in debates over who should or should
not have access to locker rooms. Many arguments against allowing female coaches or
journalists into a men’s locker rooms do so under the assumption that each of these
individuals is straight: but this estimation of a mixed gender locker room environment as
detrimental is reliant on the notion of compulsory heterosexuality, that all of these bodies
are straight and engage in opposite-sex sexual object choice. Implicit in this argument is
also the gendered assumption that men are unable to control their sexual desire while in
the presence of women, that women’s bodies exist to tempt the limits of straight male
morality and decency.
Furthermore, much previous research that gauges levels of support for gay
athletes does so through justifications of, and comparisons to, support for marriage
equality. As many scholars have noted, marriage equality then becomes the de-facto
grounding point for discussions of LGBT equality while other important necessities, such
as protections regarding the right to basic human safety, employment, housing,
healthcare, etc. still evade the LGBT community. As Lisa Duggan writes, the push for
marriage equality has replaced “the array of political, cultural, and economic issues that

32

galvanized the national groups as they first emerged from a progressive social movement
context several decades earlier” (2003, p. 45). And the way in which marriage equality
furthers the contract of marriage as a conferral of rights, such as access to health care and
tax breaks, among others, carries with it implicit attacks on “promiscuity” and the “gay
lifestyle” that devalue queered relationships and alternative family and kinship structures
brought about by a long history of exclusion from this institution.
33
Again, I turn to
Duggan who characterizes this jettisoning of queered positionalities and potentialities
when she writes, “There is no vision of a collective, democratic public culture, or of an
ongoing engagement with contentious cantankerous queer politics. Instead we have been
administered a kind of political sedative – we get marriage and the military, then we go
home and cook dinner, forever” (Duggan, 2003, p. 62).
This focus on homophobia and heteronormativity also has ramifications for the
discussion of hegemonic masculinity within sports, which has long been understood as an
important theory for understanding sexuality in sports (no matter the perceived sex or
performed gender of the athlete). R.W. Connell defines hegemonic masculinity not as a
fixed character type, “always and everywhere the same,” but rather as “the masculinity
that occupies the hegemonic position in a given pattern of gender relations” (2005, p. 76).
For those associated with sports culture and its accompanying industries performances of
hegemonic masculinity are ingrained at an early age.
34
As Mike Messner has argued,
children who play sports are not just acquiring “game” knowledge but are also learning

33
For a more thorough unpacking of the queer critique of marriage equality I direct you to
againstequality.org’s marriage site which contains links to many well thought-out and researched postings
and thought pieces by academics and activists on the heteronormative politics of marriage equality (Against
Equality).
34
Though the majority of this research has been focused on male sporting cultures, it should be noted that
female sports are still regulated, in some ways, by ideologies of hegemonic masculinity. A closer mapping
of Jack Halberstam’s work on female masculinity (1999), and the way in which it is often reliant on
heterosexuality to recuperate its manifestations, would be of particular connection.

33

how to perform their gender roles within the realm of sports (1992). However, these
constructions are not limited to the arena of sports, but are generalized as essentialized
aspects of mass culture. It is not surprising that idioms from sports that perpetuate clear
and defined gender roles, such as “man up,” “next man up,” and “take it like a man,”
have gained popular usage. Messner further writes that “boys learn early that to be gay,
to be suspected of being gay, or even to be unable to prove one’s heterosexual status is
not acceptable” (1992, p. 34).
35
Messner’s argument gains additional nuance in his belief
that it is not just homophobia that works to undergird men’s competitive sports but that
sports also serves as a political project to privilege heterosexual masculinity over other
understandings of masculinity.
36

Researchers that focus on homophobia as an entry point to discussing mediations
of sports and sexuality see multiple approaches to masculinity as a sign of decreasing
homophobia. As Eric Anderson, the most prominent scholar currently exploring
questions of sports and gay sexualities writes, “if masculinity is predicated upon
homophobia, and homophobia is the chief policing agent against behaviors coded as
feminine, then the reduction of cultural homophobia would lead to a significant change to
the manner in which masculinity is both constructed and maintained” (2005, p. 14).
However, this sets up a reliance on the cultural phenomena of homophobia to dictate how
masculinity is understood; for Anderson it is cause and effect. Instead of seeing the
variations of masculinities as productive of a long history of sexuality as both socially
produced, institutionally regulated, and culturally performed, he sees it as solely a

35
It should be noted that while “homophobia” as a term is less central to Messner’s work, he does take the
time to define it as “the irrational fear or intolerance of homosexuality” (1992, p. 34).
36
It is this second phenomenon that begins to speak to a notion of heteronormativity. Though it is never
discussed as such, the term proves especially useful for those academics who later use a queer or cultural
studies approach to sports studies.

34

byproduct of modern conceptions of homophobia. Therefore, he and frequent co-author
Edward Kian write that “as Americans and U.S. athletes are rapidly losing their
homophobic sentiment, so are ancillary members of the institution of sport… [and]
decreasing homophobia on the part of sport media is yet another indicator of the rapidly
changing zeitgeist toward homosexuality” (2009, p. 812). For Anderson, Kian, and
others who take this same approach to mediations of sports and sexuality, this monolithic
notion of “homophobia” is a quantifiable experience, and one that is often reified evenly
across class, ethnic, sexual, and geographic differences. No claims are made as to the
social, political, and economic differences of cultures making sense of sports and
sexualities. In fact, many of the studies pair ethnographic research from the UK with
studies carried out in the US not to compare their cultural specificities but rather to
support generalizations with regards to sports culture.
When work in this approach does occasionally attend to racial and/or national
specificities, it often does so at the expense of other intersecting positionalities. When
analyzing data that players in the NBA are less welcoming of a (hypothetical) gay
teammate than players in the National Hockey League (NHL), Anderson and Kian
deduce that this discrepancy is attributable to the number of African-American athletes
playing in the NBA compared to the NHL (2009).
37
However, the authors do not
interrogate the backgrounds of these players beyond quantifiable phenotypes; no mention
is made of the abundance of international players in the NHL compared to the NBA or of

37
This assumption trades on the stereotype that African-American culture is inherently more homophobic
than white American culture. This stereotype is explored more in chapter two, but is also discounted by the
recent remarks of Michael Sam who said he has encountered far more racism in the gay community than
homophobia in the black community (Queerty.com, 2016)

35

the staggering disparity in individually generated revenue possible in each league.
38

While their analysis of race should not necessarily be discounted, it is limited. Any
analysis of homophobia in sports should also take into consideration the experiences of
professional gay athletes in other countries, how the economic stakes of a particular sport
affects its ability to transgress, as well as different nationalist views of LGBT rights, in
order to understand the social acceptance of a gay teammate.
Though Anderson’s work argues that “theoretically, the trend of rapidly reducing
cultural homophobia may have a profound impact on both the American sex/gender
system and the manner in which masculinity is constructed” (2005, p. 14), he does little
to elucidate what he means by “homophobia.” Anderson’s work quotes heavily from
Brian Pronger, who identifies homophobia as “being a fear of masculine violation,” a fear
of “exposure” and “the fear of the loss of power” (1990, p. 77), though there seems to be
some slippage in the ways that Anderson recoups these terms. And while “homophobia”
does not necessarily receive an unpacking as a nuanced and varied cultural term and
phenomena, it does seem to stand in for a monolithic understanding of the
sports/sexuality relationship. As Anderson further writes, “the level of homophobia at a
cultural level peaked in 1988 in America” (2011, p. 568) though this generalization
seems to overimagine the concept of homophobia as a wholly quantifiable experience.
Anderson’s work relies on overt acts of discrimination in order to situate gay athletes’
place within sports culture. As he writes, gay high school and university athletes
interviewed in 2011 did not fear coming out as much as those he interviewed in 2002

38
Around the time of their study about 80% of the NHL was comprised of nonamerican players as opposed
to only 20% of the NBA.

36

(2011).
39
In Anderson’s estimation this finding is indicative of a decrease in homophobia
but lacks a critical engagement of how the ‘coming out’ process has become a normative
ritual for gay individuals. ‘Coming out’ as a form of performative language, and a
further acculturation of LGBT individuals is never problematized, but rather bolstered as
a necessity for gay individuals and a direct result of decreased homophobia.
40

It seems that this understanding of sports and sexuality is reliant on heterosexual
individuals making room for gay ones within sports culture. Additionally, his reliance on
updated “facts” regarding the experiences of athletes and the statement that “times have
changed” (2011, p. 573) further positions homophobia as a generational issue rather than
a structural one. For Anderson, the seemingly orthogonal concepts of sports and gay
men
41
are amended by a decrease in overtly homophobic acts; however, one might
question both how subversive and/or covert acts of homophobia are disregarded in this
understanding of “decreased homophobia” and how explicit acts of homophobia, like the
social concepts they police, are furtive and continually shifting.
Conversely, this dissertation approaches these same ideas of the mediation of
sports and gay sexualities with a different set of questions in mind and it attempts to use
queer scholarship as both a mode of critique and a site of alternative possibilities. I
utilize this interrogation of heteronormativity to both bolster alternative sporting practices
that contest the normative and illuminate instances where normativity functions

39
Though he attempted to obtain an identical sampling group for his study, there was some discrepancy
between the two cohorts.
40
In chapter two I look to the experience of Robbie Rogers as an instance in which ‘coming out,’ even in
this new and less-homophobic world sketched by Anderson and others, still exists incongruently with
sporting cultures.
41
Anderson fits into the line of academic inquiry that most often focuses on the male experience in
professional sports. I use his work to show how this dissertation sets out to look at the same grouping of
narratives but with different questions in mind. As I attempt to note throughout this piece the unequal
treatment of women within the realm of sports culture continues to support patriarchal notions of male
dominance and privilege in relation to the institution of sports.

37

cryptically as axioms for LGBT identity production. This line of interrogation questions
how individuals are pressured into fashioning themselves and their identities in a
particular manner: with mediations of the ‘coming out’ narrative serving as expected and
required identity productions. It is an approach that situates queerness not as oppositional
solely to heterosexuality, but as oppositional to the normative. As Heather Sykes writes,
“the theoretical premise for queering theory was to reframe ‘gay sexuality in its specific
male and female cultural forms’ as a form of social agency that is both interactive and
resistant; participatory and distinct; equal and different; politically represented yet
historically and materially specific” (2006, p. 18).
This approach challenges institutional practices and discourses that produce
sexual knowledge in order to repress difference. Unlike previous conceptions that
configured LGBT sporting practices as able to speak only from a marginalized position
of deviance, these approaches aim to understand how structures of power force
individuals to participate in a particular kind of identity formation. Far from simply
requiring the individual agency to ‘come out’ or announce oneself as a “sporting queer,”
these approaches interrogate both the shifting terrain of identity production and the
structures that produce sporting bodies as either gay or straight; included or excluded.
However, this approach is also careful not to disentangle questions of sexuality from the
intersections of race, class, and gender (to name a few). These approaches reflect the
intersections between sexuality and other cultural and social identities/subject positions
and recognize the need for work that acknowledges the messiness of negotiating multiple
identities.
42

42
Work in this vein is then, not only interested in identity formation, but also in the structures of feeling
that accompany these subjectivities. For example, studies of the Gay Games within this approach

38

Work in this area has acknowledged that whiteness and heteronormativity are
inseparable from capitalist Western sports cultures and demonstrates the need for studies
that frame and attend to the complex processes of racialization within sports studies
(McDonald, 2006). Studies bolstered by this queer/cultural studies methodology are also
interested in the ways that identity and sexuality are deployed in both male and female
oriented sporting practices. Rather than relying solely on male sports arenas as a center
from which to dictate conceptions of masculinity and success, these approaches establish
that “female participants are affected differently compared with male participants;”
however, these differences do not exist on a strict binary as opposites and necessitate
their own nuanced and critical examination (Eng, 2006). I continue this line of reasoning
as I argue that progressive alternatives to men’s sporting practices could be bolstered
through the experiences of female professional athletes.
Additionally, while work guided by homophobia is predominantly preoccupied
with professional or competitive collegiate sports, scholarship that attends to
heteronormativity places an importance on how communities engage with and/or
disidentify with normative identities through recreational sports participation. It is
perhaps not coincidental that though these studies, for the most part, have been concerned
with European and/or Canadian cultures (Eng, 2006; Jarvis, 2006; Wellard, 2006).

interrogate not only the multiple ways that sexuality and nationalism antagonize each other as competing
subject positions, but also conceptualize how the concept of pride inherent to these athletic events
necessitates a disavowal of shame that alienates particular members of the LGBT community (Probyn,
2000). Here queer theoretical claims engage hybrid identifications and interrogate the policing of
subjectivities through structures of power and knowledge claims.

39

Sports and Sexuality Through the Optic of Disidentifications
Throughout this dissertation, I utilize the practice of disidentifications (Muñoz,
1999) as a resource to better understand how identities that are hailed by more then one
minority identity make sense of these conflicting moments, since “minority
identifications are often neglectful or antagonistic to other minoritarian positionalities”
(1999, p. 8). While it requires a shift in conceptual focus, the approach offered by
disidentification as a theoretical tool is still useful to the conversation of sports and gay
and lesbian sexualities in that it engages with sites of emergence produced when
“identities-in-difference emerge from a failed interpellation within the dominant public
sphere” (7). Perhaps Muñoz’s most useful contribution to this dissertation is the notion
that “to disidentify is to read oneself and one’s own life narrative on a moment, object, or
subject that is not culturally coded to ‘connect’ with the disidentifying subject” (12). In
this estimation the worlds of sports and sexuality provide a particularly useful application
of the theory because much of sports culture is built upon notions of compulsory
heterosexuality. To disidentify is to bend one’s experiences to fit an existence as a gay or
non-heterosexual individual within a decidedly heteronormative institution.
Disidentifications is not about rejecting previous cultural codes or practices, but rather
about how, through the acknowledgement of their previous force and influence, one is
able to reformat and reconfigure their power in transformative ways; these practices need
not be vacated but rather are seen as informing new tactics.
Rather than positioning sports and sexuality as either complicit or reactionary
forces, the intersection and the material existences it produces illuminates a slippage
within identification practices. This slippage opens up a space in which to think through

40

disidentifications: a concept that understands individuals as both constructed and
contradictory (complicit and reactionary). These individuals neither opt to assimilate
within such a structure nor strictly oppose it; rather they utilize their disidentifications as
a strategy for survival that works on and against prevailing and authoritative ideologies. It
is important to keep in mind that a disidentification decodes cultural products and fields
“from the perspective of a minority subject who is disempowered in such a
representational hierarchy” (p. 25) but who still experiences and negotiates these
occurrences not from a position outside those fields but rather from within them. As a
practice, disidentification does not dispel those ideologically incongruous elements, here
meant to represent gayness and sports, but rather “works to hold on to these notions and
invest with them new life” (p. 115).
This notion of disidentification is similar to Stuart Hall’s work on
encoding/decoding. For Hall, viewers of content have the ability to either accept
dominant ideologies coded within media content, reject them in favor of an oppositional
reading, or work on the dominant code to create a negotiated meaning. Disidentifications
most closely represent this third negotiated meaning; however, where the two concepts
differ is that disidentifications focus on a minority within a majority experience. Rather
than emphasizing how content most often coded by a majority subject for a majority
audience is decoded/understood by those in the minority, disidentifications are a survival
strategy for minority subjects already situated in an arena that visualizes them as out of
place. Furthermore, disidentifications operate on and through organizing principles by
using the codes of the majority to rewrite the stories of the minority. As Muñoz
elucidates, desire and identification are not dismissed or banished, but rather tempered

41

and rewritten. Additionally, there is a way in which the negotiated readings posited by
Hall are often imagined as a middle ground between an accepted and rejected reading. In
opposition to this neatly packaged conception, disidentifications do not exist as an even
process. The ideologies they take up are uneven at best; there are multiple antagonisms
that ebb and flow and index difference differently within particular moments.

Incorporating Nonnormative Sexualities: Navigating the Promise of Sports
Sexuality Through Affirmative and Transformative Frameworks

Within the following chapters, I also parse the ambivalence of gay sporting
representations as representative of what Nancy Fraser (1997) has identified as
affirmative and transformative frameworks. Here an affirmative framework works to
correct “inequitable outcomes of social arrangements without disturbing the underlying
framework that generates them” (1997, p. 23). It brings members into the fold of existing
structures and makes them feel welcome, but only as long as they reproduce existing
ways of living. Alternatively, a transformative remedy works to correct “inequitable
outcomes precisely by restructuring the underlying generative framework” (1997, p. 23)
as well as calling into question existing frameworks and hoping to dismantle them. If an
affirmative framework only revalues cultural formations so that previously devalued
ideas and individuals are now allowed to exist within current structures, then
transformative frameworks destabilize existing normative cultures so that all ideas and
individuals are questioned. Rather than mainstreaming subaltern positionalities, it
attempts to decenter the mainstream. Here again we can use sexuality to guide us as an
affirmative framework would work to situate gay identities as just like straight ones,

42

whereas a transformative framework would deconstruct the binary of homosexuality and
heterosexuality, not only because of the fluidity inherent to sexuality within queer
politics, but also because, in this formation, homosexuality is always unequal and
opposite to the normativity of heterosexuality. As Fraser adds, “Whereas gay-identity
politics tends to enhance existing sexual group differentiation, queer politics tends to
destabilize it” (1997, p. 24). I return to this notion of affirmative versus transformative
throughout the dissertation as I attempt to operationalize queer theory within sports
culture. For example, in chapter two I question how the ‘coming out’ narrative works in
the service of an affirmative framework; in chapter three I offer up the queering of
language in digital realms as representative of a transformative framework; and in chapter
four I return again to an affirmative framework to better understand the prevailing
ideologies that govern gay sports bars.
This notion of affirmative versus transformative is also useful in relation to the
previous discussion of homophobia versus heteronormativity. While work focused on
homophobia seeks to diminish overt acts of bias so that gay individuals might be better
incorporated into the existing landscape of sports culture, those that focus on
heteronormativity are not just concerned with the generative aspects of queering
boundaries within sports, which is a transformative framework, but also are focused on
the role LGBT individuals play in the assimilationist project (an affirmative framework).
Theorists are aware of iterations that only challenge sports as a straight bastion without
questioning how “LGBT individuals” participate in the assimilation project (Probyn,
2000 and Wellard, 2006). These are conflicting subject positions necessary of further
investigation. As Ian Wellard argues, “the emancipatory power which appeared initially

43

within the gay and lesbian community, particularly in its approach to sport, has been
quelled in recent years through the attempts to ‘normalise’ and become part of
mainstream sport,” even as this assimilation is often indicative of the antagonistic
relationship between politics and the imagined “core ideals” of sports (2006, p. 85).
43

Many, though not all, LGBT individuals have found sports and sports culture as a way to
normalize themselves within straight culture, and yet others still approach queerness as a
“doing.” Wellard gives the example of a South East England LGBT tennis club in which
a gay tennis player nicknamed “Monica” received complaints after he started wearing
outfits that emulated his tennis idol, Monica Seles, to his matches. This particular
example is useful in that it both shows how individual members differently dis/identify
with sports and its boundaries while still struggling to reconcile traditional notions of
sports norms within queered sporting practices and alternative contemplations of the
body within sports culture. Here, the positioning of sports and sexuality as overlapping
and mutually beneficial realms allows for participants to reflect upon their own
understandings of masculinity/femininity, whether radical or reductive, within alternative
sporting spaces.
Ultimately, this dissertation recognizes the boundary maintenance of sports and
sporting culture, yet it is also focused on transgressions to these limitations. It
emphasizes projects that both recognize and illuminate the regulatory practice of sports
and/or acknowledge the multiple perspectives that blur boundaries in order to understand
how they might push for new possibilities within sports culture. By identifying the
experiences that move into, and circulate through, taboo realms the work is not bolstered
by necessitating the escape from such restrictions, but rather relies on the blurring of

43
This is an argument he borrows and complicates based on the work of Pronger (2000).

44

these lines. It is a strategy that both recognizes our complicity in such border
maintenance while still pointing toward modes that resist norms and naturalized relations
of power. There is pleasure and place to be found in the confusion of boundaries.
It is the questioning of how and when affirmative verses transformative
frameworks of sports and sexuality are deployed that has proven to be more useful with
regards to the questions this dissertation asks. Though I do not necessarily disagree with
Anderson’s claim that “there is an overall declining homophobia within the institution of
sport and physical cultures” (2011, p. 573) I question what might be lost in the
quantifying of social issues in this manner, because it seems to obfuscate larger issues of
institutional, political, and cultural heteronormativity. These claims seem to make sense
within a grand narrative of hegemonic masculinity; however, as Samantha King notes,
this is problematic in that “the rather universalizing and overarching conceptualization of
masculinity upon which it is based leaves little room for more complex renderings of
masculinity, that is, for diversity of men” (2008, p. 432).
44
This dissertation takes up the
call that “there is little knowledge about patterns of sport participation” (Eng, 2006)
particularly as it pertains to the ways in which sports as an industry and sports as
community engagement overlap within the realms of nonnormative sexualities. It is this
dearth of research that has influenced my choice in case studies that integrate media
representations and community engagements. I look to mediated content as a new realm
for living, questioning, and understanding sports and sexuality.

44
Again, while this paper hopes to speak to a broad queer framework, it should be noted that the majority
of work concerning traditional sports within the United States have been focused on male players within
male leagues.

45

Choosing Homonormativity: ‘Coming Out’ in a Neoliberal Age
“ABC and Disney executives had separately concluded that the most exportable
forms of TV entertainment are sports and children's programming because they
have universal appeal and offend no political position” (Carter & Sandomir,
1995).

While I engage with the concept of neoliberalism more specifically in subsequent
chapters, particularly in chapter two, I offer a brief sketch of the larger project of
neoliberalism here, along with its connection to homonormativity. Neoliberalism,
broadly conceived, is a set of economic and social policies guided by the free market. It is
most familiar in economic terms, which include policies that incorporate the
minimization of state intervention in the economy; the privatization of sectors of the
economy once thought to be the domain of the public sector; the deregulation of markets;
the slashing of government spending, and the promoting of anti-union “flexible” labor
policies making it easier for employers to depress wages and fire workers at will, to name
a few. As Lisa Duggan argues, “Neoliberalism developed over many decades as a mode
of polemic aimed at dismantling the limited U.S. welfare state, in order to enhance
corporate profit rates” (2003, p. XI). Neoliberalism also works to disarticulate social
issues from economic ones, arguing that “Neoliberal advocacy, of course, is defined as
the nonpolitical exclusion of ‘issues of class, race and gender’” (Duggan, 2003, p. 55).
However, neoliberalism has profound effects on social formations, in particular through
its emphasis on the individual and personal responsibility since one’s relationship to the
economic is also understood as a personal obligation devoid of any extenuating
circumstances or impediments such as institutionalized power dynamics that privilege
certain classes of people over others.

46

Within cultural formations of neoliberalism, the individual is responsible and
accountable for their own actions and well-being. While neoliberal ideologies stress that
individuals make choices, they do not critically engage with what “choice” actually
means. Put another way, although individuals do make choices in everyday life, the
frameworks that guide these choices are rarely made in circumstances of their own
making, but rather within conditions that are shaped by a small number of people who
benefit most from the economic and social conditions of neoliberalism. However, as
David Harvey argues, “individual success or failure are interpreted in terms of
entrepreneurial virtues or personal failings rather than being attributed to any systemic
property (such as the class exclusions usually attributed to capitalism)” (2005, pp. 65-66).
While the effects of neoliberalism are wide-reaching, for the purposes of this dissertation,
I am most invested in neoliberal expectations of the individual and the ways in which
progress for the LGBT community are configured within affirmative frameworks that
uphold, rather than contest, normative configurations of progress, an idea often described
as homonormativity.
Lisa Duggan proposes this new “homonormativity” as based on a steady march
towards neoliberal ideals within a specific sect of mainstream gay rights advocates and
community members. As Duggan writes, this new neoliberal sexual sensibility is a
“politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions,
but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay
constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and
consumption” (2003, p. 50). Harvey, who writes that a contradiction then arises
“between a seductive but alienating possessive individualism on the one hand and the

47

desire for a meaningful collective life on the other,” further undergirds this concept
(2005). As he continues, “While individuals are supposedly free to choose, they are not
supposed to choose to construct strong collective institutions as opposed to weak
voluntary associations” (2005, p. 69).
45

If much of the recent struggle for representation and visibility has been over the
ability to self-identify, through the ‘coming out’ narrative, as gay or lesbian identities for
the purposes of political action, now it seems attention must be paid to what this “work”
has done. This dissertation argues that the mainstreaming of modern gay identities,
specifically in relation to sports culture and the ‘coming out’ narrative, and mostly at the
demand of LGBT activist groups and corporate interests, has produced a new neoliberal
gay citizen committed, knowingly or not, to heteronormative ideals of citizenship.

Reading Media Narratives of Sports and Sexuality: Authenticity Versus Queer
Realness
Ideas of authenticity and truth crop up in various ways throughout this
dissertation. Most often they emerge in connection to questions of identity, though I
argue that these understandings cannot be separated from the media narratives that inform
our understanding of sports and sexuality. Those that uncritically assess the idea of
authenticity rely on a notion of authenticity as a state of biological fact that is confirmed
or denied in a moment of visually and textually mediated recognition. This version,
similar to biological essentialism, posits authenticity as an essentialized trait waiting to be
discovered: it is intrinsic and innate to an individual. While the difficulty of this

45
An example of this weak voluntary association would be through charitable organizations, such as the
#BeTrue campaign explored in chapter two, which ultimately serves Nike’s corporate interests.

48

essentialized “truth” is explored more in later chapters, a useful comparison is to relate it
to a competing narrative of queer realness (Gray M. L., 2009).
Queer realness, in this definition, is the manufacturing of identity that is
influenced by re/circulations and mediated renderings of LGBT identities complete with
particular ways to dress, look, and speak. This could be related to the notion of social
construction in that it recognizes the multiple ways that identity is transformed through
social assemblages: it recognizes that our understanding of self is highly mediated and
contingent and there are traces of social interaction that affect our understanding of self.
Mary Gray argues that there is a set of expectations that guide how an identity “ought” to
look, sound, and/or feel. We therefore do not possess authenticity as a core tenet of our
being, but rather it is constructed through the codes, expectations, and mediated texts that
teach us what it means to enact or claim a particular identity. Manufactured, in this
sense, does not mean “fake,” but rather references the piecing together of multiple “social
actors” (reading the newspaper, watching TV, surfing the internet, talking to friends) in
order to cultivate a sense of self.
This distinction is important as the following chapters progress through the
multiple media-generated source materials that become part of the process with which we
understand ourselves. It is these representations that guide “queer realness.” As opposed
to thinking of authenticity as real or fake, queer realness recognizes that identities are
manufactured because they are deeply social and highly mediated and that these
processes compromise our claims to authenticity or to a stabilized/essentialized identity.
However, queer realness also recognizes that individuals are interpellated, or hailed, by
particular cultural formations and representations that attempt to lay out narratives of how

49

to properly embody these articulations of identity. People both absorb and rework these
categories, but they do so within the confines of the resources available to them (their
identity work is contingent on the familiar tropes made available). Identity, authenticity,
and truth are not fixed, but rather a process of sorting through the available terms and
narratives made available by media formations.
I end with these competing notions of authenticity and queer realness to gesture
toward the moments of storytelling that crop up throughout the case studies in the
following chapters. I do so in the hopes that it will remind us that media matters: that
individuals use media engagements to understand their own identities and that media
narratives transform how individuals think and talk about their identities. But they do so
within a particular language cultivated by norms produced and circulated throughout
culture. Within the parameters of sports culture, identity formations of nonnormative
sexualities are a story of how “communities make ‘room’ for themselves, by piecing
together a story of emergence from a set of representations produced and circulated
within postmodernism” (Halberstam, 2005, p. 20). Individuals use their material
circumstances to refashion what they discover through mediated texts, which is why the
interrogation of what these texts authorize and what they foreclose is so important to
beginning to understand how sports culture and gay identity circulate.

Methods
In addition to utilizing queerness as a theoretical lens, this dissertation also
employs queerness as a “scavenger methodology” (Halberstam, 1998) that combines
discourse analysis, field studies, historical survey, and archival research. I believe that

50

within the media studies tradition, this concept is most closely related to Douglas
Kellner’s multiperspectival approach (Kellner, 2011). While I engage with each of these
further I would be remiss not to first engage reflexively with my own positionality. As a
gay white cisgender man no doubt my own subjectivities are inflected and entangled in
the methods I chose, the data I collected, and the interpretations I made of the research.
However, I attempted to utilize methods that would allow for a nuanced and critical
engagement with how discourses and narratives of sports and sexuality are constructed,
deployed, and understood by the media and LGBT communities in modern culture. I
simultaneously tried to continually recognize my own perspective as a further mediation
of these sites and stories.

A Multiperspectival Approach
In his piece, “Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism, and Media Culture” Douglas
Kellner elucidates how cultural studies, here used as a tool that enables the reading and
interpretation of culture through the social relations and systems that produce and
consume it, is “intimately bound up with the study of society, politics, and economics”
(2011, p. 8). Kellner offers a multiperspectival approach meant to holistically interrogate
culture, specifically culture that is intimately tied to mediated artifacts, in a manner that
does not privilege a particular aspect of production, circulation, or reception.
For Kellner, this approach can be divided into three sub-sections: production and
political economy, textual analysis, and audience reception and use of media culture.
46

These three aspects of the methodology are important in their individual ability to unpack
differing parts of the production of culture. As Kellner argues, “this comprehensive

46
The first and last help to situate the two sections of the dissertation as seen in the chapter outline.

51

approach avoids too narrowly focusing on one dimension of the project to the exclusion
of others” (2011, p. 10). It further attends to the various ways that cultural studies
illuminates and interrogates the relations of power and domination, as well as resistance
and criticism, within and surrounding cultural production and mediated artifacts.
By production and political economy Kellner steers us towards a mode of analysis
that attends to systems of production and distribution. As Kellner writes, “the system of
production often determines what sort of artifacts will be produced, what structural limits
there will be as to what can and cannot be said and shown, and what sort of audience
effects the text may generate” (2011, p. 10). This attention to the political and economic
are important in understanding the range and limits of their ideological discourses. Put
another way, both political and economic factors contribute to the environments and
landscapes that produce, air, and disseminate cultural artifacts and they must be
accounted for in a fully realized media analysis. Kellner does not want an attention to
political economy to detract from other aspects of cultural analysis and critique. Rather,
he argues that by attending to the structural limits of production, one is able to better
understand how and why restrictions are placed on textual production and, consequently,
how these texts alter/effect audience engagements. However, it is not enough to attend to
the production and distribution of culture, along with its relationship to issues of
globalization, corporate hegemony, and profit interest, to name a few, but rather this
approach should be used in tandem with methods that focus on meaning (textual analysis)
and effects (audience reception).
Through the use of textual analysis, Kellner is focused on close readings of
media artifacts that illuminate the “discourses, ideological positions, narrative strategies,

52

image construction, and effects” that unpack how “texts function to produce meaning”
(2011, p. 11). This attention to the creation of meaning through both verbal and non-
verbal codes provides an understanding, and room for critique, of how cultural meanings
convey specific ideologies through textual systems. While Kellner makes a broad case
for the use of multiple critical methods depending on the object of study, this dissertation
begins its analysis through the use of queer theory. While queer theory certainly has its
own strengths and limitations, its inclusion of feminist perspectives, along with the
presence of queer of color critique, allow for an intersectional approach that attends to the
various ways that nonnormative voices are silenced, recuperated and/or assimilated
within popular mediated portrayals. However, it should not be reduced to a paranoid
method only concerned with moments of oppression, but also identify instances of
disruption that point to queered openings within otherwise mainstream or normative
portrayals. It can be argued that a limitation to textual analysis is its inherent subjectivity
and its potential inability to attend to negotiated readings by specific, and specifically
situated, audiences. It is rather this attention to “how diverse audiences actually read
media texts and attempt to determine what effects they have on audience thought and
behavior” (Kellner, 2011, p. 13) that point us towards the third aspect of this
multiperspectival approach.
The final aspect of Kellner’s methodology is concerned with audience reception
and the use of media culture. It is here that this multiperspectival approach most directly
deals with the complexities of multiple readings, subject positions, and perspectives that
alter the unpacking and reappropriation of media artifacts and cultural goods: it is
interested in “how people actually interact with cultural texts” (Kellner, 2011, p. 13). For

53

the purposes of this dissertation the more qualitative and ethnographic aspects of
audience interpretation will be deployed. As opposed to traditional effects research, this
dissertation utilizes field studies and media ethnography in order to explore what users do
with media and cultural content surrounding sports and sexuality.
It is also important to recognize the intersectional aspects of identity and
community which contribute to particular readings; to attend to distinctions of sexuality,
gender, race, and class (to name a few) to think through how differing subject positions,
and their particular formations and overlapping natures, alter the reading of discursive
texts. Furthermore, Kellner cautions against “romanticizing” the active audience in such
a way that denies the manipulative effects of media culture. Again, as with the previous
two approaches, these three methods work in conversation with one another in the hopes
that they will provide a fully rounded critical analysis that attends to the intricacies and
multiple aspects of cultural production.
This dissertation is focused on the production of culture as it relates to, and makes
legible, the intersection of sports and sexuality. It relies on a multiperspectival approach,
that of production studies/political economy (socioeconomic factors), textual analysis
(constructed codes), and the uses of media culture/audience reception (the impact on real-
world audiences and the meaning making process), in order to illuminate, in an equitable
and comprehensive a manner, the various modes and methods employed in cultural
production. By adhering to this three-pronged approach, Kellner offers media scholars a
method that, far from being one-sided, allows for a critical and multicultural system that
recognizes the multiple aspects of production and reception that contribute to cultural

54

production. It is an approach that attempts to overcome a myopic understanding of
cultural production in favor of a broader and more comprehensive framework.

Discourse Analysis
I employ discourse analysis as a key method for this dissertation drawing on the
broadness of the term to include the investigation of visual images and verbal texts as
well as the examination of institutional practices that put those images “to work.”
Discourse produces meanings that inform and organize action; I am invested in both the
text and context surrounding particular iterations of LGBT narratives within sports
culture. Discourse analysis is especially useful for understanding how textual and visual
imagery construct accounts of the world, how they make some identities legible while
obviating or distorting others. I am interested not in whether these notions are good or
bad, right or wrong, but rather in how their production, dissemination, and reception
begin to make sense and interact with lived subjectivities. Discourse analysis is
especially helpful in elucidating this power/knowledge nexus because it attends not only
to the images themselves (the text) but also their social production and effect (the
context). Furthermore, any reading of texts (either verbal or visual) requires an attention
to the skills and/or competencies expected of specific “types” of readers to decode
embedded meaning. I am fully aware that these texts are complex and contradictory and
yet their production establishes social difference. This understanding of discourse as
polysemous and rhizomatic allows for a detailed unpacking of texts not only as socially
produced entities that articulate relations of power but also as artifacts that take on varied
meanings depending on their consumption and interpretation.

55

Field Studies (Media Ethnography)
In addition to an engaged and critical analysis of the discursive articulations of
sports and gay sexualities, I also engaged in field studies to understand how these images
and texts are understood, interpreted and/or contested within actualized LGBT
communities. In addition, I turn to field studies because I do not want to situate mediated
experiences as the focal point of understanding and information as it pertains to
reception, but rather I aim to position these media relationally. Again, this “in situ”
approach focuses on the context of mediated and culturally bound artifacts of meaning as
they are embedded in cultural practices: “A media in situ approach focuses on how media
engagements fit into a larger mosaic of collective identity work,” in this case specific to
LGBT sports communities (Gray M. L., 2009). Rather than divorcing reception from
production, I attempt to use engagement as a structure of meaning. I establish a typology
for how and when the discursive and concretized realms become mutually informative.
In this estimation discursive production will be helpful for contextualizing onsite
observations, but should not replace actualized interactions, observations, and interviews.
As Shani Orgad writes, face-to-face interviews are crucial because they enable the
researcher “to explore many issues, such as the exchange of experience,” (2005, p. 61)
which might remain otherwise undeveloped.
This method is utilized in chapter four, a field study of gay sports bars across the
country. I acted as an observant participant, in order to collect data in a “naturalized”
setting, one concerned not with the distribution of occurrence, but rather with the specific
acts themselves. Analogous to participant observation, observant participation asks that

56

the researcher take part in the daily routines of the specific community they are
researching. They begin to understand how meaning is made through both explicit and
tacit displays. Participant observation is often attributed to Polish anthropologist
Bronislaw Malinowski who for “three years endeavored to live among the ‘natives’”
(Campbell, 2004, p. 25). However, observant participation sets itself apart by taking into
consideration the distinct subjectivity of the researcher engaged in the work. It does not
situate the researcher as academic first and person second, but rather asks the researcher
to knowingly understand their place as both an individual, who is wholly constituted and
inspired by their background and situational knowledge, and as a committed academic
investigator.
Specifically, observant participation is used by researchers who both belong to,
and focus upon marginalized communities, in this instance the LGBT community.
Observant participation approaches field studies with a sense of liminality; an
“inbetweeness” where one recognizes both their status as academic researcher but also
their undeniable connection to the group they are observing. The method requires
concurrent involvement and detachment.
Serious and critical engagement should not be omitted or dismissed by readers
simply because the researcher holds multiple intersectionalities with the subjects and/or
situations they are studying. In my case, I entered some of these gay sports bars as an
unknown observer, though tied through my own identity to the gay community.
However, in other instances, such as with bars in New York and Los Angeles, I was
already known to some patrons and many employees as both a member of the LGBT
sports community and a graduate student researching the intersection of sports and

57

sexuality. While at times I wondered if my position caused individuals to censor
themselves, at other times I noticed that this familiarity allowed individuals to be more
open and honest with me.
Field notes were taken accordance with traditional observation techniques (see
Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 1995) and utilized immersive practices in order to “see how
[participants] respond to events as they happen,” all the while “experiencing for oneself
these events and the circumstances that give rise to them” (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw,
1995, p. 2). These field notes, combined with discursive content, served as the texts for
explicating “what local people consider meaningful” (p. 108) with regards to how
competing frameworks of LGBT cultural engagement establish importance for various
members of the LGBT community through consumptive practices. However, as stressed
throughout this dissertation, these approaches situate analysis as a mode of understanding
rather than mastery (Mahmood, 2005).

Structure of the Dissertation

Section One: Mainstream Media Engagements

Chapter One: Historicizing Sports and Nonnormative Sexualities: A Genealogy of
Sports/Media’s Engagement with Gay and Lesbian Sexualities and Bodies that
Transgress

I start by tracking the ways in which media narratives are historically produced
around bodies that transgress sexually or are perceived to be differently sexed. Through
a mixture of media and subjects, both gay, straight, and otherwise, I begin to think about
the ways in which gender intersects with discussions of transgressive bodies and the ways
in which the media functions to reify difference and reinforce cultural norms through

58

representational practices. I begin by historicizing early media portrayals and
disciplinary practices through a reading of Babe Didrikson. By way of a comparative
reading of Brittney Griner I offer up the ways in which our contemporary era is both
reflective of our current neoliberal moment and yet still utilizes heteronormative
structures, such as marriage, to contain and normalize difference even while allowing for
more open engagements with sports and sexuality. I then move into a reading of Sports
Illustrated to track the ways in which cultural norms of the 1950s and 1960s built upon
earlier understandings of sports and sexuality and the “crisis of masculinity.” By tracking
the ways in which the magazine relied on the language of masculinity and the effacement
of homosexuality in sports I argue that media portrayals worked to crystalize men’s
professional sports and heterosexuality.
Since later chapters engage with LGBT-specific sports media platforms, I offer a
brief reading of the 1980’s Gay Cable Network’s Pride and Progress news program in
order to better understand the history of LGBT media engagements with sports and
sexuality at a time when mainstream images of the HIV/AIDS crisis influenced most
discussions of gay men. I look at how the network’s programming decisions and story
placements work to engage the community in the recuperative aspects of sports: here
meant as both an attention to the community building aspects of sports and sexuality and
the way in which these narratives of athleticism worked against prevailing mediations of
gay men as constructed and constituted by sickness. I also argue that this estimation of
sports and the LGBT community provided an alternative framework of experience
compared to the media narratives seen in Sports Illustrated.

59

I end with a more recent example, that of gay slurs within men’s professional
sports in the years just before and after the historic ‘coming out’ narratives referenced
earlier. I use these examples not only to provide a better understanding of the prevailing
ethos that tied mediations of sports and sexuality only to moments of homophobia, but
also to better understand how a neoliberal ethos of individual actions began to supplant
calls for more collective coalition building around antigay sentiment in professional
sports. I am interested in the ways in which the solution to homophobia is still
configured in heteronormative terms that uncritically privilege the ‘coming out’ narrative
and how the power to curtail homophobia is placed upon the gay individual as opposed to
a critical examination of the power structures that create this unequal power dynamic.
What is frequently configured in liberating terms is often done so in the service of
heteronormativity and neoliberalism.
This chapter calls attention to the various ways that media formations have
historically engaged with sports and sexuality while still attending to the specter of these
moments in our current era. It shows that he media landscape is not just a producer of
culture, historically, but also an arbiter of taste, a measure of approval, and a source of
acceptance.
While this chapter is certainly important for historicizing the current
understanding of masculinity and heteronormativity within sports culture (and the
absences of class, race, gender, and ability) it serves a second purpose as well. The nature
of this chapter, and therefore the dissertation as a whole, is not to prove whether this
understanding of LGBT cultural production is right or wrong, fact or fiction, but rather to
understand how this knowledge plays out in everyday instances. Decisions made by

60

those in the culture industries do not exist in a vacuum and should not be disassociated
from the political, economic, and institutional entities that affect their creation. I am less
interested in whether or not these representations, desires, and experiences are true or not,
but rather what makes them legible and coherent, compelling and axiomatic. I ask what
their relationship is, whether agreeable or antagonistic, to everyday being, experience and
lived subjectivity? As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick asks with regards to reparative readings,
“Is a particular piece of knowledge true, and how can we know? How…is knowledge
performative, and how best does one move among its causes and effects” (Sedgwick,
2003, p. 124)? We are better able to understand the current moment the rest of this
dissertation unpacks through the historical tracking of multiple iterations of media
engagements with sports and sexuality.

Chapter Two: Commodifying 'Coming Out:' Sports, Neoliberalism, and the
‘Coming Out’ Narrative

In the second chapter, I move into a reading of the ways in which mainstream
sports media currently engages with sports and sexuality, in particular as it relates to the
‘coming out’ narrative. I argue through readings of the ‘coming out’ announcements and
portrayals of Jason Collins and Michael Sam that we are better able to see thematic
patterns of the ‘coming out’ narrative that work to reinforce particular norms surrounding
gay sexual production and support neoliberal tenets. I further think through the way in
which disidentifications are deployed by athletes to work through contradictory
identifications and the difficulty of “authenticity claims” using an intersectional analysis
of gender and race. I end with a discussion of the ways in which the ‘coming out’
narrative has produced a cottage industry of professionals who both espouse the

61

importance of the ‘coming out’ narrative while simultaneously profiting from this
particular type of mediated sexual truth production. Within this analysis I also look to the
ways that sports corporations profit from the commodification of the ‘coming out’
narrative and situate how this produces market driven modes of individualized and
depoliticized consumer citizenship.
This estimation of “visibility,” especially as it pertains to the ‘coming out’
narrative, however, relies on an “incitement to visibility” (Gray H. , 2013) that privileges
the importance of individual, often isolated, actions over collective activism and state
intervention. I thus critique this type of visibility as a technique that relies on the
individual to ‘come out’ to produce change: “This insight suggests how the deployment
of difference in neoliberalism discourses of diversity consolidates the shift from group
position to self-enterprise” (Gray H. , 2013, p. 779). ‘Coming out’ can be commodified
and refashioned in economic terms, but then discarded once it has exhausted its economic
potential without critical attention to how this effects the individual it supposedly
liberates through discourses of “truth.”

Section Two: LGBT Media & Community Engagements: How Discourses of Sports
and Gay Sexualities Interact with Everyday LGBT Experiences.

Chapter Three: Challenging the Clubhouse: Outsports.com and Digital LGBT
Sports Citizenship

Section two begins with an investigation into how LGBT-specific media
platforms engage with stories of sports and gay sexuality. Within this chapter I return to
Nancy Fraser’s work on affirmative versus transformative frameworks to better
understand how outsports.com, the most popular LGBT specific sports news organization

62

covers stories pertaining to sports and sexuality. I ask how the site works to reproduce
and privilege the ‘coming out’ narrative in order to reconfigure it as a political
imperative. At the same time I track the ways this platform works as a counterpublic to
provides a forum for queered engagements with sports and sexuality. Here we begin to
see the ways in which gay journalists and members of the gay sports fan community
reproduce and wrestle with mainstream media portrayals and work through claims to
authenticity and queer realness.
I begin by unpacking the design and structure of outsports.com to better
understand how we might posit a difference between gayness and queerness in digital
spaces. I then ask how discursive productions, facilitated by outsports.com, might offer a
different narrative of gayness and sports culture. Online affinity portals such as
outsports.com are useful in analyzing how queer conversations about sports, and
contestations of static terminology, illuminate the queer potentiality of those portals. In
particular, I look at two disparate discourses surrounding sports and sexuality: the sexual
abuse scandal at The Pennsylvania State University’s football program and the ‘coming
out’ of Tom Daley. These two case studies, and their accompanying discussions of sports
and sexuality by users online, help us to better understand how the discourses produced
through user engagements gesture towards a queering of discussions of sports and
sexuality. The results obtained may suggest how our normative beliefs generate implicit
stereotypical assumptions regarding accessible and potential sites of queer community.
Ultimately this information can help call attention to how understandings of queerness
are constantly negotiating heteronormative structures of existence.

63

Chapter Four: The Queer Clubhouse: Community and Consumption in Gay Sports
Bars

Whereas the second chapter of this dissertation is focused on how mainstream
media spaces cover narratives of gayness and sports, and the third chapter is focused on
how spaces of LGBT media cover narratives of gayness and sports, this final chapter is
focused on how spaces of gayness and sports, here exemplified by gay sports bars,
engage with mainstream narratives and mediations of sports. Within this chapter the gay
sports bar becomes the corporeal approximation of the online space explored in chapter
three. And, as in chapter three, it serves as a locus to think through how authenticity and
moments of queer realness are reinserted into the corporeal. How are bodies reproduced
empirically within sports and sexuality and how do these bodies represent or contest
previous media engagements?
I begin with an overview of bar culture in order to see how these sites of men’s
sociability were produced historically and the ways in which this history still guides gay
sports bars today. As my work on gay sports websites in chapter three and gay sports
bars in chapter four elucidates, these spaces provide for interactions around sports that
problematize the queering of sports culture. It is not that these spaces are entirely queer,
the fact of their dependence on the static categories of gay/straight seems to belie any
insistence on their queer totality. However, the juxtaposition of hegemonic masculinity,
essentialized gayness, and queered “otherness,” helps to construct these spaces as
exhibiting queer meaning-making and gestures towards the potentiality of a queer utopia
(Muñoz, 2009), while still recognizing the limitations of these spaces and their
connection to corporate capitalist culture. As my field studies research shows, these
spaces begin to challenge traditional notions of the proper space of sports and gay

64

cultural consumption, and yet the ways in which they are experienced are still intensely
qualified by heteronormative notions of authenticity. Patrons express the ways in which
gay sports bars begin to challenge preconceived notions about what a sports bar or a gay
bar “should” be and how one’s behavior within this places is reconstituted from
normative understanding of sports culture produced through media formations.
This chapter investigates how LGBT consumption and community, as played out
in gay sports bars, complicates reified and essentialized notions of LGBT interaction and
identity. I argue that what is lost in this broad overview of LGBT sporting practices is a
recognition of the (re)negotiation of community and sports that is needed when framing
their existence in a queer light. I suggest that a queered social praxis based on “new
categories of perception and appreciation” (Bourdieu, 2001, p. 123) might provide an
alternative classification and understanding of heteronormative dominance in LGBT
sports fields. Furthermore, I offer up the notion of heterotopias to see how we might
distance ourselves from a notion of authenticity that is always already presumed to be
constituted by normative sexualities
Ultimately, this final chapter uses queer engagements with the ubiquity of sports,
and “analysis as a mode of conversation, rather than mastery” (Mahmood, 2005, p. 199),
to think through how acts of quotidian consumption still speak to collective engagements.
Culture has often been posited as a site of struggle and negotiation between superaltern
and subaltern communities. The gay sports bar as a site of queer conflict is no different.
The quotidian consumption that takes place in gay sports bars offers new understandings
of LGBT sports, friendships, and community through a praxis of queer values rather than
through identity politics.

65

Chapter One: Historicizing Sports and Nonnormative Sexualities: A
Genealogy of Sports/Media’s Engagement with Gay and Lesbian Sexualities and
Bodies that Transgress
The history of gay and lesbian visibility in twentieth and twenty-first century
America is vast and detailed. Many scholars have cultivated historical narratives that
attempt to better understand how our modern conception of the LGBT community has
come into being (Faderman 1991; Chauncey 1994; Kaiser 1997; Kennedy and Davis
2014, among others). Others have written historically about the connections between the
LGBT community and media formations (Doty 1993; Gross & Woods 1999; Capsuto
2000; Gross 2001; Walters 2001; Dyer 2002; Tropiano 2002; Villarejo 2013; Johnson &
Keith 2014, among others). The aim of the following chapter is not to provide an
exhaustive history of sports, gay and lesbian sexualities, and the media, but rather to
cultivate a genealogy of representation that highlights four instances of twentieth and
twenty-first century media engagements with the LGBT community.
By examining the way in which historical mediations of sports and sexuality
cultivate norms of representation, and connecting these instances to their specific
historical and cultural contexts, this chapter illuminates how questions of sexuality and
gender, within sports culture, are discursively organized to produce forms of knowledge
and power: it works “to pick out the historical contingencies that shaped these practices
and the ways in which we thought about them (Morgan, 2006, p. 15). The following
traces the continuities and discontinuities invoked by examining discursive productions,
across multiple temporalities, and links these discourses to political practices and cultural
norms.

66

I begin with a reading of Babe Didrikson Zaharias in relation to changing
economic conditions and social morals that influenced understandings of sports and
sexuality in the early twentieth century. I argue that the way in which journalists inserted
discussions and questions, both explicit and implicit, of Babe’s gender and sexuality into
seemingly neutral media accounts of her sporting accomplishments worked to reinforce
emergent norms regarding femininity in twentieth century America. Correspondingly,
they also helped to crystalized the connection between sports and masculinity that both
undermines female participation and underpins stereotypes about both gay and lesbian
athletes.
1
I also argue that Babe, and her advisors, took an active role in reinserting
narratives of femininity within portrayals of her transgressive body in order to counteract
negative descriptions produced by journalists, and to better position her as an acceptable
figure in popular culture at a time when economic hardship, brought about by the Great
Depression, worked to solidify heterosexual relationships as key to the survival of the
American nation. I additionally posit that her marriage to professional wrestler George
Zaharias served a purpose in this normalization process.
Within this analysis I introduce a comparative reading of Brittney Griner to the
story of Babe in order to illustrate some of the ways in which acceptance for lesbian and
gay athletes has changed since Babe’s era, but also to highlight the ways in which
heteronormativity still guides and structures everyday life for athletes who transgress.
2
I
believe this connection is crucial to thinking through the current moment that the rest of

1
It is not my intention to make the argument that mediations were the only way that these connections were
made. Throughout this piece I reference larger historical arguments that connect sports culture to
nationalism and violence, and the particular ways that sports were used to ready men for war, both
metaphorically and materially. For more on these arguments see: Mosse 1985 and Mosse 1996.
2
Throughout this dissertation I have chosen to refer to Babe by her first name, as opposed to her last name,
as I do with other athletes. This is a conscious choice to recognize that Babe Didrikson and Babe
Didrikson Zaharias stood for two very different ideas, especially within media narratives of the athlete.

67

this dissertation engages with and the way it connects to, and differs from, historical
representations of sports and gay and lesbian sexualities. While we certainly live in an
era of greater acceptance for LGBT athletes, and one which engages with discussions of
sexuality in a far more explicit manner than in Babe’s time, to simply posit, uncritically,
that we are now in an era of tolerance ignores the ways in which LGBT individuals are
still expected to live up to heteronormative ideals.
I then move to an analysis of the ways sexuality is invoked within early issues of
Sports Illustrated. I engage with President Elect John F. Kennedy’s article The Soft
American (1960) in order to better understand how sports, and the crisis of masculinity
were implicated in concerns over national security and reflected a society intent on
shoring up consumptive practices through heterosexual relations. Furthermore, I look to
the very first mentions of homosexuality and lesbianism within the pages of Sports
Illustrated to better understand how media narratives, originally produced around Babe’s
body in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, solidified into archetypal patterns of representation.
Thirdly, I engage in a brief reading of the Gay Cable Network’s news program
Pride & Progress to better understand how sports and the lesbian and gay community
were connected during the 1980s. In particular, I highlight this program as an important
moment in the history of gay and lesbian specific media engagements with sports that are
produced by and for the community (which also connects to the case studies I take up in
Chapters three and four).
In the final section, I look at gay slurs within professional team sports in the
twenty-first century in order to interrogate the ways in which the modern lesbian and gay
individual is posited as a necessary actor in the drive for change and acceptance. Here I

68

begin to parse through the differences between homophobia and heteronormativity, work
I first introduced in the introduction, and the latter’s reliance on the language and
ideology of neoliberalism. By looking at moments of homophobia both before, and after,
the ‘coming out’ of Collins, Sam, and Griner, I am better able to highlight the ambivalent
moment that guides modern understandings of sports, sexuality, and the media.
Additionally, this analysis gestures towards the ways that a focus on homophobia often
elides larger structural inequalities, and overlapping intersections of identity and
marginalization, that critiques of heteronormativity seek to both emphasize and
problematize.

The Terrific Tomboy?: The Rise and Fall of Babe Didrikson
Mildred Ella Didrikson was born on June 26, 1911 in Port Arthur, Texas (Reid,
2013). She received the nickname Babe because of her talent for sports, especially
baseball, at a young age. Babe showed great promise at most sports she took up, and
while Babe’s early life and career are more thoroughly chronicled in books (Cayleff
1996; Freedman 1999; Vanatta Jr. 2011; Wallace & Wallace 2014, among others), she
became the subject of national media attention because of her accomplishments in the
early 1930s as an Olympic Track & Field athlete and her subsequent transformation into
a successful professional golfer in the late 1930s and beyond.
3
Babe represented an
important figure in sports, as evidenced by the claims that she was the “first female
athlete to be referred to as a single name,” but also because of the way sports media

3
Her many basketball achievements of the 1920s, prior to the Olympics, did not receive as much national
media attention.

69

engaged with her athleticism in relation to questions of gender and sexuality (Freedman,
1999).
As George Chauncey argues, medical notions of the homosexual that were first
promoted at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century did
not meaningfully alter popular understandings of heterosexual and homosexual behavior
until the 1920s. Therefore, Babe’s rise within the sporting world coincided at the same
time that popular culture was grappling with the relationship between athletics and
female sexuality. By all accounts, Babe did not conform to traditional ideas of a
femininity most often ascribed to women of her era. This concern over her body was
evidenced in the media attention she received in the lead up to the 1932 Los Angeles
Olympic games.
4
As she began to show the athleticism that would eventually lead to a
dominating performance in Track & Field, journalists began to question her appearance
and what her body might reveal about her “true” gender and sexuality (Cayleff, 1996).
Babe’s performance at the Olympics was groundbreaking – headlines after the
games declared her “The Amazing Amazon” and “The Terrific Tomboy.”
5
But while
press accounts continued to heap praise on her athletic achievements, they still framed
them within normative expectations for women in the 1930s. They asked if she
possessed the same great ability to sew as she did at running, and wondered how her
“beauty diet” contributed to her success. (Johnson & Williamson, 1977). Media coverage

4
While accounts of her early athletic accomplishments are not as widely accessible, the majority of them
were concerned with the statistics of her performances rather than with questions of her body. While the
reasons for this are worthy of their own separate investigation, part of this can no doubt be traced to
arguments which posit that the notion of the tomboy is a more acceptable positionality within culture for
young girls; however, this becomes a contested and devalued attribute as girls transform into women
(Halberstam 1998).
5
It is worth noting that the term Amazon has undergone its own transformations in popular culture. Where
“earlier references to ‘amazons’ had signaled heterosexual ardor,” it was not until the 1930s that the term
began “to mean unattractive, failed heterosexuals.” (Cahn, 1994). One can trace the term in its applications
to Babe to better see when it was deployed positively and when it was used negatively.

70

used examples from her private life to offset questions of gender normativity inherent in
her public life. For example, in her autobiography she recounted how articles which
detailed her ability to adjust to different athletic conditions, such as the thin air of
Denver, also highlighted the fact that this same knowledge came in handy as she pursued
more feminine pursuits: that she found out the “altitude made a difference in the kitchen,
too…” (Zaharias & Paxton, 1955). Her athletic prowess was offset by references to more
appropriate activities for a single woman of her time. So, while the press cultivated
narratives that scrutinized her physical appearance, which fixated on her body as a site of
curiosity, they also worked to justify how she might also embody typical femininity.
Stories often referenced the fact that Babe was, in fact, “all girl.” These two competing
narratives are paradigmatic in the way that stories of transgressive bodies are recuperated
through media accounts, but also in their connection to heterosexuality. While earlier
concepts of sexual deviance tied sports to an overly eroticized woman, or, conversely, to
one who would be unable to reproduce because of the effects of athletic competition,
these new definitions of femininity were intimately tied to the reproduction of
heterosexuality. As Susan Cahn notes, “Assertive heterosexuality, once a sign of sexual
deviance, now formed the standard of acceptable femininity” (1994, p. 170).
It is also worth noting that Babe’s class position worked to salvage some of her
more transgressive positionalities since her success at activities previously deemed the
domain of men, and in particular her professionalization of these activities, would
normally be seen as a mark of moral corruption for members of the middle and upper
class. However, the narrative of Babe’s East Texas working class background,

71

conspicuously inserted into media accounts, helped to counteract the respectability
politics that often questioned her unfeminine success.
But while Babe’s success at the 1932 Olympics catapulted her into the national
spotlight, they did so at time in American history where cultural values as to the proper
place of women were being crystalized through both social and political formations,
along with a growing concern for the small, but noticeable lesbian communities in large
cities (Cahn, 1994). Similar to the way in which married men were prioritized for jobs
during the great depression, so too did negative public opinion begin to mount towards
women in the workforce as the privileging of men as breadwinners was supported by
equal ideologies of women as supportive companions whose domain was the domestic
sphere. In fact, the Economy Act of 1933 mandated that two members of the same
family could not both be employed by the federal government. The fallout from this
legislation meant that workers, and in particular women, were forced to resign.
6
As the
depression wore on cultural attitudes about the appropriate place of woman crystalized in
American culture. However, Babe stood in stark contrast to these norms – she was
unmarried, financially independent, and existed outside the increasingly static
conceptions of femininity and feminine embodiment. Interestingly, Babe often described
herself as almost 5 inches and 40 pounds lighter than she was in reality. While one could
argue that she rewrote the biography of her body in an attempt to cultivate myths about
her ability to transcend traditional sports limits, in retrospect, it is probably more likely
that these alterations were made to heighten perceptions of her claims to femininity.
Not all accounts of Babe’s athletic prowess were disparaging, in particular
reporter Grantland Rice was known for his positive portrayals of Babe, and yet even the

6
Many estimates posit that around 75% of those that were forced to resign were women.

72

most supportive of narratives still expected Babe to be both athletically invincible and
traditionally feminine. However, others showed their contempt for Babe more openly,
such as sportswriter Paul Gallico, who famously compared his curiosity about Babe to his
attraction for the bearded lady and the albino girl at the circus sideshow. Gallico penned
articles for Vanity Fair calling Babe a “muscle moll” (1932) and another for Reader’s
Digest entitled “Women in Sports Should Look Beautiful” (1936). The latter article is
particularly interesting in the way Gallico created a taxonomy for sports that allowed
women, in his mind, to participate while still living up to normative beauty standards:
archery, riding, and skating were among the eight sports that were appropriate because
they allowed women to move gracefully and allowed for “some pretty cute costumes.”
However, there were 17 other sports, such as games that involved balls, which he did not
think women should participate in since they forced women to perspire.
7
He also posited
that these activities were not suitable for women since many of these sports relied on
instructions as to what to do with your genitalia as your participated and “a girl just can’t
do those things and still be a lady.”
While Gallico was not alone in his criticism, he epitomized the ways in which
sports media narratives, written almost exclusively by men, began to prescribe
appropriate sports for women – those that were considered “beautiful” and did not
sublimate femininity, beauty, and heterosexual desire for athleticism. Furthermore, we
see the beginnings of sports stories on women that focus on physical attributes, rather
than athletic accomplishments.
8
Articles focused on Babe’s physique as much as her
Olympic accomplishments. For example, according to historian Susan Cayleff, one story

7
Gallico based his analysis on the 25 sports he believed women generally participated in.
8
For a more nuanced taxonomy of these techniques I refer to the work of Toni Bruce, in particular (Bruce,
2013).

73

comforted the reader by stating “‘she is not a freakish looking character…[but] a normal,
healthy, boyish looking girl.’” Another account in 1932 described that, “she likes to
fight. Her voice is deep, her remarks virulent and pointed. She has few close girl friends
and isn’t much interested in boys” (Cayleff, 1996). Furthermore, a July 1932 New York
Times article entitled “Miss Didrikson Buys First Hat for Trip to U.S. Title Games” spent
three paragraphs describing Babe’s purchase of a pink hat to wear to an athletic
competition (1932). If Babe was to be America’s sweetheart, it would only be framed in
a way that relied on appropriate femininity to offset her Amazonian presence.
While this criticism was not confined to Babe, her success and national attention,
coupled with accounts that constantly tied her body to discussions of transgressions,
reinvigorated the idea that athleticism was the natural opposite of femininity and that
female athletes must constantly prove their connection to normative beliefs about
femininity, heterosexuality, and the proper role of women. As a more hostile tone of
public discourse resurfaced regarding women’s pursuits of athletic achievement, they
were discouraged from engaging in activity that was again considered detrimental to
motherhood; however, as opposed to earlier concerns that posited this connection solely
in biological terms, it was now recast as detrimental to heterosexuality as well.
These female athletes became suspect in both the biology of their bodies, but also
in their cultural actions and career aspirations that seemed to signal failed
heterosexuality. The specter of lesbianism accompanied Babe because of her success in
an arena deemed the realm of men and because she did not conform to traditional ideas of
femininity in her dress. Public fears of the “modern lesbian,” which were gaining
heightened public awareness and criticism in movies, plays, and popular novels, were

74

also now associated with athletes and crystalized in the narrative of Babe. As Susan
Cayleff argues, “Her physique, her trousers and plain shirts, her short-cropped hair, and
her sheer competence in the male realm of competitive sports presented an intimidating
image to a culture recently attuned to the medical definitions of female homosexuality”
(1996, p. 88).
Babe’s sexual identity proved to be a constant source of anxiety in press coverage
during the 1930s. But Babe was not naïve as to work done by these portrayals. Though
she did not live at a time when it was acceptable to discuss sexuality openly, she did
attempt to counteract these narratives with statements like “I know I’m not pretty but I do
try to be graceful’” (Cayleff, 1996). Additionally, Babe enlisted the help of Tiny
Scurlock to help offset stories written by Gallico and others. More than just a writer,
Scurlock worked as a manager of sorts for Babe beginning in 1931. Not only was he
tasked both with looking after Babe’s welfare but also with writing her up as often as
possible in her hometown region. He worked to protect her amateur athletic status, and,
upon turning pro, was to handle all feature stories written about Babe. He would write
articles that reported on scores and athletic accomplishments, but always included
narratives that reasserted normative traits, whether real or imagined. Babe relied on the
relationship she developed with Tiny to help utilize press stories to reaffirm her
normalcy. Articles that called her “a muscular gal with the litheness of a Texas
cowpuncher” were countered with statements that wrote “feminine? Decidedly so. She
can cook, sew, and is a neat housekeeper when she stays around home long enough”
(Scurlock, 1953).

75

Interesting, Babe was often disparaged for her short hair, regardless of the fact
that “the bob” had become increasingly popular in American cities. Babe attempted to
conform to a society that was increasingly dependent on consumer goods, like cosmetics
and clothing, to emphasize femininity; however, this look was often accompanied by
flirtatious attitudes and more feminine manners. While Babe attempted, through dress, to
recreate feminine fashions, her body and behavior belied these efforts. Babe became the
ultimate archetype, the warning, for what happened if a woman was not presentable or
marketable. But this also points us to the double bind for female professional athletes:
the same characteristics that make them champions, are also often those that place them
decidedly outside the norm.

The Sturdy Spouse: The Rise of Babe Didrikson Zaharias
As Gallico and others virulently labeled Babe as existing outside the binary of
man and woman, the public began to question Babe’s biology. Therefore it is of little
surprise that she attempted to transform her gender identity after the Olympics and
participated, more explicitly, in the narratives that attempted to reject any of her
masculine tendencies. One of these attempts to quell rumors regarding her gender and
sexuality was to switch sports. Moving from Track & Field to golf became a way for
Babe to resuscitate her career and counteract claims to her androgynous status: “golf also
promised a way up in social standing, golf, then an upper-crust, refined, ladylike pursuit,
entailed no unseemly sweating, no muscle moll accusations, no ridiculing press hovering
in the wings” (Cayleff, 1996, p. 114). Golf served to reinvent her image and her social
graces. But adopting femininity also meant abandoning her past – both her athletic

76

accomplishments and her working-class upbringing. She stopped discussing her
childhood and studied female etiquette as much as golfing technique. Here we see the
media’s role in disciplining her body.
But as rumors persisted around Babe as a lesbian, she realized that transforming
herself into the ideal woman in appearance and action was not enough. As magazines
such as Ladies Home Journal and Vogue described the ideal woman as attractive and
domestically competent, they also undergirded society’s need for a woman to also be a
wife and mother and to produce a healthy and happy family – she was expected not only
to marry, but to keep her husband happy. With this in mind Babe began to rewrite her
personal history in such a way that it emphasized her romantic contact with boys: “Babe
consciously created a heterosexual past for herself and made certain it was a
nonthreatening heterosexual past replete with adolescent savvy and gender boundaries”
(Cayleff, 1996). It was not until 1938, when she was paired with professional wrestler
George Zaharias at the Los Angeles Open that this final piece of the puzzle fell into
place. As an athlete, Zaharias was known for a toughness and ferociousness that
contrasted well with Babe’s newly constructed femininity. As Susan Cayleff writes,
“George’s ‘manliness,’ evidenced in his exaggerated physical forms and prowess,
reaffirmed Babe’s femininity” (1996, p. 138). While accounts of their marriage varied,
and in particular historians have pointed to Zaharias as an overbearing and often jealous
husband, media reports at the time painted a picture of matrimonial bliss: “It is nice to
hear news of Mr. and Mrs. Zaharias, a couple who have, to my mind, achieved the
pinnacle in married harmony” (Cayleff, 1996, p. 140).

77

Media reports also focused on her domestic activities, highlighting the way in
which she decorated their Denver home, her trading of family recipes with his mother,
and even hinted at their sex life through a detailed account of the bed required to fit two
larger-than-life athletes. And though Babe had previously taken a lead in the
management of her career, she took a more passive role after the marriage, deferring to
Zaharias who now became her manager. Through her marriage to Zaharias, as both
manager and husband, Babe was able to align herself with heterosexual ideals and
distance herself from the specter of homosexuality that had followed her throughout her
career. As Babe herself stated after a golf tournament victory, “And all the while I was
enjoying being Mrs. George Zaharias. That’s what I’ve been ever since we were married,
whether I was keeping house or playing in a golf tournament. I’ve always competed as
Mrs. Zaharias, not Babe Didrikson. We’re a team” (Zaharias & Paxton, 1955). Babe and
George worked together to cultivate an appealingly feminine Mrs. Zaharias who would
counteract previously held ideas about Ms. Didrikson. Though her body and athleticism
would never conform to cultural norms of femininity, through the narrative of her
marriage, and its accompanying claims to femininity, Babe did acquire the veneer of
girlishness so crucial to appealing to American ideals.

Another Bluebonnet Babe: Brittney Griner and the Marriage “Proposal”
While Babe was one of the first high-profile female athletes to experience gender
scrutiny from the media, she certainly would not be the last.
9
Born in Houston, Texas in
1990, 80 years after Babe, but only 80 miles away from Babe’s hometown of Port Arthur,

9
While this chapter works through a history of media representations, I jump chronologically for a moment
to think through some of the connections and gaps between media representations of Babe and Griner.

78

Texas, Brittney Griner is widely considered one of the best athletes to play the game of
basketball. While Griner’s story is explored more in Chapter two, I think it is important
to compare her experiences to those of Babe’s to better understand the particular moment
that this dissertation examines within sports, media, and culture. Griner, like Babe, was a
standout in sports at a young age. But unlike Babe, Griner grew up knowing that her
athleticism had the potential to give her an education and a career in an American
professional team sports league. While descriptions of Griner in the press are too varied
to unpack completely here, Griner has spoken openly about the taunts directed at her
growing up, during games, and on social media. She wrote that:
I was bullied in every way imaginable, but the worst was the verbal abuse. (I was
always a strong, tough and tall girl, so nobody wanted to mess with me from a
physical standpoint.) It hit rock bottom when I was in seventh grade. I was in a
new school with people I didn’t know, and the teasing about my height,
appearance and sexuality went on nonstop, every day.

People called me a dude and said there was no way I could be a woman. Some
even wanted me to prove it to them.
10
During high school and college, when we

10
There is a long history of sex testing within athletics, particularly since the renewal of the modern
Olympic games that places the burden of proof on female athletes who are presumed to transgress.
Whether it be through eye-exams where female genitalia is inspected, such as the decision by the
International Amateur Athletic Foundation in 1966 to force women Track & Field athletes at the
championships in Budapest to prove their femaleness by parading nude in front of a panel of women
gynecologists, or chromosomal testing, this process is both discriminatory, sexist, and highly contested in
academic and scientific circles. For a particularly important and compelling look at critiques of
chromosomal testing in sports, and the way in which female athletes can be mandated to undergo such
testing solely because of visual stereotypes and/or unfounded complaints by competitors, I point to articles
on athlete Caster Semenya by Cheryl Cooky (Cooky and Dworkin 2013), among others. For pieces on
questions of hyper-androgyny, I point to the case of Dutee Chand and the work of Dr. Katrina Karkazis
(Karkazis, et al. 2012) and Dr. Payoshni Mitra (2014), among others.

79

traveled for games, people would shout the same things while also using racial
epithets and terrible homophobic slurs.

(That’s nothing compared with the horrendous things people call me online today
— if you don’t believe me, look at the comments about me on Twitter and
Instagram). (Griner, 2013)

While some scholars have written about decreasing homophobia within sports
culture, and certainly there is far greater acceptance for LGBT individuals in the twenty-
first century compared to the early twentieth, to see this type of progression as a linear
triumphalist march towards progress ignores the ways that homophobia and, more
importantly, heteronormativity still continue to operate in society. Certainly, it has
become easier for athletes to ‘come out,’ or to challenge hegemonic masculinities
through dress and style,
11
but to say that it is “easier” does not mean that it is “easy,” and
often elides important questions of race, gender, and politics. I think Griner’s experience
helps to remind us that homophobia still exists and is still connected to racist and sexist
ideology. Furthermore, while scholars argue that social media, and in particular Griner’s
social media postings, have provided digital possibilities for social change within sports
and sexuality (Chawansky, 2016), the medium also facilitates anti-gay sentiment as seen
by Griner’s own experiences. However, as I will argue throughout this dissertation, I am

11
For more on this, one can look to professional athletes such as Russell Westbrook, Dwayne Wade, Kevin
Durant, and Draymond Green, among others, who have used the NBA’s league mandated dress code,
initially enacted to counteract what the league felt was dress that was too “urban,” to experiment with
fashion (designer labels, skinny jeans, capri pants) once seen as an expression that undermined hegemonic
masculinity. But this type of experimentation is certainly not equal for athletes across positionalities such
as gender and race. In particular, C.J. Pascoe (2005) makes interesting arguments about the ways in which
style experimentation conjures up questions of sexuality differently for white versus African-American
communities.

80

interested not in cataloguing moments of homophobia, but rather interrogating how
heteronormativity is still present in, and often authorizes, moments seen as inclusive of
transgressive bodies.
Unlike Babe, who attempted to recreate her narrative by feminizing her body,
Griner has embraced her gender-queer status. In fact, one of the first major mainstream
feature articles written about Griner seemed to embrace her gender nonconformity.
Entitled Owning the Middle (Fagan, 2013) the article focused on Griner’s embrace of her
gender nonconformity, something unimaginable in relation to Babe.
12
However, to say
that Griner lives more openly because she lives in a time of more acceptance misses some
of the nuance illustrated in Griner’s story. While I engage more thoroughly with her
relationship to Baylor University in Chapter two, it is worth noting that the university,
and her coach, vigorously defended Griner and her gender, while at the same time shying
away from a discussion of her sexuality. For the University, it was paramount to reinsert
a narrative of Griner as “all-girl” in a similar manner to the narratives used by Babe’s
advisors. While this was done to assuage fears of her gender non-conformity, I believe
they also point to the necessity to shore up gendered boundaries in sports.
Also, in a similar manner to Babe, Griner saw marriage as way to better conform
to a society that places so much attention and visibility on marriage and the replication of
a traditional family by both heterosexual and homosexuals alike. Griner’s relationship
with fellow WNBA player Glory Johnson was well covered by news outlets and through

12
This notion of the “middle” is especially interesting in the ways that the term is deployed to discuss
LGBT sports athletes. In addition to Fagan’s article “Owning the Middle,” former NBA player John
Amaechi ‘came out’ in a book titled Man in the Middle, and many sports writers categorized Michael
Sam’s shortcomings as attributable to his “tweener” status (meant to reference how his size and ability fit
between, or in the middle of, two established positions in the NFL). This notion of occupying “the middle”
is then posited in both positive and negative terms. These athletes exist outside of binary constructions,
though this existence is made undesirable because of its inability to fit neatly into heteronormativity as
much as it is applauded for contesting existing binary frameworks.

81

each player’s own social media accounts. Their engagement became a rallying cry for
how far sports have moved towards acceptance of the LGBT community. However, this
connection between LGBT acceptance and marriage equality, as argued in the
introduction, relies on a specific type of visibility that positions LGBT individuals as
“just like” straights at the expense of more queered versions of kinship and familial
structures. It also endorses a version of LGBT acceptance that relies on normative ideals.
While Griner, unlike Babe, might not feel as much pressure to conform to traditional
notions of femininity in dress and presentation, this does not mean that her acceptance
into the mainstream was not also predicated on the need to accept “advances” in the
LGBT movement such as an embrace of traditional marriage.
Just a month after Griner married fellow WNBA player Glory Johnson, she
announced their decision to separate.
13
As Griner described, “Prior to us getting married,
I knew I didn't want to... I shouldn't have went through with it… Sometimes you feel
pressured into things, and I went along with it. And I know I shouldn't have. It was a
huge mistake. I just knew it was a mistake” (Warren, 2015). I highlight this moment to
think about the ways in which sports culture, though operating in a society of greater
tolerance for, and understanding of, LGBT issues, still falls into old traps of
discrimination. Furthermore, it shows the ways in which heteronormativity and

13
I would be remiss not to recognize that Griner and Johnson were engaged in a domestic abuse case, prior
to their marriage, with each accusing the other of physical violence. While this instance is important of its
own unpacking, it is something I would like to pursue more in later versions of this project. In particular, I
shy away from this discussion here because I believe it furthers a double-standard in which domestic abuse
cases for female athletes, such as Griner and Hope Solo, gain far more attention than their athletic
achievements, and are reported and condemned in a far different way than the plethora of domestic abuse
cases in men’s professional sports, which are often swept under the rug. For an example of this, ESPN ran
a headline titled “How Brittney Griner Acts Is More Important Than How She Plays” (Voepel 2015).
There are multiple angles from which to interrogate this story, which include the unfair and biased attention
to events like these over equal attention to athletic achievements, Voepel’s article’s connection to issues of
personal responsibility within neoliberalism explored in Chapter two, and, very importantly, the ways in
which this media attention and criticism plays upon, and furthers, a cultural stereotype of the violent black
lesbian.

82

homophobia are two distinct phenomena. Even though Griner lived an open-life as a
lesbian, as a transgressive body, she still felt the pressure to conform to societal
expectations of marriage. This is the ambivalent moment we live in – as LGBT
individuals strive for acceptance, over mere tolerance, we must ask what aspects of queer
culture are jettisoned in the service of this approach. While Griner was able to resist the
pull of ideological forces that expect hegemonic femininity of women who play
traditionally male sports, she was unable to resist the pull of a society that still privileges
heterosexual relationships and frameworks of life. Just as with Babe, marriage served a
purpose for Griner, though one that was not necessarily in step with the more queered
outlook she has deployed elsewhere.

Sports Illustrated and the Crystallization of Normative Media Portrayals
Just as these media formations and popular ideologies cultivated understandings
of femininity and athleticism, so too were ideals of men and masculinity crystalized by
these same organizations. As gestured to earlier, any discussion of sports, sexuality, and
the media, must recognize larger economic and political factors that contribute to modern
media industries. A multitude of factors (not limited to the economic busts and booms of
the 1920s and 1930s, coupled with the cultural, political, and economic shifts associated
with World War II) meant a tectonic shift in American culture. Instead of a locally based
economy of production centered on small shops American culture shifted to a system
based on large-scale corporate enterprises focused on an economy, and encouragement,
of consumption. These changes are important for many reasons, but in this case, most
notably because they contribute to the ways in which media products (such as television,

83

film, newspapers, and magazines, to name a few) are implicated in the construction of
sports and sexuality. As scholars have noted, “the growth of modern masculinity created
roles for men that suited them to a corporate consumer culture” (Pendergast, 2000).
These corporate entities did not exist outside of political and cultural constructions of
sexuality but rather played a concomitant role in helping to construct normative ideas and
ideals of citizenship that were tied to heterosexual coupling and family formations for
men just as they did for women. And since media entities are situated to promote
consumption, their success is often based on an ability to cultivate forms of masculinity
that are easily consumable.
As opposed to pre-twentieth century formations of masculine identity, which were
based almost entirely on a connection to the ownership of property, the advancement of
corporate capitalist culture, one that relied on a culture of consumption rather than
production, meant there was now a market for the promotion of masculinity through
alternative pursuits, such as hobbies and leisure activities. Sports participation and
spectatorship provided new cultural venues for the production and maintenance of
masculinity at both the expense of alternative forms of masculinity and in the service and
promotion of capitalist pursuits. If the previous section outlined the ways in which
popular and medical depictions of femininity were posited as antithetical to sports
participation, then one could argue that the exact opposite applied to men. As more men
moved from farming to industry, there was a general fear that the lack of strong male
role-model in the home would lead to the feminization of men. George Chauncey adds to
this claim by arguing that much of the modern conception of homosexuality was based on
the concept of gender inversion (mannishness in women and effeminacy in men) rather

84

than sexual acts themselves. Therefore sports were often posited as an apprenticeship in
masculinity – and the continued sex segregation within modern sports helped to further
this goal. Sports served a socializing purpose, much like the development of the YMCA
and the Boy Scouts of America, but they also worked to counteract a crisis of masculinity
that sought to maintain hegemonic understandings of white masculinity as the dominant
form of citizenship.
14

The Soft American and National Security
This cultural connection between sports and the athletic man took on another
dimension as twentieth century media portrayals intrinsically connected to athleticism to
wartime efforts. For example, President Eisenhower established the President's Council
on Youth Fitness in July of 1956 to counteract rumors from military officials that draftees
were not physically fit enough during World War II and the Korean War, and the
publication of an international study that found American children far less fit than
children in other countries
15
. President-Elect Kennedy laid out his plans to build upon
this initiative through an article he wrote for Sports Illustrated entitled “The Soft
American.” The piece begins with a description of Ancient Greece where he writes, that
“the Greeks prized physical excellence and athletic skills among man's great goals and
among the prime foundations of a vigorous state” (1960). He compares athleticism to
other important aspects of Western civilization, such as philosophy, drama, and

14
This crisis of masculinity was not confined to the United States. For an in-depth reading of a similar
panic within the European context I defer to George L. Mosse’s “Masculinity in Crisis: The Decadence” in
(The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity, 1996).
15
The 15 year study was conducted by Dr. Hans Kraus and Dr. Sonja Weber for the Posture Clinic of New
York's Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital. It compared physical fitness tests given to 4,264 children in the
US and 2,870 children in Austria, Italy and Switzerland. The findings showed that American youth lagged
far behind Europeans in physical fitness.

85

government, to name a few. But Kennedy asserts that the US had lost the knowledge that
“the physical well-being of the citizen is an important foundation for the vigor and
vitality of all the activities of the nation…” (1960). He contributed to the “crisis of
masculinity” by situating the “soft American” as a threat to national security:
But the harsh fact of the matter is that there is also an increasingly large number
of young Americans who are neglecting their bodies— whose physical fitness is
not what it should be—who are getting soft. And such softness on the part of
individual citizens can help to strip and destroy the vitality of a nation. (1960)

Through the pages of Sports Illustrated Kennedy tied America’s success and failures in
armed conflict directly to sports prowess:
Throughout our history we have been challenged to armed conflict by nations
which sought to destroy our independence or threatened our freedom. The young
men of America have risen to those occasions, giving themselves freely to the
rigors and hardships of warfare. But the stamina and strength which the defense of
liberty requires are not the product of a few weeks' basic training or a month's
conditioning. These only come from bodies which have been conditioned by a
lifetime of participation in sports and interest in physical activity. Our struggles
against aggressors throughout our history have been won on the playgrounds and
corner lots and fields of America. (1960)

86

Though Kennedy’s remarks were supposedly prompted by the previously
mentioned study on draftees, his emphasis on the growing conflict between the United
States and the Soviet Union situated sports and masculinity as key to success in the
continued campaign against Communism:
But physical fitness is as vital to the activities of peace as to those of war,
especially when our success in those activities may well determine the future of
freedom in the years to come. We face in the Soviet Union a powerful and
implacable adversary determined to show the world that only the Communist
system possesses the vigor and determination necessary to satisfy awakening
aspirations for progress and the elimination of poverty and want. To meet the
challenge of this enemy will require determination and will and effort on the part
of all Americans. Only if our citizens are physically fit will they be fully capable
of such an effort. (1960)
16

Kennedy’s remarks, which were written and published before his inauguration, are
important to recognize as they position the “soft American” as one of the greatest threats
to national security.
17

These statements also came at a time when the state began to implement laws that
sought to regulate sexual behavior. While homosexuality was not a new phenomenon,

16
Interestingly, we start to see the beginning of a neoliberal ethos in his statements that “no matter how
vigorous the leadership of government, we can fully restore the physical soundness of our nation only if
every American is willing to assume responsibility for his own fitness and the fitness of his children” and
“All of us must consider our own responsibilities for the physical vigor of our children and of the young
men and women of our community” (Kennedy, 1960).
17
And while Sports Illustrated certainly continued this association, they were not the first to do so, as early
as 1922 magazines aimed at sports culture espoused the importance of athletics. An article in Sporting Life
detailed that “Keeping physically fit is a man’s duty, first to his country, and to himself” (Sporting Life,
1922).

87

prior to World War II much of the policing of deviant sexualities tied the behavior to
broader problems: such as poverty, disorder, violence, and crime. This regulation of
sexuality also has added effects on the production of the closet since George Chauncey
argues that concepts of underground or closeted homosexuals or homosociable activities
did not exist in America in a modern sense until the 1930’s. It was after the Depression
that a morally and religiously driven rhetoric began to influence laws and regulations
which policed and prohibited homosexual activities: “A new anxiety about homosexuals
and hostility towards them began to develop, which soon became part of the more general
reaction to the cultural experimentation of the Prohibition era that developed in the
anxious early years of the Depression” (1994, p. 8).
From the mid-1940s to the late-1960s the nation crafted tools to overtly target
homosexuality. As Margot Canaday writes, “the state’s identification of certain sexual
behaviors, gender traits, and emotional ties as grounds for exclusion (from entering the
country, serving in the military, or collecting benefits) was a catalyst in the formation of
homosexual identity. The state, in other words, did not merely implicate but also
constituted homosexuality in the construction of a stratified citizenry” (2009). But this
type of enforcement and regulation was not equally applied to both genders. While
lesbianism was no doubt policed, gendered ideologies of citizenship shaped the gendered
regulation of perversion and so male perverts mattered more to the state because male
citizens did as well. Furthermore, just as the family man was considered a more
deserving citizen during the Great Depression, so too did the state use its resources, in
this instance seen in GI Bill benefits, to “heterosexualize” men after World War II. No
doubt this emphasis on marriage, home, and reproduction can be seen in the following

88

analysis as a man’s connection to proper citizenship is implied by his ability to marry
and/or have kids. As Canaday writes, “A man established his own independence and
viability as a good citizen through his relationship to a dependent wife and children”
(2009).
And while the focus of this dissertation is on American formations of sexuality
and masculinity, the connection between sports and successful citizenship was not
confined to the United States. In England, “team sports such as cricket were considered a
training in manliness and also analogous to an imaginary, chivalrous field of battle”
(Mosse, 1996, p. 46) and in post-World War I France men like anti-feminist/misogynistic
novelist and playwright Henry de Montherlant “looked to sports to keep alive the
challenge and masculinity of war” (Mosse, 1985, p. 101). Similarly, in 1920s Germany,
young Germans “were also obsessed with having missed the opportunity to prove their
manhood (Mosse, 1985, p. 114). This perception of sports as intimately connected to
wartime activities after the First World War was extended into the 1930s and the Nazi
regime where “sport was viewed as the equivalent of war in peacetime… the best
available test of manliness until it could once more be challenged in battle” (Mosse,
1985, p. 173).
Additionally, as Gail Bederman argues through a reading of boxer Jack Johnson,
twentieth century male power was intimately tied, through sports, to the construction of
white supremacy (1995). She lays out how this construction was facilitated not only by
cultural ideologies and media formations, but also legislated through governmental policy
such as the Mann Act of 1910. Furthermore, since “‘primitive’ races and lower classes,
and poor immigrants and nonwhites were believed to be especially inclined toward

89

perversion,” masculinity then served not only to shore up traditional notions of white men
as the dominant class, but also undergirded concerns over America’s place as a global
powerhouse (Canaday, 2009). Media organizations worked in tandem with these
constructions of masculinity and femininity, whiteness and otherness, and of the binary of
homosexuality as deviant and heterosexuality as shoring up American ideals and
protecting the United States from the threat of foreign powers.

Homosexuality and Lesbianism in Early Editions of Sports Illustrated
On August 16
th
, 1954, Time Inc. published the first issue of Sports Illustrated
magazine. Though it covered a mixture of both professional sports and leisure activities,
and did not consolidate its focus on professional sports until 1960, it quickly became one
of the best selling men’s magazines in America. In that time period the magazine has
published over 3100 issues; however, from its inception until 2016 only 179 articles have
mentioned the word “homosexual” or “homosexuality” and only 81 have mentioned
“lesbian.”
18
To put that into perspective, over this same 62 year period Time Magazine
mentioned “homosexual” or “homosexuality” 2547 times and “lesbian” 2118 times.
The first mention of homosexuality appeared in a story published on April 2
nd
,
1962 in an article about boxer Emile Griffith (Rogin, 1962). The first article to mention
the word “lesbian” appeared over a decade later (Yardley, 1974). This July 1974 article
was far from a hard-hitting sports piece, but rather it reviewed two books recently
published about women’s tennis. And while the article made a point to gesture towards
the importance of the current crop of tennis stars, in particular Billie Jean-King, in order

18
For a point of comparison, the acronym LGBT has appeared in Sports Illustrated only 12 times: first in a
September 4
th
, 1995 article and not again until March 1
st
, 2010.

90

to situate their importance both to gender equity in sports and the larger Feminist
movement in general, it also made sure to note that the books reviewed chronicled the sex
lives of its subjects which were “quite active in some cases but not, rumor to the contrary,
wildly lesbian” (Yardley, 1974).
With regards to homosexuality, the 1962 article documents Emile Griffith’s
knockout of Benny (Kid) Paret to win the Welterweight title. While the article begins by
detailing the devastating effects of Griffith’s 12
th
round knockout, which sent Paret to the
hospital with injuries that would eventually cause his death 10 days later, the article did
not focus on the champion. Instead it began with a background of Paret, the loser, though
an easier biography to write since it positioned his heterosexuality in relation to his
possession of women and goods: “He acquired a wife, Lucy, produced a son, Benny Jr.,
2, bought a 1962 Eldorado Cadillac and a 1962 Thunderbird” (Rogin, 1962). The article
only alters its focus to the champion when the author describes the gay slur Paret directed
at Griffith during a weigh-in during their previous fight. He again repeated the slur at the
weigh-in before their third and final bout: “As before, Paret called Griffith maricón,
gutter Spanish for homosexual. It is the most vulgar epithet in that violent idiom and is
particularly galling to Griffith, who has a piping voice, wears extravagantly tight clothes,
has designed women's hats and is, ordinarily, a charming, affectionate kid” (Rogin,
1962).
19

19
The New York Times printed an article, written by Howard M. Tuckner, that similarly reported on the gay
slur hurled at Griffith; however, while Tuckner’s original copy reported that Paret had spoken negatively
about Griffith’s sexuality, the editors at the times replaced this detail before press – stating only that Paret
had accused Griffith of being an “un-man.” Similarly they removed Tuckner’s original copy that stated the
slur was meant to be offensive to homosexuals. According to Tuckner, the newspaper did not feel
comfortable printing an article that contained the word homosexual (McRae 2015).

91

Despite the fact that the author, Rogin, spent most of the article describing the
violent blows each man delivered to the other, he posited Griffith’s rage as retribution for
Paret’s taunt. Rogin positions Griffith’s actions as representative of an hysterical state,
positioned in relation to his feminine body, rather than as indicative of his talent as a
fighter. As Rogin writes, “Emile kept touching his temple with his small, slender hand
and shaking his head in the confusion of seeking a logical explanation for what had been
irrational, emotional behavior” (Rogin, 1962). Here again we see representational
techniques that connect the specter of homosexuality to femininity, with negative
connotations. The author situates Griffith’s actions in the ring not as a characteristic of
an accomplished boxer, but rather as indicative of an overly emotional state.
But this example is not just representative of how media narratives of athletes
often undergird, implicitly, stereotypes surrounding the LGBT community, but also about
the way in which gay athlete’s accomplishments were effaced in media reporting. While
Rogin discussed Paret’s private life, he shied away from any discussion of Griffith’s,
despite the fact that Griffith was involved in a relationship with a man. At the time
Griffith was a well-known member of the gay scene in New York City, where he
regularly patronized gay bars, but no mention was made of his sexuality or his connection
to the community. Reporters felt they were doing Griffith a favor by not discussing his
homosexuality, which is understandable considering the immense amount of homophobia
in the US, seen in both cultural, medical, and legal discourses, not to mention the fact that
Griffith was not white.
20
But ignoring his sexuality did little to advance the conversation
regarding sports and sexuality. It also further entrenched the double-bind of “outness”

20
This was still a period in which homosexuality was classified as a psychiatric disorder by the American
Medical Association and homosexuality was considered a criminal act in every state save Illinois.

92

and “visibility” for gay athletes. Griffith was sketched as having a double-life, though
this double-life was not necessarily of his own doing. Rather, it was discursively
produced through media accounts that either refused to recognize his homosexuality or
skirted the question through language that might implicitly invoke his sexuality in
relation to feminine features or activities.
The word “homosexual” did not appear for another seven years when the
magazine wrote a feature on entertainer and professional wrestler George Raymond
Wagner, who went by the stage name Gorgeous George (Jares, 1969).
21
The feature
chronicled Wagner’s unlikely path from small-town Nebraska kid to television super-star.
It painted a picture of his adoring fans, his reputation for in-ring entertainment, and his
struggle with alcohol addiction and untimely death from a heart attack at age 48. Though
the article made a point to acknowledge Wagner’s flamboyant and narcissistic stage
persona, as his “long blond hair, done up in the latest style” and “lace-and-fur-trimmed
robe” became a staple of his pre-match entrance, it also pointed out that these histrionics
had no bearing on his sexuality. As Joe Jares wrote, “For the record, it should be noted
that Gorgeous George was not even remotely homosexual. He was a tough man in a
barroom brawl, was generally liked and respected by other wrestlers, was very fond of
women and was twice married” (1969). This narrative of Gorgeous George again
highlights the ways in which male homosexuality and sports were deemed antithetical.
As tropes began to rely on the body of athletes to counteract claims of homosexuality, it
was paramount to ignore those individuals, like Griffith, whose body belied this
narrative. Furthermore, we see the way in which media narratives contribute to axioms

21
During that time period Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in professional sports on April 15
th
,
1947.

93

that the private lives of fighters are not created equal. Instead, the private lives of athletes
become an instance of recuperation for seemingly transgressive behavior. Gorgeous
George’s performance was permitted so long as he could produce heterosexuality in his
private life. Just as Babe used her marriage to Zaharias to quell rumors of supposed
sexual transgressions, so too did reporters use Gorgeous George’s multiple marriages as a
way to explain away his feminine act. The discourse of masculinity, and sports as a
recuperative process for the “crisis of masculinity,” only worked if the bodies of
individuals cooperated.

Pride and Progress on The Gay Cable Network
Beginning with NBC’s first regular television broadcast in 1946, televisual
imagery has often served as a guide to, and reflection of, American culture (Thompson,
2007, p. 137). The electronic landscape became not just a producer of culture, but also an
arbiter of taste, a measure of approval and a source of acceptance: it is “has become our
national cultural meeting place, a site of profound social meaning and effect” (Walters,
2001, p. 27). Television’s storylines and characters have often been the social standard to
which many aspire; yet for numerous minority cultures the lack of representation has
only compounded issues of marginalization and stigmatization. When these groups were
included, television worked to establish personal events as mediated narrative strategies;
however these storylines explored social issues while still binding them within prescribed
and delimitated hegemonic frameworks. As Richard Dyer explicates, “This is not just
taxonomic knowledge, an ability to slot someone into the correct social category, but
value-laden” (Dyer, 2002, p. 23).

94

While not completely absent from the history of television, LGBT representations
have been typified and replicated through the televisual landscape, and in most instances,
further absorbed into the broader functions of ideological television programming; one in
which deviant subcultures, in this case homosexuality, have been sublimated not through
repression, but rather through the institutionalization and standardization of norms. Since
television’s popularity grew during a time, as argued earlier, when the homosexual
community in American culture was criminalized and pathologized, silenced and
stereotyped, then it should not be surprising that the general approach to LGBT imagery
was less than positive. As Larry Gross further adds, “television has become the key
source of information about the world, creating and maintaining a common set of values
and perspectives among its viewers” meaning that the ways in which the medium
understands and recreates LGBT representations has added weight with regards to
cultivated assumptions regarding the gay community (2001, 6).
While there are many important and comprehensive histories of the relationship
between television and the LGBT community (Capsuto, 2000; Gross, 2001; Joyrich,
2001; Walters, 2001; and Tropiano, 2002, among others), the general televisual approach
to LGBT representation left much to be desired in the 1950s and 1960s. Prior to the
1970’s, explicit televisual depictions of homosexuals were rare, and when members of
the LGBT community were represented it was usually in a less than positive light.
Though not common, some 1950’s daytime television shows began to discuss
homosexuality within a medical discourse, though this pathologizing usually surrounded
the problem of, and necessity to cure, homosexuals. In a similar manner, homosexuals
showed up occasionally on medical dramas, such as a 1963 episode of The Eleventh

95

Hour, though these portrayals were again, interested in the issue of sexual confusion or
“homosexual panic” – which was linked to medical conditions such as ulcers, diabetes,
anxiety and heart conditions, among others. For these shows, clearing up sexual
confusion was necessary to treat a patient’s medical condition; being gay was a problem
that needed fixing. However, this general approach to gays on television was not
surprising since “gay people were mostly portrayed and used in news and dramatic media
in ways that reinforced rather than challenged the prevailing images” (Gross, 2001, p.
82).
Gay men also appeared on news reports, such as a March 1967 special report
hosted by Mike Wallace and titled CBS Reports: The Homosexual. The program was the
first major network news special about homosexuality and attempted to “answer the
major moral, legal, and medical questions surrounding male homosexuality” (Tropiano,
2002, p. 10). Though the episode did feature one “self-assured” and “seemingly well-
adjusted” gay men, its primary focus was on the “self-hatred, shame, and guilt”
associated with being gay. Furthermore, it gave ample airtime to anti-gay religious
leaders and medical professionals along with sensationalized recreations of gay bars,
male prostitutes, and vice squad arrests of gay men. The episode was met with differing
amounts of acceptance, as some newspapers “applauded CBS for tackling the subject”
while others believed the topic was not appropriate for television. No one, however,
objected to, or commented on, the anti-gay bias in the show’s reporting (Tropiano, 2002,
p. 12).
The 1970s ushered in a new era of socially relevant sitcoms, no doubt inspired by
the June 1969 Stonewall Riots, advances made by both Feminist and Civil Rights

96

advocates during the 1960s, and the work of vocal queer media activist groups such as
the Gay Activist Alliance (GAA), Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and National Gay Task
Force (NGFT). Though the issue of homosexuality, regarded by many viewers as a
question of morality, was still a hot-button topic with broadcast networks, producers were
finally ready to acknowledge the political climate of the 1960’s, through fictional shows
such as All in the Family, Barney Miller, Phyliss, The Bob Newhart Show, and Soap to
name a few. But while 1970s and early 1980s televisual depictions of gay individuals
focused on the struggle to come to terms with this marginalized community, mid-1980s
representations were subsumed by the AIDS epidemic.
Because of the early associations with the gay community, and the lack of
medical knowledge as to how to curtail its effects, the homosexual community became
the face of the disease. “Gay life” depictions became centered around the epidemic in
such a way that the “gay community as such is not being shown at all, but rather the
community of AIDS sufferers and their caretakers” (Walters, 2001, p. 144). Early
images of HIV “victims” on shows and TV movies such as St. Elsewhere, Trapper John,
M.D., and An Early Frost helped to alter cultural memory and tilt its remembrance of
AIDS to that of a predominantly, if not exclusively, gay disease.
22
Unsurprisingly, many
sitcoms reverted back to a more classic, and traditionally family oriented approach to
television; leaving the pathos for hour-long dramas, which gay characters started to

22
Traditionally, discriminatory practices have been aimed at minorities who are easily identifiable, isolated
and highly stigmatized and while Kaposi’s sarcoma became the most mediated image of the epidemic, it
was still difficult to identify who was HIV negative or positive. It became far easier for the heterocentric
majority to rationalize AIDS as a strictly homosexual ailment (despite the fact that information pointed to
the vulnerability of all communities) because of media portrayals that focused solely on male seropositive
images.

97

inhabit as AIDS related medical cases.
23
This correlation only grew worse over the
decade as a lack of funding and intervention by the government meant few medical
answers were produced and infection rates continued to rise.
While just a brief sketching, this historical look at the relationship between the
gay and lesbian community and televisual representation shows both the ways in which
cultural moments influence the valence through which LGBT characters are produced
and received, and the double-bind of representation. As Larry Gross notes, “this is a
media-dominated society, and being left off the media’s center stage is a form of
symbolic annihilation” (2001, 258), and yet a mere increase in the number of
representations, as argued earlier in this dissertation, speaks little to the effects produced
by those depictions. However, what was missing from this history was a television
network run by members of the lesbian and gay community specifically for members of
the lesbian and gay community. As Richard Dyer contends, “What we should be
attacking in stereotypes is the attempt of heterosexual society to define us for ourselves,
in terms that inevitably fall short of the ‘ideal’ of heterosexual society… and to pass this
definition off as necessary and natural” (2002). If media historians have noted the ways
in which the LGBT community was among “the least permitted to speak for ourselves in
public life, including in the mass media” (Gross, 2001, p. 14), then that ability changed
greatly with the establishment of the Gay Cable Network (GCN) in the early 1980s.
While there are multiple entry points into the discussion of GCN and its
importance to any conversation of media, American culture, and the 1980s lesbian and

23
This televisual focus on the AIDS epidemic meant that much of the energy previously dedicated to
acquiring and illuminating “proper” media portrayals was shifted to fighting the disease. No longer were
groups as worried about how many sitcoms contained recurring and precise LGBT characters, instead they
were focused on accurate coverage of the disease and truthful information about its spread.

98

gay community, for the purposes of this dissertation I am focusing on three arguments as
they relate to the network’s flagship news program Pride and Progress (1984-2000).
First, I argue that Pride and Progress fits within a history of media products targeted at
the lesbian and gay community, though it was one of the first to do so through the
medium of television, and served as a precursor, of sorts, to the digital media platform
outsport.com that I explore in Chapter three. Second, I argue that Pride and Progress’s
“Sports Report” shows the ways in which sports and the lesbian and gay community were
being thought together, or articulated (to borrow again from Stuart Hall), in an explicit
manner even before the internet provided a forum for outsports.com.
24
And lastly, I
argue that sports, and in particular the way in which Pride and Progress focused on
lesbian and gay community engagements with sports and not just professional athletics,
exhibited the importance of sports as a connective tissue, and an important cultural
resource, for the 1980s lesbian and gay community even when the HIV/AIDS crisis, and
the conservative political landscape, served as the backdrop to some of the most of the
important discussions and issues effecting these individuals.
25

Our Network, Our Issues
Founded in 1982 in New York City by Lou Maletta, the GCN began as a weekly
program called Men & Film on Manhattan Cable Television. Maletta “showed gay
pornographic movies that he had edited to make less explicit;” however, after watching a
friend rapidly succumb to the AIDS virus, Maletta decided that there was a need for

24
Here I deliberately use lesbian and gay, as opposed to LGBT, since the program used this language to
identify and describe the community they were speaking to and about.
25
And I think this last point is especially worth revisiting in chapter 4 since many advertisements for gay
bars that ran during Pride and Progress episodes connected their establishments to sports culture.

99

television content that spoke directly to the lesbian and gay individuals about issues more
relevant to their community (Hevesi, 2011). Maletta created a new program that he
hoped would become “a forum for the range of issues facing gay people” (Hevesi,
2011).
26
In 1984 this show morphed into the weekly news program Pride and Progress,
which was considered “the first to produce weekly news, entertainment, political
commentary, cultural and health-related programs” (Hevesi, 2011). Maletta produced the
shows for the New York market and distributed them to public-access channels in 20
cities (at first on videotapes he mailed). Pride and Progress, which still exists today as
Gay USA, and with original host Andy Humm, developed news programming “that gave
virtually the only television attention to the nascent AIDS crisis and the ongoing fight for
LGBT rights” (Humm, 2009).
There is, unfortunately, very little scholarship regarding the content of Pride and
Progress, most likely due in some part to the relative inaccessibility to its programming
content over the years. However, Maletta sold the 6100 hours of existing videotape
content to the Fales Archive at New York University in 2009 and the institution has
worked to digitize this material and it is slowly becoming more widely available to
scholars of US sexuality hoping to cultivate a more material understanding of the public
discourse produced by LGBT-specific media sources.
27
While Pride and Progress is best
known for its coverage of political news, which focused on LGBTQ issues, “GCN is

26
It is worth noting that, at the time, the disease was still commonly referred to as GRID, or the Gay-
Related Immune Deficiency Virus.
27
I first came to this archive while conducting research for my Masters Thesis at New York University. It
was not until I began research for my doctoral dissertation at USC that I had a chance to revisit the archive
during a research trip to NYC as part of my fieldwork looking at gay sports bars. During this time the
archives were only accessible for on sight viewing; however, since then NYU began the process of
digitizing the archive and now many episodes are available for public consumption online. I am grateful to
the many archivists at the Fales Library who diligently tracked down video tapes for me, and of course,
their hard work to digitize and disseminate online these important historical artifacts of 1980s lesbian and
gay culture should not go without mention.

100

credited with being the first television network to cover stories related to the HIV/AIDS
epidemic” (Hill, 2011, p. 215). The program introduced itself to the electronic landscape
as “a half-hour of news, community affairs, health, and sports documenting the pride and
progress of gay men and women nationally” (Pride and Progress, Episode 1, New York,
NY, Gay Cable Network, Television, 1984).

Figure 1: Opening Title Card for Pride and Progress
While GCN is recognized as a pioneer of gay and lesbian focused televisual
content, it can be connected to, and seen as an electronic extension of, printed material
produced and distributed by 1950s activist groups such as ONE, The Mattachine Review,
and The Ladder. These Gay and Lesbian Rights organizations began to create and
disseminate underground national newsletters in reaction to the increasing anti-gay
rhetoric, policy, and persecution post-World War II. They attempted to both connect

101

disparate members of the community while also working to counteract biased mainstream
media coverage. GCN was able to televise this approach in the 1980s through cable
access channels.
Furthermore, while GCN was one of the first LGBT-targeted networks to produce
televisual content, it was certainly not the only one. Similar programs that focused on
gay and lesbian issues at the local and national level, and that focused on human interest
and entertainment news cropped up around the country. An example of these includes
Electric City, a Queer TV program also founded in 1984 on San Francisco’s public
access channel City Visions and managed by the San Francisco Cable Television
Company (SFCTC).
28
The program’s missions was to “confront dramatic and
controversial issues and to embrace events in the queer community” (Johnson & Keith,
2014, p. 98). In a similar manner to Pride and Progress, Electric City worked to present
“history as it happens, rather than interpret views, reinvent ideas, or censor images… We
are irreverent, funny, poignant, sexy, and always truthful” (Johnson & Keith, 2014).
While the verisimilitude of their claims to “truth” could certainly be debated, both
mission statements from these programs show the desire for the gay, lesbian, and Queer
community to speak for themselves. This extra emphasis placed on the importance of
combining multiple aspects of the community is imperative: for these networks,
discussions of AIDS activism and political news deserved as much critical attention as
images of the drag and leather communities. These programs worked to think through
both the important issues that affected the lesbian, gay, and Queer communities in
relation to their straight counterparts and the unique aspects of these communities that

28
I use Queer here since Electric TV is identified as part of a larger history of Queer programming and
often addressed its audience as queer viewers as opposed to Lesbian or Gay (Johnson & Keith, 2014).

102

often either did not receive attention from mainstream press or were minimized or treated
with derision and mockery. These networks constantly worked to counteract the
prevailing ethos of gay individuals as victims of both the HIV/AIDS epidemic and larger
anti-gay political actions, while still highlighting the unique cultural features they felt
differentiated the gay, lesbian, and Queer communities from their straight counterparts.
GCN, along with its contemporaries, illustrate the ways in which gay-niche media
continued to thrive in the 1980s by continuing an approach to community engagement
through modern media platforms first started in more traditional newsletters and
pamphlets of 1950s activist organizations and extended electronically into radio programs
such as The Lavender Hour in the 1970s. While Gay Cable Network closed in 2001, the
groundwork laid by the company is still seen today through a plethora of digital sites and
platforms aimed at the LGBT community, along with a handful of gay-oriented cable
television networks, such Logo and Here! Network, and the recently shuttered Sirius/XM
satellite radio station OutQ.
29

The Sports Report and the Lesbian and Gay Community
Over its 17 year run, Pride and Progress covered a vast array of topics related to
the lesbian and gay community. While its more radical approach to newsworthy topics
separated itself from mainstream news programs, the format of the show followed
traditional conventions seen in local television news programs. This included a weekly
“sports report” that accompanied almost every episode of the program. The sports report,
hosted by Bill Baumer, appeared towards the beginning of the program in early versions

29
The Lavender Hour was founded by John Scagliotti and Andy Kopkind in Boston in 1973. The show
was influenced by their time working with the gay radio collective Unicorn News in Europe (Johnson &
Keith, 2014, p. 121).

103

of the show, though it eventually found its place as the penultimate segment, airing just
before the “Healthline” report, which was a dedicated segment for “Conversations with
GMHC.”
30
This inclusion of a dedicated sports report within a news program aimed at
the lesbian and gay community, and its placement prior to the “Healthline” report is
representative of the important role that mediations of sports and sports culture have
played in the modern formation of the LGBT community. While the stakes of sports
culture is often positioned, unequally, against other significant realities affecting the gay
and lesbian community of the 1980s, such as the aforementioned attention to AIDS and
political activism, Pride and Progress’s commitment to including relevant sports stories
shows the ways in which sports and gay culture were seen as mutually constitutive, even
at a time when mainstream news programs and sports organizations elided this
connection. While Sports Illustrated omitted discussions of sports and nonnormative
sexualities, Pride and Progress not only directly connected the two, but did so without
spectacularizing their relationship. Sports were not seen as a foreign to the community,
but rather as an integral point of connection, and one that necessitated attention from a
program aimed at providing a gay and lesbian perspective on culture and community.
While the show was primarily viewed in New York, we see the way in which these
remote intimacies, a concept I engage with more in chapter four, formed networks of
intimacy among strangers that imply cultural and consumptive links amongst dispersed
gay and lesbian individuals. Pride and Progress, bolstered by the wider reach of
television broadcasting and videotape dissemination, played a role in cultivating these
connections. But it was not just the mere visualization of sports and gayness that

30
GMHC stands for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, a health advocacy organization started in 1982 by
activists concerned over the lack of attention towards, and help for, the gay victims of what would
eventually be known as the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

104

produced these connections, but also in the focus of the “sports report” and its attention to
community sports formations.

Figure 2: Title Card for “The Sports Report” with Bill Baumer
As seen on traditional mainstream news programs, the sports report often centers
on national professional sports, though usually filtered through the lens of a city’s local
sports team and, to a lesser extent, on amateur sporting events as seen in highlights and
box scores of local high school and collegiate teams. While the “sports report” for Pride
and Progress did include professional sports within its segments, the focus was decidedly
on the lesbian and gay community’s engagement with sports. Most often, this took the
form of highlighting New York based gay and lesbian sports leagues. Baumer gave
summaries of scores from local sports leagues and also discussed how New York teams

105

did at a variety of national gay competitions for individual sports, along with coverage of
the Gay Games. As Baumer introduced the audience to the sports report during the first
episode, his description of the intent of the segment was framed within the language of
community and inclusion:
Now remember this, GCN is your network. As interest and participation in gay
and lesbian sports organizations grow in this city we want to be your source for
information, for scores, where you can go join teams, and where you can watch
teams, because really, that fan support is important, everyone who plays will tell
you that. We want to give you the scores, we want to give you the tournament
results, the standings, profiles of the people in our community who keep our
sports going and just the general participation of our teams both here in the city
and all around the country. But we need your help. Send us your videos, send us
your VHS tapes, we’ll use them. We’ll show them on the air. League captains,
commissioners, organizers, do your part, keep us posted so we can keep the
community posted. My name is Bill Baumer, and you can call me, in Brooklyn,
my number is 438-1305, area code 718. Thanks a lot, this is Bill Baumer, GCN
sports. (Pride and Progress, Episode 1, 1984)

Future segments emphasized both men’s and women’s leagues, but when Baumer
did focus on aspects of sports culture that were not gay or lesbian specific, this often took
the form of male desire or eroticism in sports. For instance, on one episode he showed
pictures from a new workout book, Peak Condition by Scott Madsen, a favorite athletic
crush of his (1985). He also aired footage of Greg Louganis discussing his most recent

106

diving accomplishments. Interestingly, while the footage came at a time when Louganis
was in between dominating performances at the 1984 and 1988 Olympics, the clip aired
in 1985, the focus was not on Louganis’s body, but rather his athletic accomplishments.
31

However, women’s professional sports were not completely ignored in this space. In the
very first sports report Baumer noted that the segment would not only focus on
community leagues, but that “throughout the year we want to bring you a lot about
professional sports. Football, NBA basketball, the newly revised Women’s basketball
league - they’re coming back, Nancy Lieberman and crew, they’ll be back. Hockey,
tennis, and lots more all here on GCN” (Pride and Progress, Episode 1, 1984). Outside
of its male focus within moments of desire, Baumer did attempt give equal time to both
men’s and women’s community sports leagues, and included both men’s and women’s
professional sports in the weekly roundup.
In addition to recapping community sports leagues, Baumer also used the
segments as a forum for leagues to recruit new players. Not only did he provide the local
number for each league when discussing their scores, but he also conducted regular
interviews with commissioners and representatives for each league. For instance, one
week he interviewed Jim Link and Leslie Randolph of the Ramblers Soccer Club,
32

another episode featured Tom Hull, commissioner of MCAA Big Apple Softball,
33
and
another included Ron Keel of the MCAA Bowling League.
34

31
While Louganis was not “out” publicly at the time of this report, his homosexuality was known to many
within certain gay sports circles and one can wonder if the segment focused on his accomplishments so as
to not come across as outing a sports star so admired within the community. I have had difficulty in
tracking down Baumer, but I would be interested, in a future version of this work, to include his perspective
on the program along with asking him whether or not he knew of Louganis’s homosexuality and
consciously chose not to disclose it on air.
32
Pride and Progress, Episode No. 6 [Air Date: 11/6/1984]
33
Pride and Progress, Episode No. 22 [Air Date: 2/26/1985]
34
Pride and Progress, Episode No. 33 [Air Date: 5/14/1985]

107

One difference between the sports report and other segments on Pride and
Progress is seen in the tone of the reporting and anchor attire. While other segments took
a more formal approach to their topics, Baumer’s style was generally more
conversational and humorous. Though the news anchors dressed in business attire and
were placed in front of solid backgrounds, reminiscent of a traditional newscast, Baumer
often wore a cap that represented a different professional sports team and reported in
front of a brick wall evocative of a sports bar. Additionally, he often used humor and
male sexual innuendo to introduce his segments. Before he discussed the new spring
season for the Ramblers soccer league he stated:
Sport is great. It’s great for conditioning. It’s great for coordination. And hey,
what’s wrong with spending your Saturday mornings running around with a
bunch of guys in shorts, huh? Can you think of anything better to do? So you
may not be the neighborhood Pelé, why not go out and have some fun, you’ll
really enjoy it. (Pride and Progress, 1984)

The sports report and sports culture in general, as mediated by Pride and
Progress, connected athletic competition directly to lesbian and gay community
engagement through a language of inclusion. Sports were not seen as antagonistic to
formations of lesbian and gay culture, but rather as intimately linked to the cultural
makeup of the community, and just as necessary of media portrayals as the fight for
Lesbian and Gay Rights, information about HIV/AIDS, and other political issues facing
the community.

108

The Great Gay Hope or What to do About Homophobic Language in the
Twenty-First Century?
In this final section, I move from 1980s lesbian and gay television to early
twenty-first century professional sports and, in particular, a series of gay slurs that
occurred just a few years before Jason Collin’s became the first active player in an
American men’s professional team sport to make the mediated announcement that he
identified as gay. I focus on these instances to help situate the more explicit ways we
engage with conversations of sports, sexuality, and homophobia compared to some of the
more historical moments I detailed earlier. I call attention to the ethos of neoliberalism
that permeates throughout these discussions of sports and sexuality and, in particular, the
way in which an individual’s responsibility to sexual politics is configured differently for
heterosexual and homosexual bodies: they show that “neoliberalism in fact has a sexual
politics, albeit a contradictory and contested sexual politics (Duggan, 2002, p. 177).
Additionally, I turn my attention to the qualifications that often accompany discussions of
gay athletes, and, in particular, the ways in which hegemonic masculinity and the
supposed “success” of a player’s professional career are used to qualify the importance of
their announcements.
I end with a more recent example of homophobic language in sports both to
question how tenets of neoliberalism still dictate affirmative frameworks of sports and
sexuality even after high profile ‘coming out’ occurrences in sports and also to gesture
towards some of the more detailed readings I engage with regarding ‘coming out’
narratives in chapter two. These moments, that posit the visibility produced by ‘coming
out’ as a political strategy that facilitates change, neither guarantee political rights nor do

109

they contest broader heteronormative assumptions. Rather, they recast political
responsibility within the language of individual choice, though one with a particular set
of contradictory expectations for heterosexual and homosexual bodies. The objective in
highlighting these moments is not to indict the individuals who used this language, but
rather to interrogate the ideologies that guide them.
In April of 2011, Kobe Bryant, a guard for the Los Angeles Lakers, and arguably
one of the most well-known and recognizable athletes on the planet, was caught on
camera calling a referee a “faggot.” While Bryant is certainly not the first player to use
this slur towards a referee or opposing player, the prevalence of DVR technology made
this utterance easier to highlight since the slur was verified using replay of the event,
rather than relying on eyewitness accounts or rumors.
35
As the story began to gain
traction through both social and traditional media sites, Bryant issued a non-apology,
where he stated that “what I said last night should not be taken literally. My actions were
out of frustration during the heat of the game… period” (Beacham, 2011). He then
released a statement, through his team, where he showed some culpability, if not
contrition, for his actions, and added that “the words expressed do NOT reflect my
feelings towards the gay and lesbian communities and were NOT meant to offend
anyone” (Beacham, 2011). He was soon after fined $100,000 by the National Basketball
Association but not suspended for the final game of the season, a night that proved to be
pivotal for the Lakers’ post-season hopes.

35
While this argument does not attend to the intricacies of evidence, it should be noted that many issues,
from acts of domestic violence, to racial slurs, to substance abuse, within professional sports, has called
into question many assumptions we have about the power of eyewitness accounts versus media evidence
(such as photographs, video recordings, and audio tapes).

110

Little more than a month later Joaquim Noah, a highly visible starting player for
the Chicago Bulls, was similarly caught on tape using the anti-gay slur during a game;
though this time the target was an opposing team’s fan. He too issued an apology, though
was quick to make clear that he is “an open-minded guy” that just lost his cool (Haugh,
2011). The league followed suit and fined Noah $50,000 citing the object of the epithet,
a fan as opposed to a referee, as the reason for the discrepancy in dollar amounts. No
mention of the referee or fan’s perceived or identified sexual orientation was included in
any statements made by league officials or reporters, which will become important
through an unpacking of the final example in this section regarding Rajon Rondo.
According to ESPN, Bryant’s fine represented 0.4 percent of his salary, while Noah’s
represented 1.6 percent of his.
A few months later DeSean Jackson, a popular and polarizing wide receiver who
at the time played for the National Football League’s Philadelphia Eagles, responded to a
fan on a morning sports radio show by calling him a faggot, this coming just weeks after
he appeared on a well-known daytime talk show supporting a teenager who had been the
recent victim of bullying – a current hot button issue among American schools and the
LGBT community. Subsequently, James Harrison, another high profile Football player
for the Pittsburgh Steelers was quoted in an issue of Men’s Journal calling league
commissioner Roger Goodell a “faggot” based on their tumultuous relationship
(Solotaroff, 2011). Though both of these comments were the subject of much fodder for
sports journalists neither reciprocated any action from the league or its fine-happy
commissioner.

111

While these examples certainly lend themselves to multiple discussions regarding
homophobia, political correctness, and the increasing saturation and mediation of sports,
the following analysis explores the media’s specific response to, and framing of, these
incidents. Particularly, it asks how sports journalists both employ and/or ignore
expectations of individual responsibility to rationalize player action and explain
necessary cultural advancements in the world of sports. Put another way, I look to how
the individual is positioned as the catalyst for change while at the same time eliding calls
for new frameworks of understanding that might necessitate a reexamining of
heteronormative affirmative frameworks.
As has become customary, these gay slurs brought about an incredible amount of
media scrutiny, especially considering the close temporal proximity of all four events.
The reporting ranged from repulsion to reprimands and from apathy to encouragement.
However, a dominant trope began to weave itself into the general discussion regarding
both player conduct and the inclusion or visibility of gay athletes in the major American
professional sports leagues. More and more, reporting on the incidents relied on the
language of personal responsibility and its necessary dependence on “closet politics” to
help frame the players’ reactions and the subsequent actions needed to change the culture
of American sports. For these writers, the offending players’ behavior could be easily
explained and excused by the dominating and controlling structure of hegemonic
masculinity inherent to American sports culture. However, the discussion of how to
remedy these situations relied, conversely, on the importance of a gay athlete to ‘come
out’ while still playing sports at the national level, a turn that employs, and depends upon,
individual action for the nonstraight individual.

112

Within the context of neoliberalism the conversation of individual responsibility
takes on an additional consideration since it is not a universal trait, despite being cast as
such, and rather must be recognized as imbued within unequal power relations.
Neoliberalism, in this estimation works to cultivate the illusion of the individual as a
bearer of free choice. As Mary Wren writes, “Indeed, this is the grand illusion of
neoliberalism: that the individual is self-efficacious and therefore possesses free and
uninhibited agency or, at the very least, maintains the potential for such” (Wrenn, 2015,
p. 1234). But this formation is often left unquestioned when narratives of responsibility,
choice, and action are deployed within media portrayals, especially when they are used to
either excuse or encourage certain types of behavior for certain types of individuals. In
particular, under the guise of neoliberalism, this does not attend to how particular
individuals are more powerfully positioned within these formations.
For those commenting on the slurs used by athletes, they were quick to point out
that these words are used “everyday, on playgrounds and fields around the country.”
That, as Steve Giles pointed out:
Professional athletes have been getting into altercations with other players,
coaches, referees and fans for years. Although it’s not a very flattering aspect of
professional sports, it will always be around as long as you have testosterone-
filled and short-tempered athletes, referees making bad calls and ignorant
fans. It’s just how it is. (Giles, 2011)
These writers constructed the players as mere bearers of structure, who passively
follow rules that they have internalized during socialization. That even though we might
think of Joaquim Noah, as a “pretty openly progressive person politically,” he still exists

113

in an environment in which the “f-word is tossed around without people even thinking
about it” (Arnovitz, 2011). Here again we see structure as a determining, rather than
delimiting factor of human action. Journalists are able to cite the players’ apologies as
evidence that their words shouldn’t be taken “literally” but are rather expressive of their
environment and the “battle-like” qualities of a professional sports mentality.
Interestingly, the way in which the term fag was deployed and rationalized in these
instances, by both players and journalists, is indicative of the term not as an indicator of
sexuality but rather as a discourse that seeks to establish masculine gender identity
through interaction: that the fag discourse represents a “penetrated masculinity that
functions as a regulatory mechanism” (Pascoe, 2005, p. 329).
Conversely, journalists employed the language of the individual when discussing
how players might combat these situations moving forward. Many of these reporters
quoted the need for active players to ‘come out,’ before the issue could truly be tackled
and/or solved. Lori Brown, an associate professor of sociology at Meredith College (in
Raleigh, N.C.,) was quoted as saying that “having a pro football player come out would
be the most helpful because that is the ultimate masculine sport…” (Newberry, 2011).
However, for some journalists, the idea of a player ‘coming out’ was not enough, but
rather they necessitated the distinction of having a star player admit their homosexuality.
As Paul Newberry wrote, “It will likely take someone at the top of his game, along with
impeccable character and the thickest of skin. A modern-day Jackie Robinson in other
words, and those guys don't come around too often” (2011). Here again we see the
discussion turn to individual responsibility as the necessary resolution to homophobic
slurs; a move that situates multiple individual actions as having determining power.

114

However, that emancipatory agency is only required of a nonstraight athlete identifying
themself as such. Their straight counterpart is not expected to take responsibility for
making changes to the dominate sports culture.
This selective turn towards agency and individual responsibility, only for the gay
individual, is not only representative of neoliberal constraints, but is also yoked to the
correlative employment of the closet. What is at stake here is not only an expected
and/or required performative action, carried out by the non-straight individual, but also
the fallacy of freedom imbued in the ‘coming out’ act. It ignores the limits of one’s
power within existing social structures, and, in reality, only serves as a further biased
understanding of the hetero/homo distinction. This necessary obligation to confess, a
condition still saturated with “relations of power,” has become so ingrained in society
that it feels “naturalized” and no longer as a power which constrains. ‘Coming out,’ as
posited by journalists, serves as a framework of understanding, which consequently
informs modern discussions of LGBT athletes and sports. Furthermore, as Fatima El-
Tayeb argues, “This is a concept that affirms a particular gay identity as normative by
tying liberation to specific types of mobility.” At the same time, “the mobility that
modern gay identity requires is not universally available” (2011).
More and more we approach questions of gay identity as predicated on visible and
axiomatic understandings of what it means to be a “homosexual.” Inquiries into the
problematic nature of identity politics have thoroughly examined how we (re)create
scripts or tropes which, through repetition and ubiquity, are “overimagined” as “real” and
begin to stand in for more fluid understandings of the self. The ubiquity of these
narratives normalize the performative acts, thereby obviating the need for further

115

investigation into their supposed veracity. And thus, the answer to questions of bias in
sports becomes clear; athletes must ‘come out’ in order to change the culture, though
what it means for an athlete to ‘come out’ is never quite defined beyond the performative
language of the act itself.
Though the journalists’ posited ‘coming out’ as a solution for the rash of gay
slurs, there wasn’t a subsequent discussion as to what this actually means. As Will
Sheridan, a former Division 1 basketball player who played at Villanova from 2003-2007
noted, he was “out” while playing but didn’t feel the need to discuss it in a mediated
sense until years after his career ended and he was promoting his new job as a musician
(O'Neil, 2011). Furthermore, one might ask, what happens after these athletes ‘come
out?’ What is it about this confession that suddenly changes dominant heteronormative
narratives already ingrained in modern culture and structures of power? The admission
serves as a production of truth that speaks for the queer individual while in the service of
heteronormativity. ‘Coming out,’ in this manner, situates the ritual as a prosaic process
that serves not only to define one’s existence, but also to inform their relationships with
others. It functions as both a semiotic indicator of self, but also as a moment of pathos
and truth. However, this truth is formed out of a subjective relationship to its
heterosexual counterparts, which exist as unequal and privileged realities and without a
required or expected confession of sexual identity. Lest we not forget that ‘coming out,’
even in a supportive environment, continues to ask nonstraight individuals to both
vocalize and accept themselves as different than “normalized” society.
As ‘coming out’ is typified and continually manifested across the sports
landscape, the resulting codifications, in turn, construct a standardized rite of passage for

116

both LGBT athletes and fans without the necessary investigation into what it means to
discuss ‘coming out’ and promote it as a remedy. As David Russell (1997) elucidates,
these structures are “mutually (re)constructed by participants historically” causing
semiotic structures to (re)produce and enter into states of collective cultural memory as
both seemingly reflective and representative frameworks. These narratives carry with
them wide-ranging residual meanings and consequently shape how performative
sequences are carried out as ritualistic events in modern life. While arguments can be
made both for and against the supposed verisimilitude of these narratives, their ubiquity
across mediated texts should not substitute for critical engagement. As John L. Jackson
states, “The problem is that these tales can be both ‘too tightly scripted’ and corrosively
mobilized to make social differences appear absolute and natural” (Jackson, 2005). What
is operationalized as an intrinsic and simple aspect of gay identification is, “a profoundly
troubling act” (Walters, 2001). Certainly, the unified experiences of the LGBT
community should not be discounted, but often the limiting boundaries of modernism
restrict the fluidity queer theory argues for. Reoccurrences, which manifest themselves
through repetition, have consequently served as validation of these socially performative
events.
And while this reliance on ‘coming out’ as a remedy for homophobia first
appeared consistently in 2011, it only picked up steam as the years progressed. As Conor
Gaughan wrote two years later:
Now is the time for a gay player in one of America's four major team sports to
step out of the closet and onto the field…Given the changing political landscape
and major shifts in social attitudes, America is ready. Among public intellectuals,

117

coming out confers social capital. It is an act of courage that is met with media
acclaim. This is the so-called “golden era” of coming out, and professional sports
remain the last holdout. (2013)
Though I think this statement is necessary of further unpacking, the author does
identify correctly, in my estimation, that ‘coming out’ is intricately linked to questions of
self-understanding, visibility, and media attention. However, where I think this
statement, and its accompanying zeitgeist stumble, is in its unproblematic
conceptualization of the ‘coming out’ ritual – a continued point of emphasis when
questioning the norms that guide ‘coming out’ and its crypto-political aims. While
Guaghan argues that ‘coming out’ will allow “the athlete to meaningfully elevate every
aspect of his life, including his level of play” his assertion that life will be easier for the
player is based on the claim that more Americans are supportive of gay individuals
because of their support for gay marriage.
36
As he further argues, “A hostile locker-room
atmosphere was depicted in last week's Necessary Roughness, with players mocking gay
stereotypes; Chris Kluwe called the portrayal accurate. Nevertheless, as I pointed out
earlier, marriage equality polls favorably among athletes” (2013).
37
Here, not only does
Guaghan dismiss the lived realities of being gay in professional sports, which Noah
provided additional support for when he agreed that the word faggot is tossed around in

36
It is worth noting that many gay former professional athletes have discussed the ways in which their
preoccupation with being “found out” as gay distracted them from their job as an athlete. While I do agree
that this specter of “getting caught” no doubt affects their athletic ability, it is difficult to prove empirically.
The best case study is the stellar senior season of Michael Sam after ‘coming out’ to his teammates. For
the purposes of this argument, I am less interested in arguing against Gaughan’s assertion that ‘coming out’
will allow the player to focus on their day-to-day job and more interested in how he uses support for
marriage equality as support for the LGBT community. However, as we also saw with the Michael Sam
case study, ‘coming out’ did not allow him to solely concentrate on his athletic duties, this performative
language created a different set of “worries.”
37
Necessary Roughness (USA, 2011-) is a fictional television show that centers around therapist Dr. Dani
Santino as she treats athletes and other high profile clients. In this particular episode, “Regret Me Not”, Dr.
Santos counsels a white closeted professional quarterback on how to handle his boyfriend’s ultimatum that
he must either “come out” or end their relationship.

118

locker rooms every day, but Gaughan also conflates a support for marriage equality with
a support for nonnormative sexualities.
38

Additionally, while Gaughan relies on the changing social climate to further his
claims, this continues to produce the “othered” individual as the agent of change and his
position further undergirds ‘coming out’ as a forced confession. He continues:
As [Cyd] Ziegler and [Howard] Bragman wrote, ‘In this age of gossip sites and
social media, we're desperately afraid the first out pro athlete will get dragged out
of the closet by a scandal. Instead of a proud gay man declaring his truth to the
world, he'll be a disgraced athlete in damage control mode.’ The preferred
alternative is for a professional athlete to proactively come out; such a positive
affirmation advances professional sports, the leagues, the teams, the player and
the LGBT movement. This scenario allows the player to control his story.
(2013)
39

The athlete’s confession, in this estimation, is now seen as producing a fetishized
and privileged locus of sexuality rather than as another discursively produced construct of
knowledge. Though Guaghan, Ziegler, and Bragman, among others, imagine ‘coming
out’ as a sign of individual choice and responsibility, and contrast it to a mysterious entity
“dragging” the athlete out of the closet, one could argue that their insistence that athlete’s
must ‘come out’ position them as the force that would drag them out of the closet. And
this is an important idea to return to as I discuss the timing of Michael Sam’s ‘coming

38
Chris Kluwe is a punter in the NFL and an outspoken advocate for gay marriage. He responded to the
Necessary Roughness episode by writing that the show “managed to capture the very essence of an NFL
locker room” (2013).
39
Cyd Ziegler is one of the owners and operators of outsports.com, a website focused on LGBT issues and
sports culture and Howard Bragman is a PR executive most well known for helping celebrity and other
high profile clients “come out.” It should be noted that both men make their livelihood off of the “coming
out” stories of LGBT individuals.

119

out’ in Chapter two, an event coordinated by Ziegler and Bragman a year after they were
quoted in this article, and an approach that Sam regrets to this day (The Dan Patrick
Show, 2015). Though Guaghan and others call for athlete’s to ‘come out,’ they never
stop to conceptualize what this requires of the individual, nor of what happens after they
‘come out.’

Anti-Gay Sentiment in a Post-Out World: Rajon Rondo and Bill Kennedy
An additional example of the limits of this approach rests in a 2016 incident
involving the same sport (the NBA) and slur (faggot). Almost half a decade after
Bryant’s incident, Rajon Rando, a point guard for the Sacramento Kings, a previous NBA
champion and former teammate of Jason Collins, was ejected from a regular season game
between his current team, the Sacramento Kings, and his former team, the Boston Celtics.
His ejection, which was prompted by two technical fouls in quick succession, was based
both on his repeated use of a derogatory term aimed at a referee Bill Kennedy and
aggressive gestures he made towards Kennedy. After being called for a common foul, an
irate Rondo aggressively approached Kennedy, as if to start a fight, before being
restrained by his teammates and escorted off the court. This is different from the
previous examples of Noah and Bryant as their usage of the slurs was not accompanied
by aggressive physical behavior directed towards the recipient. The incident gained
media attention because of the aggressive nature of Rondo’s actions, his refusal to leave
the court after receiving his second technical foul, and the general lack of surprise that
this episode included a player who has a reputation for selfish and immature on-court
actions. As commissioner Silver noted, “these comments were directed in a particularly

120

aggressive manner. As you noted, Rondo went back at Bill Kennedy [after being ejected]
and had to be restrained and would not leave the court in an orderly fashion"
(Wojnarowski, 2015). And while initial reports did not identify the nature of the slur, the
league suspended Rondo for one game for “directing a derogatory and offensive term
towards a game official and not leaving the court in a timely manner (Harper, 2015). It
was later revealed that Rondo said to Kennedy, “You're a motherfucking faggot. …
You're a fucking faggot, Billy” (Newell, 2015).
While there was much reporting on the incident, very few articles questioned the
suspension, but rather the length of time it took for the league to decide on a penalty since
the incident occurred on Thursday, December 3
rd
but the punishment was not announced
until a week later on Friday, December 11
th
. Though we know the details of Rondo’s
language now, at the time there was little interest, by reporters, as to the nature of his
language. Instead, reporters were surprised by how long it took the NBA to decide on a
penalty. As one reporter wrote, “It took the NBA more than a week to reach this decision
— the Kings have played four games since then. Odd that it took that long” (Helin,
2015). While NBA players are not generally suspended for foul-language, the aggression
Rondo displayed towards the referee, along with his refusal to leave the court in a timely
manner, were used to justify the suspension even though the league, which lead an
investigation into the event, was able to corroborate his language through taped
interviews with other officials. Three days after the announcement of his suspension, on
December 14
th
, 2015, Kennedy, through an interview with Yahoo Sports announced that
he was a homosexual and stated “I am proud to be an NBA referee and I am proud to be a
gay man” (Wojnarowski, 2015).

121

After Kennedy’s announcement reporting on the incident took a different turn.
Now many who had excused Rondo’s offense took the NBA to task for not acting more
swiftly and harshly in addressing this blatant example of workplace harassment. Many
questioned what the league would have done if this had been a racist remark aimed at
Rondo by a white referee or white player (these arguments were made by many reporters,
including those who write for NBA.com, such as Scott Howard-Cooper, Shaun Powell,
Ian Thomsen, and others). While this example, and the following analysis is not meant to
equate anti-black sentiment with anti-gay remarks, since they carry with them important
differences in the ways in which anti-gay and anti-black sentiment are institutionalized
within US structures and culture historically and currently, it is offered to highlight the
fact that many were surprised to see an instance of aggressive homophobic rhetoric so
quietly and casually handled when it was directed at a gay individual.
40

This general apathy towards moments of anti-gay language seem to undergird the
prevailing ethos evidenced in the non-apologies of players, including Rondo who tweeted
“my actions during the game were out of frustration and emotion, period! They
absolutely do not reflect my feelings toward the LGBT community. I did not mean to
offend or disrespect anyone” (Newell, 2015). For these individuals the use of anti-gay
language, such as faggot, is not meant to be “offensive” to the LGBT community.
Rondo, just like Noah and Bryant, attempted to disconnect their use of the term from the
gay community in a way that links the term to questions of masculinity, rather than
homophobia. As C.J. Pascoe argues, “The fag is an ‘abject’ position, a position outside
of masculinity that actually constitutes masculinity. Thus, masculinity, in part becomes

40
This was especially apparent given that no NBA players publicly denounced Rondo’s comments, a stark
contrast to the general outrage of players of all races after the anti-black statements made by former Los
Angeles Clippers Owner Donald Sterling.

122

the daily interactional work of repudiating the ‘threatening specter’ of the fag” (2005,
342). The way in which these individuals differentiate between the use of the word fag
and the player’s feelings towards the LGBT community is indicative of the gendered, and
not just homophobic, nature of the term. As Pascoe further contends, “a boy could get
called a fag for exhibiting any sort of behavior defined as non-masculine” where gay as a
social identity still retains the recuperative possibility of masculinity. Put another way,
someone who is deemed to be gay, could still have claims to masculinity, whereas
someone deemed to be a fag, does not: “there is a possibility, however slight, that a boy
can be gay and masculine. To be a fag is, by definition, the opposite of masculine,
whether or not the word is deployed with sexualized or non sexualized meanings”
(Pascoe, 2005, p. 337). Within this estimation, the actual action of the players
themselves could be read as a strategy to deploy the term, and its association with non-
masculinity, to assert one’s masculinity while simultaneously denying it to others. This
reading of the fag discourse then reinserts gendered implications of the term that are often
lost when solely focusing on the slur as an example of homophobia.
But the way in which the NBA reacted to, and rationalized, their handling of the
episode is also connected to the prevailing neoliberal philosophy of personal
responsibility and individual action. After the nature of the slur was identified and
Kennedy publicly acknowledged his sexuality, the league went on a public relations
offensive to try to quell the growing outrage over the way the incident was handled. The
league announced that it did not hand out a more severe penalty for fear that in doing so
would “out” Kennedy. As commissioner Adam Silver stated, “had I gone let’s say to two
games from one game, or even possibly to three games, it would have been clear that

123

something else was going on here” (Wojnarowski, 2015). In effect, commissioner Silver
admitted that even though the league felt a longer penalty was necessary for this
homophobic act, especially since it was directed at a gay man, they chose a more lenient
penalty because Kennedy was not, in their estimation, out publicly.
There are two issues here worth examining: the first is who gets to decide how
“out” an individual is (by what standards do straight individuals get to measure a gay
person’s outness) and the second is what expectation do we have of gay individuals to
“come out” in order to be protected? The first, a constant question within this project, is
what does it mean to be “out?” Kennedy was known to be a gay man by others in the
league. In fact, he had already been “outed” in the media, over 5 years earlier, by former
referee Tim Donaghy in a 2010 interview (Helin, 2010). So, it was not that there wasn’t
already a discussion of Kennedy’s sexuality, but rather that he had not made a mediated
and public announcement that confirmed this fact and adhered to the league’s, and
society’s, expectations of ‘coming out.’ The league said they did not want to “out”
Kennedy, which again employs the closet as a binary– one is either all the way in the
closet or all the way out.
Additionally, rather than acknowledging that this language should not be
addressed towards anyone in the league, the actions of the commissioner set up separate
standards for different individuals. Now it not only matters if derogatory remarks are
aimed at individuals who inhabit that identity, but there are also degrees of punishment,
not based on the action of the offending individual, but on the perception of the gay
person who is experiencing this harassment: an ethos that further entrenches the necessity
and requirement of the ‘coming out’ narrative.

124

This instance also redirects us back to my earlier argument about the unequal
application of individual action when it comes to issues of LGBT rights and protection
within professional sports. While the league said that it did not want to ‘out’ Kennedy,
its reasoning implies that had Kennedy made more of an effort to ‘out’ himself prior to
the event then a harsher penalty would have applied. This line of reasoning expects gay
individuals to ask for recognition but ignores both a history of anti-gay and anti-black
violence perpetuated by moments of “recognition.” This is comparable to similar
arguments made by academic Chandan Reddy when he asks “why US law… desires
gays’ and lesbians’ desire for recognition” despite institutionalized anti-gay sentiment
that does not provide equal protection to all individuals once recognition is demanded
(2011, 193). The NBA offered additional protection to Kennedy if he had asked for
recognition and publicly announced his homosexuality, but if he were to remain silent,
then he was not afforded the same aid. And yet this necessity for recognition, which is
devised to protect gay individuals from homophobia, does not critically examine the
ways in which recognition leads to further prejudice at the hands of institutionalized
antigay and antiblack sentiment. The league’s actions show that they expected Kennedy
to ‘come out’ in order to garner greater protection from the league – but why would
Kennedy need to come out in order for a penalty to be handed down?
This contradiction is easily answered within the language of neoliberalism: one
that emphasizes individual accountability and responsibility in order to effect change and
uncritically situates power in the individual. Furthermore, considering that Kennedy
announced his homosexuality just three days after the suspension was levied, one should
question why the league did not engage with Kennedy regarding this announcement if the

125

duration of punishment was predicated on necessary actions by Kennedy himself.
Perhaps if Kennedy had known that a more “fair” and “equitable” punishment would
have been levied if he had first made a statement about his sexuality he would have done
so, despite the undue burden it placed on him. However, the main issue here is the way
in which the NBA expected an individual to ask for recognition and protection, through
the announcement and mediation of their sexuality, despite the consequences that might
have occurred outside of the isolated incident. Again, demanding an equal expectation of
‘outness’ ignores the various ways that intersections of difference operate contrarily
within the context of gay visibility.
The league’s decision also ignores the double-bind of sports that sees this type of
“asking for recognition” as antithetical to team sports in general. As the later unpacking
of Michael Sam’s announcement further explores, sports is often critical of
announcements of homosexuality since they direct too much attention onto the individual
at the expense of the team and/or the larger ideologies of team sports as about the game
as opposed to individuals. However, through their actions, the NBA made it clear that in
order to be provided with protection from anti-gay rhetoric or the threat of anti-gay
violence, then it is up to the gay individual to announce and disseminate information
about their sexuality within the very structures that criticize such announcements. This
instance, along with the earlier analyzed instances of anti-gay rhetoric, show how the
NBA, and media organizations that cover sports culture, cultivate a narrative of sports
and sexuality through the language of neoliberalism. This language, and the prevailing
ethos attached to it, then unevenly expects individual action by gay persons in order to
cultivate LGBT-friendly spaces while often ignoring, or rationalizing, anti-gay behavior

126

as indicative of larger, unchangeable, and seemingly essentialized and naturalized
cultural forces.
Though the historical moments this chapter engages with are varied, I link them
as a genealogy that highlights the ways in which media narratives rely on relationships of
power and knowledge in order to tell the story of sports and sexuality. While we can see
the influence of historical forces in creating a general ambivalence and contradictory
understanding of sports and sexuality, and the ways in which they have often been
disarticulated through omission or repression, it also points us to our current moment: one
which relies on recognition and individual responsibility to discuss matters of sports and
sexuality. While gay and lesbian bodies might not be policed or omitted in the same way
as the stories of Babe and Emile Griffith, respectively, illustrate, that does not mean that
individuals are not still regulated, as the following chapters will show, through the
expectation of ‘coming out,’ the commodification of sexuality within sports culture, and
the LGBT community’s reliance on mainstream media to intermediate narratives of
sports and sexuality. But, as these chapters will also consider, these moments do allow
for queered possibility. That the ambivalence of our current moment facilitates queered
ruptures where individuals reconfigure static language and outdated modes of
communicating sexuality to fit the realities of their lives.

127

Chapter Two: Commodifying 'Coming Out': Sports, Neoliberalism, and the
‘Coming Out’ Narrative

“Ever since [Michael] Sam publicly announced he is gay, on Feb. 10, 2014,
everyone kept talking about whether he -- or more specifically, his sexuality --
would be a distraction in the NFL. But we actually never discovered the answer to
that question. Because the truth is that Sam distracted himself. Actually, that's not
precise enough: Sam allowed himself to be distracted.”
- Kate Fagan for espnW.com, 2015

“The coming-out cycle advances itself and drives that broader cultural change.
We have a deep belief in the incredible power of the individual and what coming
out means in the sports world.”
- Kathleen Hatch, Board Co-Chair, The Sports Equality Foundation, 2016

Since 2013, multiple high profile American team-sport athletes have used media
platforms to ‘come out’ as members of the LGBT community. From Jason Collins, to
Brittney Griner, to Michael Sam, among others, sports has seen a proliferation of ‘coming
out’ stories across team and individual sports. The following chapter critically unpacks
the ‘coming out’ narrative, and its relationship to media narratives and sports culture, in
order to better understand the scripts and norms that now guide sexual identification
practices in the post-gay twenty-first century. In particular, it makes the claim that the
effects of neoliberalism have shaped narratives of ‘coming out’ within a particular
cultural moment that both expects and encourages ‘coming out’ without critical attention
to what this process produces. In particular, it makes this linkage through the deployment
of notions of personal responsibility, choice, and consumer citizenship, all results of a

128

neoliberal ethos that privileges individual responsibility over an attention to, and critique
of, larger structural forces and inequities in power.
I work to accomplish this linkage between ‘coming out’ and the general language
of neoliberalism first through an unpacking of the epigraphs to this chapter and the
situations that prompted them. These two examples are paradigmatic of current
neoliberal ideologies that sustain the contemporary discussion of sports and LGBT
sexualities. I then work to relate ‘coming out’ and its accompanying logics of truth and
authenticity, to neoliberalism through two main case studies: the ‘coming out’ of Jason
Collins and Michael Sam. I engage in a discursive analysis of these recent high-profile
‘coming out’ narratives of active male American team sports athletes in order to better
understand how the ‘coming out’ narrative produces a language of honesty and truth that
obscures the ways in which this type of performative language, meant as a moment of
empowerment, actually works in the service of neoliberalism to disguise the fixed nature
of modern sexual truth production. I am looking at mediations of ‘coming out’ within
sports, not to decide if an individuals ‘coming out’ was right or wrong, but rather to
interrogate the logics that guide the ‘coming out’ process. Put another way, here the
argument is that the neoliberal framing of ‘coming out’ is a technique produced by the
media rather than by the ‘coming out’ act itself.
1

Within this section I also attend to, and recognize, intersecting subjectivities that
are often elided within neoliberal formations. As Raewyn Connell argues, “just as
neoliberal theory treats men and women as equivalent market agents, it makes no
discrimination on the basis of race” (2010, p. 34). I reinsert a focus on intersections of

1
Of key importance is that while this analysis works through specific examples the overarching argument
is meant, not to be a statement on these individuals, but rather to highlight the way in which the ‘coming
out’ narrative is mediated.

129

race and gender in order to better understand how we might use disidentifications as a
way to work through important material differences within sports and sexuality that are
lost when these categories are flattened.
I then gesture towards the ways in which ‘coming out’ facilitates consumer
citizenship, especially through the commodification of individual sexual identity
production and also produces a cottage industry of professionals who benefit from an
increased call for athletes to ‘come out.’ As Laurent Berlant writes, one of
neoliberalism’s “best tricks” is “to persuade individuals, as a matter of common sense,
that they should “imagine [themselves] as . . . solitary agent[s] who can and must live the
good life promised by capitalist culture” (2007, p. 78). I use ‘coming out’ narratives to
identify the subtle creation of a neoliberal ‘coming out’ industry; one which prioritizes,
uncritically, the potential of the pink dollar and the power of market activities to bring
about change.
I argue, throughout all of these examples, that even though ‘coming out’ is
configured as a moment of individual liberation and a proactive approach to combating
homophobia, this configuration ignores larger concepts of institutional heteronormativity,
an overreliance on the politics and economics of visibility, the uneven power dynamics
built into the binary of the closet and ‘coming out,’ and capitalist commodity culture
facilitated through neoliberal ideologies.
2
I maintain that the ‘coming out’ process should
be seen as a paradigmatic example of neoliberalism in the way that it exerts power
through self-actualization and self-governance. Put another way, ‘coming out’ works in
the service of neoliberalism by subjugating through subject making: it privileges the

2
Implicit in the arguments that follow is a critique of visibility I first posited in the introduction. This
attention to notions of visibility are key to many of the arguments I make in my work, since visibility has
become a stand-in for social change, one that often goes unquestioned.

130

language of individualism and individual gratification, along with the importance of
market driven modes of citizenship, at the expense of political and collective action.

If You ‘Come Out’ It Will Change
I began this chapter, on sports, neoliberalism, and the ‘coming out’ process with
two epigraphs taken from disparate conversations regarding sports and sexuality. While
they refer to two very different moments, the premature end of a promising gay athlete’s
career and the rebranding of a new LGBT sports advocacy group, respectively, I start
with these moments because I think they implicitly and explicitly invoke the concepts,
ideas, and language of neoliberalism that I explore throughout this chapter. They gesture
towards a particular modern-day understanding of sports and sexuality and our cultural
reliance on ‘coming out’ as a panacea for change. While the details of Sam’s short-lived
career, and its accompanying media narratives, will be more thoroughly unpacked later in
this chapter, I begin with an article written by Kate Fagan, a prominent sports reporter for
espnW and ESPN. Fagan is an important and influential journalist as she is widely
promoted as ESPN’s go-to reporter for discussions of sports and the LGBT community.
In addition to being a former collegiate athlete and beat writer for the Philadelphia 76ers,
Fagan is a prominent lesbian figure within the world of sports media.
As explored in the introduction, neoliberalism impacts cultural formations as
much as it does economic ones. In fact, the abstracting of culture from economics is one
of its greatest feats – though these are two realms that the following chapter(s) attempt to
reconnect in order to better understand their concomitant and constitutive nature. There
are many ways to interrogate the failure of Sam to make good on his promise to America

131

to become the first openly gay man to play in the National Football League (NFL), and
while it is not my intention to privilege one point of analysis over the other, I do want to
call attention to the way that Fagan, as one of the authoritative gay voices for ESPN and
the sports media complex, frames Sam’s experience as a moment of individual failure.
Her article, entitled “Michael Sam Needed To Put All His Focus On Football To Succeed
On The Field” uses the language of personal responsibility and individual failure to
explain the complex array of economic, social, and structural forces that coalesced to
produce Sam, not as a pioneer in the gay rights movement, but rather as a cautionary tale
of activism and athleticism gone wrong.
Unsurprisingly, she begins her article by invoking the body of Sam, both literally
and metaphorically, as an isolated figure for cultural change. She writes, “Michael Sam
was supposed to be a change-maker, a trailblazer, a 260-pound hulk of a man who would
tear down stereotypes and anything else that got in his way. In his wake, so many others
were going to walk” (Fagan, 2015). In this estimation, Sam, as the epitome of
masculinity and millennial promise, became the body on which the LGBT community
was supposed to stake its future.
3
He had ‘come out,’ the hard work of gay identification
supposedly accomplished, and now all we needed to do was sit back and watch as the
heteronormative world of sports was brought crumbling to its knees. As Fagan further
writes, “Sam was supposed to clarify things: He would get drafted, make a roster and
contribute every Sunday” (Fagan, 2015). Here again, we see a focus on the individual as
the impetus for change. While Fagan spends the majority of her article providing

3
While Fagan does hold his team of advisors accountable for some of the decisions she criticizes, her
recounting of the ways these decisions were made regarding football and nonfootball activities does not
speak to their chronological specificity nor does it attend to the nuances of these decisions in light of
economic imperatives. For example, while Sam did participate on ABC’s Dancing with the Stars, he did so
after he was cut by the NFL and had no immediate options for employment.

132

examples as to how Sam either did not work hard enough, or did not work hard enough in
the right way, she glosses over institutional or structural frameworks that reduced his
chances for success. For example, she does not mention how speculative draft
predictions, produced by individual analysts and sanctioned by corporate sports
organizations, dropped his draft potential at the mere admission of his gay identity, nor
does she engage with quotes by players, front-office personnel, or football analysts, who
admitted that the NFL might just not want to deal with the “distraction” of an openly gay
player. And while there are many other factors that contributed to Sam’s disappointment,
the only narrative that gains traction is that of personal failure. That Michael Sam
“allowed himself to be distracted.”
Fagan’s critique of Sam seems to follow the argument that, for Americans,
“believing that success depends upon one’s attitude is far preferable… than recognizing
that their success is the outcome of the tilted scales of race, class, and gender”
(Halberstam, 2011, p. 3). Fagan reprimands Sam for not doing more, but this estimation
of accomplishment is dependent upon heteronormative formations of success that ignore
the ways in which failure is constitutive to any version of living. A turn to work on queer
failure might be useful to think about the queered potential of these disappointments:
“rather than just arguing for a reevaluation of these standards of passing and failing…
[we might] dismantle the logics of success and failure with which we currently live”
(2011, 2). Additionally, as Jack Halberstam’s engagement with the artwork of Tracy
Moffat, a photographer who chronicled the fourth place finishes of athletes at the 2000
Olympic games in Sydney shows, a refocusing on the “images of brilliant athletes who
didn’t make it” can work in powerful ways to counteract the mainstream media’s focus

133

on “the triumphant spectacle of winning” (Moffett, quoted in: Halberstam 2011, 93).
Had Fagan conceptualized Sam’s journey in queered terms, then he would not exist on a
binary of success or failure, but rather disappointment could stand in as a productive
concept. Instead of needing Sam to represent a heroic figure, one whom the LGBT
community could yoke their political gains to indiscriminately, we could then see the
contradictory narratives and lived realities of Sam’s experience as connecting sexuality to
politics. By refocusing Sam’s journey as one of either complete success, or abject
failure, we ignore the ways in which the disappointment of his narrative should refocus
our attention to the realities of navigating professional sports culture as an openly gay
individual. This would also allow for a further critique of arguments that position the
‘coming out’ narrative as an inherently successful political strategy on its own.

‘Coming Out’ as a Political Act
The second quote, from Kathleen Hatch, similarly connects the ‘coming out’
narrative to neoliberalism through the language of personal responsibility. The Sports
Equality Foundation, which was officially announced in January of 2016, is actually a
“rebranding” of the Ben Cohen StandUp Foundation: an organization founded in 2011 by
straight British former Rugby player Ben Cohen. Cohen created the organization after
his retirement from English professional Rugby and it is described as “the world's first
foundation dedicated to raising awareness of the long-term, damaging effects of bullying
by connecting communities and raising funds to support those doing real-world work to
eradicate bullying” (About Us). While its connection to LGBT activism is not stated
outright, the organization trades on the zeitgeist of bullying as a metonym for anti-gay

134

behavior and the narrative of Cohen as an LGBT ally is prominent in much of the
discussion of Cohen and his work.
While the Sports Equality Foundation is still in its infancy, its focus on the power
of ‘coming out’ is justified by board member Cyd Ziegler who stated that “we believe the
singular most important tool to changing sports is people coming out” (Gleeson, 2016).
This particular focus is a far cry from StandUp’s more collective previous mission that
argued for the importance of collective action. The previous organization in fact
identified that “to remove bullying from schools and sports, requires all of us to have
strong characters.” The collectivity once present in the organization’s mission is replaced
with the I or You of their new initiative – lost is Cohen’s initial argument that “when we
stand up together, we stand up a bit taller.”
Furthermore, this new organization owes its genesis to a $200,000 grant provided
by Nike. While the details of Nike’s involvement with LGBT sports activism is more
thoroughly unpacked in the final section of this chapter, I bring this connection to the
forefront as it highlights the role of the consumer citizen within neoliberalism. Nike
formally began its relationship with Cohen in 2013, when his StandUp organization
teamed with the athletic apparel company to sell jointly branded products that would
reflect both the StandUp organization and Nike’s LGBT focused #BeTrue line of
products. In fact StandUp’s website reassured their visitors that in order to make a
difference all they had to do was “simply shop or donate.” While the website included a
donation link that allowed visitors to contribute funds directly to the website, this
hyperlink was placed after the option to shop their StandUp branded merchandise: the
ability to purchase products, in the name of activism, became the defacto route for

135

visitors to underwrite and support the organization’s goals. Echoing neoliberalism’s
reliance on “doing good through shopping good” (Banet-Weiser & Lapsansky, 2008)
StandUp aimed to cultivate support for its brand first through the purchasing of goods,
and secondly through grassroots activism or community engagement.
Additionally, this is also an approach that works in tandem with the language of
personal responsibility. As board member and gay UCLA softball coach Kirk Walker
stated, “We will not change hearts and minds of people just by legislative or policy
changes” (Ennis, 2016). This sentiment was further echoed by head coach of the NBA’s
Golden State Warriors, Steve Kerr, who told HBO’s Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel that
“a lot more athletes and people in the sports world will need to come out before we really
see the change” (Fernandez, 2016).
4
Here again we see the language of neoliberalism
that works to cultivate change through individual action, as opposed to political action.
While these examples could be read as a postscript to the case studies examined in this
chapter, I believe that they are useful in providing context and situating subsequent
claims tying neoliberal imperatives and media narratives to the ‘coming out’ process.

Setting the Stage – The Last Closet Crumbles?
The ‘coming out’ narrative, as argued earlier in this dissertation, presents a
seemingly natural aspect of gay sexual self-identification. It is therefore no surprise that
this process operates unquestioned. While it is certainly important to read and unpack
these narratives, I believe it is also important to understand the historical precedence for
these moments. While this dissertation provided a brief sketching of these moments

4
Coach Kerr was interviewed by the program for a feature they ran on Rick Welts, the openly gay
president of the Golden State Warriors. These comments were prompted by a discussion of the recent
homophobic remarks made by Rajon Rondo and examined in Chapter 1.

136

historically within sports, it is worth repeating that prior to 2013 no male athlete had ever
‘come out’ as gay while on a current roster playing as a member of the NFL, NBA, MLB
or NHL. Furthermore, no male athlete has ever “come out” while actively on a roster.
Additionally, sports culture and sports rhetoric were able to establish an ethos that
either did not recognize LGBT athletes or quickly rationalized them away. Stemming
from a fear as to what queerness might implicate in the heteronormative arena of sports,
American gay athletes have often been an afterthought. After the outings of diver Greg
Louganis and tennis champion Billie Jean King, to name just a few, sports rhetoric relied
on the rationalization that these athletes’ success stemmed from their solitary and/or
feminizing, meant both literally and figuratively, sports. However lesser known, but
equally out, gay former athletes such as Dave Kopay and Esera Tuaolo, of the NFL,
Glenn Burke and Billy Beane, of the MLB, and John Amaechi, of the NBA, have
contradicted prior dismissals of gay men as incapable of playing on team sports at the
professional level - though none of these men were openly gay while employed.
Jason Collins broke the first part of this trend with his announcement in 2013 that
he was a gay man; however he was a free agent at the time of the announcement and not
on an active roster. Collins, considered a journeyman within the NBA because he played
for 6 teams over 12 years, did not become the first openly gay man to play on a major
American sports team until the following February, midway through the season, when he
was signed to a 10-day contract with the Brooklyn Nets. It should also be noted that the
franchise that signed him to this historic contract was also the franchise where he spent
the majority of his career,
5
had helped lead to the NBA finals, and was coached at the

5
Collins originally left the team in 2008

137

time by Collins’s former longtime teammate Jason Kidd.
6
Collins became the first
openly gay man to play in a major men’s professional team sport on February 23
rd
, 2014,
just hours after signing his 10 day tender.
His first game came against the Los Angeles Lakers where he played 10 scoreless
minutes with two rebounds and five fouls.
7
The game, played at the Staples Center in
Los Angeles is just a short drive from his San Fernando home where he was living while
unsigned. No doubt the fact that the game was played in his hometown, in addition to the
historic moment, explained the boisterous applause he received after checking into the
game late in the second quarter. Additionally, it should be noted that Michael Sam, the
previously unknown University of Missouri football player had come out just weeks prior
to his signing.
After his initial contract Collins was signed through the end of the season, though
he only played sparingly during his time with the Brooklyn Nets, just 22 games averaging
7.8 minutes per game and only 1.1 points per game. Furthermore, he did not see a single
minute of game action during the Nets trip to the playoffs, which was officially attributed
as a “coaches decision” as opposed to an injury. While his announcement was important,
it is also necessary to think through the cultural zeitgeist that proceeded this moment.
On the other hand, Sam, who made his announcement just weeks before Collins
played his first post-announcement professional game, never played a regular-season
snap as a member of the National Football League, despite being a highly lauded

6
In fact, Collins mentions his playing relationship with Jason Kidd in his self-authored ‘coming out’ article
for Sports Illustrated. This mention was made almost a year before the team Kidd coached signed Collins
to the historic contract.
7
Collins’ references his history for “giving” fouls as part of his ‘coming out’ narrative. In particular, he
relates his reputation to fouls as an indicator of the lengths he went to sacrifice his body for the team and
also in the connection between fouls as a sign of masculinity within the NBA. This idea of sacrificing the
body is an interesting metaphor since he also implies that he has sacrificed his body for the LGBT
movement by putting his hand up and ‘coming out’ before any other active player.

138

collegiate player. Sam made his announcement after his senior season at the University
of Missouri but before the NFL’s combine, where potential players are evaluated based
on both their performance in skills drills at the combine and their ability to navigate an
interview session with potential teams, before the official NFL draft.
8

While this timing means that Sam was not technically an official employee of the
NFL, he was projected to be drafted in the early rounds (somewhere between the 2
nd
and
5
th
) of the draft in May. This projection was based on his All-American performance at
Missouri where he was named the SEC defensive player of the year his senior season.
This is important because from 2003-2013 (the year Sam won the honor) there were 13
recipients of the award, including Sam.
9
For the other 12 players, all but 2 were selected
in the first round of the draft with their average draft position at 23.
10
Sam was drafted in
the final round (7
th
) at position #249. There were 256 selections made in the NFL draft
that year, meaning only 7 players were drafted after him.
This detailed account of draft positions is important to note because prior to
Sam’s announcement, CBS sports predicted that he would be drafted at position 90.
After he came out, CBS sports adjusted this position to 160. In their eyes, the mere
announcement of his homosexuality was enough to inhibit his potential this significantly.
There were now, according to CBS Sports, 70 players who were better prospects for the

8
It is worth repeating that the interview portion of the NFL combine has often been used as a forum to
learn more about a player’s perceived sexual orientation, despite the fact that this practice is considered a
form of workplace discrimination and strictly forbidden by New York State law which has jurisdiction over
the NFL.
9
There were co-defensive player of the years in 2012 and 2013. C.J. Mosely, with whom Sam shared the
honor, was drafted in the first round with pick #17. The two players who were co-awardees in 2012 were
both drafted in the first round, at picks #1 and #17, respectively.
10
The only player to be selected outside the 2
nd
round was in 2003 when Chad Lavailas was selected at
pick #149 and the only second round draft player, DeMeco Ryans, was selected in position #33.

139

NFL, not because of their athletic ability, but because of their sexual orientation.
11
The
St. Louis Rams eventually drafted Sam 89 spots after his predicted position post-‘coming
out’ and 159 spots after his predicted position prior to ‘coming out.’
Many felt that St. Louis’s decision was made to prevent Sam from going
undrafted, a controversy the NFL greatly wanted to avoid. These questions were raised
not only because of how closely the pick was made to the end of the draft, but also
because St. Louis did not have much need for a player at Sam’s position and they
wondered why other teams which greatly needed a player at Sam’s position. Others
countered that St. Louis made the most sense since the team, at the time, was the closest
profession football team to his college alma mater. Despite a strong pre-season with the
Rams he was cut prior to the start of the season. In March of 2016, just before this
dissertation was completed, Howard Balzer reported that the St. Louis Rams made a deal
with the NFL to draft Michael Sam in order to get out of having to film the league
contracted and HBO produced Hard Knocks reality show. While the report cites
unnamed sources, and the team has denied this version of events, there were many
questions regarding the decision to cut Sam after the preseason, a decision that HBO’s
cameras would have captured.
The Dallas Cowboys briefly signed Sam to their practice squad in September of
2014 before being cut in October.
12
He also played very briefly in the summer of 2015

11
As a side note, Las Vegas sports books, who make a variety of prop bets not associated with scores of
games, placed an over/under on Sam’s draft placement, after his announcement, as the middle of the 4
th

round. Meaning that his draft at the end of the 7
th
round was considered a monumental “upset” within the
eyes of logic and reason for Vegas odds makers.
12
This signing was seen, by many, to be purely motivated by economics. Prior to the start of the season
Sam registered one of the most popular jersey sales amongst all rookies. While all NFL teams participate
in a revenue sharing program, the Dallas Cowboys do not share revenue from team jersey sales. Therefore,
their signing him to the practice squad meant they could sell more Sam jersey’s despite the fact that he
would never be signed to the official 53 man roster.

140

for the Montreal Alouettes of the Canadian Football League before announcing his
retirement from football for mental health reasons (Dubin, 2015). After Sam ‘came out,’
he never played a regular season snap in professional American football, though he did
win the 2014 ESPY Arthur Ashe Courage Award, was named GQ athlete of the year for
2014, and was a finalist for Sports Illustrated’s 2014 sportsman of the year – all awards
given to individuals who display the spirit of sportsmanship rather than for actual sports
accomplishments. However, these two instances are useful resources for thinking
through the mediation of ‘coming out’ stories within American professional men’s team
sports and the narrative ideas present within the accounts themselves.

At Last, The Great Gay Hope?: Unpacking the ‘Coming Out’ Narratives of Active
Team Sports Athletes
While ‘coming out’ stories exist as the central point across media, as the locus of
sports and sexuality, unpacking these narratives illuminates three ideas that are
universally present, especially within mainstream media portrayals of the event itself.
For the purposes of consistency, the following focuses on ideas present in the ‘coming
out’ statements and narratives of Michael Sam and Jason Collins. These two athletes are
identified because they are the only members of the 4 major American men’s sports
leagues to ‘come out’ while actively playing.
This analysis is more interested in the specific content of the athletes’ initial
‘coming out’ statement in order to understand what we might learn about the ways in
which the ‘coming out’ narrative is reproduced within sports culture, how it navigates
conflicting ideologies of sports and sexuality, and how it relies on a language of personal

141

responsibility and hyperindividualism inherent to neoliberalism. This approach
differentiates itself from other work that analyzes ‘coming out’ narratives by focusing
solely on professional athletes across a variety of platforms (Gough, 2007).
13

Furthermore, while we can learn a great deal about narrative themes present in these
experiences, the following, as referenced earlier, also draws from the ‘coming out’
statements of Britney Griner and Robbie Rogers in order to contextualize sports and
‘coming out’ within optics of gender and race, and their relationship to concepts of
disidentification, authorship, and the economic stakes of sports and sexuality.
Within the coming out narratives three dominant logics come to the forefront as
specific to LGBT sports narratives. The first is the notion of “necessary truth
production,” the second is the specter of authorship and voice, most often seen as the
desire to control one’s narrative, and the third is an ensuing distancing of oneself from
nonnormative sexuality, which is configured as detrimental to one’s sports self. After
examining these three concepts I bring into the conversation an intersectional analysis.
This intersectional approach attends both to discussions of how race and gender factors
into these announcements and the ways in which media accounts of the planned and
coordinated announcements of Collins and Sam could benefit from instances in women’s
team sports when lesbian self-identification was navigated in a less spectacularized and
strategic way. Certainly, again, the stakes of sports culture, economically, is important to
keep in mind when discussing how men’s and women’s sports differ, but again, thinking

13
Gough’s analysis looks at seven ‘coming out’ statements posted to outsports.com. While I engage more
thoroughly in chapter 2 with the way that outsports.com selects, frames, and presents stories, I think Gough
offers a useful commentary, by way of a qualification of the themes he found, when he wrote: when
recounting “their experiences within a media environment that promotes the involvement of gay men and
lesbian women in sport (outsports.com), it is rather inevitable that editors will privilege success stories so
that readers may be encouraged to enter sporting establishments” (Gough 2007, 170).

142

through women’s experiences alongside men’s could help to offer alternative approaches,
not only for gay male athletes when discussing their homosexuality, but also for the
media professionals who cover these events and often contribute to the spectacularization
and normativity of the events.

Necessary Truth Production
“You don’t want an unknown.” – Mark Dominik, former NFL executive and
current ESPN analyst, 2014

The first theme present in the ‘coming out’ narratives centers on the invocation of
truth. This idea is important for two reasons: The first is that it situates the ‘coming out’
narrative as a moment of unequivocal truth production, as theorized earlier in this
dissertation, and the second is the that this rhetorical turn positions pre-announcement
experiences as somehow less than truthful or honest. By creating this pre vs. post
‘coming out’ relationship to veracity it causes individuals to image the ‘coming out’
narrative as the only way to exist honestly.
Within all of these coming out stories, the idea of “speaking one’s truth” is
echoed often. For example Michael Sam identified the impetus for ‘coming out’ as a
need to “own” his “truth” (Branch, 2014). Jason Collins, in his self-authored article for
Sports Illustrated highlighted the importance of his decision by stating “I want to be
genuine and authentic and truthful” (Collins, 2013). Another profile of Jason Collins
categorized his motivation as a need to “Speak Your Own Truth” (Galanes, 2014).
14
This
notion of truth is repeated across storylines and is indicative of the confessional nature of
the “coming out” process. As theorists have argued, the confession was invented to serve

14
Britney Griner was quoted as saying I’m “just happy to tell my truth.”

143

as a production of knowledge that would tell the ‘truth’ of sexuality (Foucault, 1980, p.
59).
However, as explored earlier, though confession was meant to represent a
voluntary avowal in actuality it was truly a one-sided admission. The obligation to
confess had become so ingrained in society that it now feels naturalized and no longer as
a power that constrains us; “but its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of
power” (Foucault, 1980, p. 60). Truth is so tied to ‘coming out’ because of its
confessional nature. This confession is seen, most often, as producing a locus of
sexuality, a crystalized core, rather then thinking of it as a social construct or a fluid state.
As Sedgwick writes, “An unfortunate side effect of this move has been implicitly to
underwrite the notion that ‘homosexuality as we conceive of it today’ itself comprises a
coherent definitional field rather than a space of overlapping, contradictory, and
conflictual definitional forces” (1990, p. 45). The ‘coming out’ statement fills in the
blanks for us, but in a structured and defined way that reinforces a “knowingness” that
further entrenches essentialized qualities to a contradictory, and changing, contemporary
experience. But imagining truth as a strategically essentialized quality, as a tactically
crystalized core, presents a different set of issues. In particular, it promotes an ideology,
which I explore in the following section, that athletes must distance themselves from
sexuality.
Additionally, this reliance on ‘coming out’ as a production of truth is problematic
since it images all that comes before the announcement as an inauthentic or untruthful
state of being. By constructing the coming out ritual as a technique for producing truth, it
causes us to dismiss the life gay individuals lead before this public announcement as

144

somehow less than what comes after. But it is also key to remember that this locus of
truth, this announcement of honesty, works as much in the service of heterosexuality as it
does for homosexuality. While this moment of ‘coming out’ feels like an unburdening of
a previously inauthentic self, it reminds culture that those who do not participate in this
announcement, heterosexuals, can claim a truthfulness in their silence. There is no need
to confess one’s hidden truth if the silences one produces stands in for claims to honesty.
Conversely, this veracity is only available to gay individuals once they confess. While
Collins, Sam, and others need the ‘coming out’ ritual in order to produce a self truth,
straight athletes and individuals are privileged since their connection to honesty and
truthfulness is already understood as an essentialized quality of their straightness.
Lastly, if we are to return to the comments made by Mark Dominik about the
difficulty of drafting Michael Sam, we see another way in which the ‘coming out’
narrative presents a zero-sum game for members of team sports. While there is certainly
an expectation for LGBT individuals to produce a truth of sexuality within the ‘coming
out’ narrative, Dominik’s comments show us that the releasing of one’s truth, the
explaining of one’s sexuality, presents an additional problem for members of team sports.
While Sam and others have recalled the importance of being honest, of feeling the
expectation to categorize themselves before others did, this same production of truth, of
honesty, was used against him when evaluating his potential for playing in the NFL.
While Sam was better “known” to executives, coaches, athletes, media professionals, and
fans across the country, the unknowingness of his situation, of being publicly ‘out,’ was
constructed as a factor that negatively contributed to his potential. He was both expected,

145

ideologically, to produce his sexuality as an easily categorizable identity, and yet this
delimiting of self was then used to counteract his ability to play in the NFL.

I Want to Tell My Story, Not You or Who is on my side?
Implicit in the previous argument about authentic truth production is the idea of
voice. In particular, this can be seen in the way that self-vocalization becomes an
important part of the ‘coming out’ narrative. Many athletes stated that they wanted to
announce their sexuality in order to control the narrative. This is important because it
uses the logic of neoliberal personal responsibility (it is up to ME to tell my story) in
order to mystify the economic forces and systems that benefit from an athlete’s ‘coming
out.’ As both Sam and Collins identified, they wanted to ‘come out’ so that they could
control their narrative. As Sam stated, “I’m coming out because I want to own my truth.
I’m comfortable with who I am and I didn’t want anyone to break a story… without me
telling it the way I want to tell it” (Sam, 2014). This sentiment is similarly echoed by
Collins who wrote, “my coming out is preemptive. I shouldn't have to live under the
threat of being outed. The announcement should be mine to make, not TMZ's” (Collins,
2013).
While the history, politics, and morals of ‘outing’ are long and complicated (see
Gross 1993 and Signorile 1993, among others) previous theorizing has generally reserved
forced ‘outings’ only for individuals who actively work against the rights and liberties of
the LGBT community while engaging in sexual acts or relationships that would equate
them with those very same members of society they seek to disempower. Similarly, more
recent research on ‘outing’ in sports culture revealed that sports writers are generally

146

wary of discussing sexuality with regards to athletes who are rumored to be gay, even if
this means the story could be “scooped” by competitors (Kian, Anderson, & Shipka, 'I am
happy to start the conversation’: Examining sport media framing of Jason Collins’
coming out and playing in the NBA, 2015).
15
However, what is lost in this estimation of
self-vocalization is the “after” of ‘coming out.’ I contend that this is often lost in
ideologies that over-imagine the ‘coming out’ process as a mediating event that separates
previously untruthful lives with post-out generative experiences.
16

While Michael Sam ‘came out’ in order to control his narrative, he quickly
realized that this control to decide when and where his sexuality would be discussed
ended with the announcement. Sam’s sexuality became the focal point of his story, rather
than a part of it, even within contexts that would previously be configured as separate
from off-the-field narratives.
The most egregious of these moments came during an ESPN telecast in the
August of 2014 when a report on the St. Louis Rams’ pre-season training camp focused
on Michael Sam’s showering habits. Reporter Josina Anderson, based on an anonymous
source, reported that Sam was possibly not showering with his teammates so as to not
make them nervous – information she received after specifically asking his teammates as
to how Sam was fitting in with the team, especially in the locker room.
17
While one
could make the argument that a change in Sam’s behavior could be legitimized as

15
We also see a version of this hesitancy in the story of Emile Griffith, explored in chapter 1, and
confirmed in (McRae 2015).
16
Additionally, if we reference the example of Sam’s ‘coming out’ we can see how narratives are not
solely controlled by the individual, but also by an industry of professionals who make a living off of
orchestrating the ‘coming out’ of public figures. Sam was not scheduled to ‘come out’ until after the NFL
combine, but his advisors moved the announcement to an earlier date over concerns that the story would be
scooped.
17
It should be noted that implicit in this question is that Sam was the only gay man on the team – not that
he was just the only gay man with a mediated ‘coming out’ narrative.

147

important news, the story was not based in sufficient evidence, and as it was later
revealed that Sam did not shower with some of his teammates because he was staying
longer at practice – a reminder that Sam was taking all available measures to impress his
coaches and improve his chances of making the team.
18

But whether or not the story is ethical journalism should not distract from the fact
that Sam’s sexuality became the focal point for any and all research and reporting on his
relationship to sports.
19
Instead of reporting about how athletes were progressing during
preseason workouts, the story focused on the axiom of sports and sexuality as antithetical
by wondering how Sam was “fitting in with his teammates” despite the fact that Sam was
not the first gay player to interact with professional athletes or play in the NFL. So,
while ‘coming out’ is posited as a way for LGBT athletes to take personal responsibility,
to speak their truth and control their narrative, it ignores static approaches to sexuality
that rely solely on sexual-object choice, stereotypes of gay men as sexual predators, and
the seemingly incompatible nature of an out athlete “fitting in” within team sports
cultures.
20
While Sam, and others, justify ‘coming out’ as a way to control their
narrative, this example reminds us to that the ‘coming out’ narrative, as a form of
taxonomic knowledge production, allows for normative society to identify and highlight
the sexual difference of ‘out’ athletes: it makes hypervisible the negative potentials of
their transgressive bodies.

18
Facts such as these were conveniently left out of Kate Fagen’s article when she blamed Sam’s failure to
make a roster on his lack of focus.
19
This report is also especially tone-deaf since Sam spoke to the issue of the locker room in his initial
‘coming out’ announcement. He stated that the locker room, in his mind, is “a workplace. If you've ever
been in a Division I or pro locker room, it's a business place. You want to act professional” (Connelly
2014).
20
Interestingly this focus by the sports media further individualizes Sam as an “other” within a sporting
context that reprimands him for existing outside of the team.

148

Distancing Sexual Identity from Sports Identity
The narrative of ‘coming out’ as illuminating an authenticity or truth about one’s
sexuality is not necessarily unique to sports settings, but its continued reliance on notions
of “truth” have particular consequences for athletes and those involved in athletic culture.
Imagining an essentialized core of nonnormative sexuality, which exists in these
instances as the truth of ‘coming out,’ also presents a dilemma for athletes who often feel
the need to distance themselves from their sexual truth just as quickly as they begin to
embrace it. While this is, as Megan Rapinoe and Brittney Griner, among others note,
more of an issue for male athletes in America than for female athletes, there is still an
understanding of sports and gay sexuality as incompatible. As former Major League
Baseball player Billy Bean noted, “Are people going to forget that I’m a big league ball
player… and now I might be defined by something that has nothing to do with the thing
that has been the most important thing to me since I was 8 years old.” That “being gay
isn’t necessarily core to how you want to be perceived as an athlete” (Kahrl, 2015).
Michael Sam echoed this notion during his ‘coming out’ when he stated, “My focus and
purpose right now is playing football” (Sam, 2014).
And yet one would not expect the same distancing of sexuality for a heterosexual
athlete. Not only because it would never be presented as such, but also because
heterosexuality is core to athleticism whether it is recognized or not. Compulsory
heterosexuality, the idea that heterosexuality is both assumed and enforced by a society
and is then viewed as the natural inclination or obligation by both sexes, is still standard
in contemporary culture. As these male athletes have experienced first hand, there is an
expectation that one is straight until proven otherwise and that this straightness is

149

constitutive to athletic accomplishment. So while this connection between
heterosexuality and sports remains intact, even privileged, there is still the belief that in
order for one to be taken seriously as an athlete they must distance their homosexuality
from athleticism. As many of these athletes state, while they feel the push to announce
their sexuality, to live their truth, they also feel the pull not to make their sexuality seem
larger than sports itself. An example from Derrick Gordon, a Division 1 Basketball
Player who ‘came out’ in 2014 helps solidify this point. After ‘coming out’ as an openly
mediated gay collegiate athlete, Gordon stated that he now “wants to be known as
Derrick Gordon the Basketball Player again, instead of what last year was all about” and
he “has declined interviews with the media that highlight his sexual orientation during the
2015-16 season, choosing to focus more on basketball” (Gleeson, 2016). Sam further
echoed this statement when, after failing to make an NFL roster and navigating the media
storm that followed him, he said, “I’m a football player. Not anything else. Just a football
player” (Corsello, 2014). Nonnormative sexuality is then understood as a distraction
from sports as opposed to something productive or constitutive.
It is also important to note that this distancing of sexuality from a sports self was
far more prevalent in gay male experiences as opposed to lesbian experiences. No doubt,
the overarching assumption that female athletes are more predisposed to athletic
achievement contributes to this notion. For female athletes, sports identity and sexual
identity are not seen as oppositional in the same way that they are for men. While this
axiom is oversimplified, we have seen that gay athletes both thrive and experience
discrimination no matter their gender.

150

However, it is important to note that even though, historically, the female athletic
body has been more closely associated with, and assumed to be, a nonnormative
sexuality, this connection was not always framed in a positive manner. Historically,
lesbian athletes have faced discrimination, loss of endorsements, harassment, and general
discrimination (not to mention body shaming) for transgressing the boundaries of
normative femininity and heterosexuality. In fact, the WNBA went to great lengths to
distance itself from any association with the lesbian community during its first 18 years
(Banet-Weiser, 1999; King 2009; McDonald, 2002, among others). However, this is
changing at a much more rapid pace as the WNBA begins to embrace lesbian players and
athletes in an attempt to court lesbian fans, and to recognize those who have been fans
since the league’s inception.
This was most obviously highlighted in a 2014 marketing campaign known
internally as the WNBA Pride Platform (WNBA Embraces LGBT Fans, 2014). For
instance, while men’s team sports often host LGBT nights that are locally organized by
specific LGBT communities in partnership with local teams, the WNBA incorporates
pride games into their national marketing efforts and makes sure that all of its teams
participate in events that support the LGBT community. Furthermore, they host an
LGBT specific platform on their website, WNBA.com/pride. As WNBA President
Laurel Richie admitted, “for us it's a celebration of diversity and inclusion and
recognition of an audience that has been with us very passionately” (Mitchell, 2014).
This is, no doubt, equally spurned on by both a greater ability to recognize increasing
acceptance of the LGBT community within the United States, but also the recognition
that the lesbian community remains an untapped financial resource for the struggling

151

WNBA (McDonald M. , 2008). It should also be noted that the campaign was met with
support from corporate partners and CoverGirl Cosmetics served as the presenting
sponsor. In fact, the WNBA even commissioned a study in 2012 to better understand the
sexual orientation of their fans, something no men’s professional league has publicly
engaged as of yet. But this knowledge also further supports arguments that the move was
market-driven as much as culturally compelled. While the WNBA initially might have
thought that speaking directly to the LGBT community would, in some way, deter
straight fans from attending, they have found that this is not the case. It is also worth
noting that the WNBA’s decision to finally embrace their lesbian fans, and to publicly
recognize their lesbian employees, coincided with Britney Griner’s rookie season.

An Intersectional Approach to Athlete’s ‘Coming Out’ Statements
While the previous three themes were universal to the ‘coming out’ narratives
examined, solely identifying these topics does little to attend to the intersections of
difference that contribute to these statements. It is important to pay attention to what is
lost and what is included in a focus on truth and sexuality as the key components of
‘coming out.’ While not receiving as much attention as their production of sexual
orientation, the way in which Collins and Sam included their identification as black men
is important when thinking through ‘coming out’ intersectionally. While this analysis
rests on two individuals who identify, importantly, as both gay and black, their stories are
often compared to previous athletes who have come out, such as David Kopay, Greg
Louganis, and other male athletes without attention to the material realities of their
differences of race. Since the ‘coming out’ narrative so tightly focuses on demarcations

152

of sexuality, it often elides how sexuality is intimately tied to other positionalities.
However, this is not true for all notions of difference since gender is, as Sedgwick points
out, “definitionally built into determinations of sexuality” while other contributing
factors, such as race and ethnicity, are not so naturally tied (1990, 31). It is important to
think through the ways in which race and ethnicity, just as gender, might contribute to
understandings of sexuality and sexual truth production.
Collins and Sam force us to recognize the intricacies of their multiple subaltern
positions. They show how a variety of forms of oppression interconnect with one another
and how not all oppressive categorizes are connected equally. As Collins wrote in the
opening of his coming out article, “I’m a 34-year-old NBA center. I’m black. And I’m
gay” (Collins, 2013). Sam also put his multiple identities into language when he stated
“I'm a college graduate, I'm African-American, and I'm gay” (Connelly, 2014). For Sam
and Collins their blackness figures as a central point to their coming out.
21
While
discussions of these announcements were quick to focus on their sexual identification,
often dialogues of these intersecting positionalities were lost. I want to make the case
that recognizing Collins and Sam’s blackness alongside their gayness is important both in
how it relates to authenticity claims and in the way disidentifications work within the
realm of sexual identity and sports affinity.
The fact that Collins and Sam situated their blackness alongside their gayness is
significant, in particular, because of the ways, broadly and historically, that white
normative sexuality is projected onto African-American bodies. This is seen not only in

21
It is interesting that both Collins and Sam referenced their racial identity prior to their sexual identity.
On one hand this could be representative of the way that they still privilege their blackness as an
identification, though I think an equal reading could also argue that the phraseology was constructed
through editing since their announcement of sexuality produces a new form of knowability as opposed to
the preexisting knowledge of their race.

153

the ways that whiteness operates as the proper ways towards citizenship, but also in
ideologies that situate blackness and gayness as incompatible.
While this is certainly worthy of further discussion and continued analysis that is
outside the scope of this chapter, we can look at the ways in which Eldridge Cleaver
critiqued and discredited James Baldwin as “anti-black” and “anti-male” because of his
homosexuality. I am not trying to make the argument that black culture is inherently
more homophobic than white culture, far from it, but I am arguing that gayness takes on
different stakes because of the ways that culturally, the survival of the black family has
been tied to traditional gender roles within the black domestic space (Johnson E. P.,
2003).
22
Then, the crisis of black masculinity can be tied to homosexuality since it
undermines “real” or “authentic” blackness – a formation of black masculinity defined by
“power acquired at the expense of black women and homosexuals” (Johnson E. P., 2003,
p. 34).
But this connection is not produced in isolation within black culture. As Roderick
Ferguson has argued, black culture has historically been produced, through authoritative
knowledge, as outside of heteropatriarchal ideals, and thus the site of disorder: “racial
subjects were produced and observed through canonical formations and ethically
developed through citizenship only by submitting to heteronormative regulation”
(Ferguson, 2004, p. 66). Therefore, it makes sense to internalize bias since one’s “fitness
for citizenship was measured in terms of how much their sexual, familial, and gender

22
Historically, and currently, the problem of blackness is often framed by the state as a problem of
masculinity. While I engage with the legacy of this through the work of Roderick Ferguson, for a more
nuanced unpacking of the ways in which the Moynihan Report played a large role in perpetuating and
normalizing these narratives I refer you to Ferguson (2004) and Farr (2016).

154

relations deviated from a bourgeois nuclear family model historically embodied by
whites” (p. 20).
By reasserting blackness into the conversation of gayness, Collins and Sam are
able to disrupt hegemonic understandings of black masculinity that only survive within
heterosexual conceptions and they illuminate the constructed nature of such formations
that attempt to link masculinity, blackness, and heterosexuality as essentialized and
naturally constitutive groupings. As E. Patrick Johnson reminds us, “the black
homosexual represents sexuality run amuck – a perversion that threatens the very essence
of black heteronormative masculinity” (Johnson E. P., 2003, p. 36). If anti-homosexual
violence is often implicit in cultural formations of black masculinity, then Collins and
Sam’s announcements works to discredit this link (Snorton, 2014). If previous moments
of black advocacy have attempted to distance masculinity and black political promise
from gayness, such as Martin Luther King’s distancing of himself, at the suggestion of
advisors, from his homosexual advisor Bayard Rustin, then Collins and Sam work to
reconnect these two positionalities which have been historically and socially constructed
as incompatible.
It is also important to understand that blackness, just like gayness, is dependent on
contingent notions of authenticity that are often at odds and operate through a politics of
ambivalence. Furthermore, because whiteness often circulates as an unmarked race for
white athletes, it is rarely tied to notions of masculinity and authenticity as it is for black
athletes. Therefore, the “calling out” of one’s race is important for Collins and Sam as
they situate their blackness and gayness as two mutually constitutive positionalities that
must be attended to and recognized. Their assertion of race alongside sexuality reminds

155

us of the ways that individuals are “multiply determined, regulated, and excluded by
differences of race, class, sexuality, and gender (Ferguson, 2004, p. 1). They force the
reader to recognize that racial and sexual formations are connected. Their blackness is
not inauthentic or unauthorized because of their gayness, but rather it highlights the
intersectionality of their announcements. They must attend to the material realities of
being both gay and black and the various ways these two identities cause conflicting
social relations and economic disparities.
Collins and Sam’s recognition of their blackness is also important for another
reason. As critical race scholars (such as Crenshaw 1993; Gray 1995; Johnson 2003,
among others) have argued, “the tropes of blackness that whites circulated in the past…
have historically insured physical violence, poverty, institutional racism, and second class
citizenry for blacks” (Johnson E. P., 2003, p. 4). By Collins and Sam identifying their
blackness not only in relation to this historic announcement, but also to their status as an
athlete, an elite and respected figure in American culture, they remind white culture of
the importance for thinking expansively about the culture of blackness in America.
Furthermore, this placement of black and gay also works to counteract and/or resist white
ideologies that often overimagine the black community as inherently more anti-gay than
white populations. Collins and Sam reaffirm their acceptance of their gayness through
the equal deployment of their race. They are black, and gay, and proud.
Additionally, the way in which Collins and Sam reinsert their race alongside their
sexuality shows that they see the former as flexible enough to incorporate the latter in
spite of how mainstream media typically represents this relationship and works against a
history of black athletes who are often disciplined for being too black (Tucker 2003;

156

Leonard 2006; Van Sterkenburg, Knoppers, Annelies and De Leeuw 2010, among many
others). If we are to interrogate gayness as a signifier with multiple interpretations and
materialities, then we must also recognize race in the same way, whether it circulates as a
marked entity or not.
23

Furthermore, the recognition of Collins and Sam as epitomes of masculinity is
further compounded by intersections of race. As E. Patrick Johnson writes:
The representation of effeminate homosexuality as disempowering is at the heart
of the politics of hegemonic blackness. For to be ineffectual is the most
damaging thing one can be in the fight against oppression. Insofar as
ineffectiveness is problematically sutured to femininity and homosexuality within
a black cultural politic that privileges race over other categories of oppression, it
follows that the subjects accorded these attributes would be marginalized and
excluded from the boundaries of blackness. (2003, p. 51)
Therefore, it comes as no surprise that both ‘coming out’ narratives focused on
each player’s size and strength and ability to navigate the violent aspects of their sports.
For example, Collins stated “I’m not afraid to take on any opponent. Go ahead, take a
swing -- I'll get up. I hate to say it, and I'm not proud of it, but I once fouled a player so
hard that he had to leave the arena on a stretcher” (Collins, 2013). These references are
not only interconnected to the expectation of masculinity for an effectual athlete, but also
for an effectual black man. As bell hooks has argued, “Much black male homophobia is
rooted in the desire to eschew connection with all things deemed ‘feminine’ and that
would, of course, include black gay men;” however, since Collins and Sam reinstall their

23
I am not arguing that black and gay are indistinct discourses, certainly both maintain their own agendas
and specificities, but their connection, within these announcements, forces the reader, the fan, the critic to
recognize race as a significant player in the dialectic of gay sexual production.

157

blackness next to their gayness, this, in effect, works to anticipate and forestall this
connection and undermines its logic (1992, p. 147). This approach then identifies that a
rejecting, or rather a reconfiguring, of black machismo identities provides for new
stylistic options for black men while still recognizing that black masculine ideals are
linked to authenticity claims of the body.
24

The process of ‘coming out’ as a claim to truthfulness additionally necessitates an
analytical optic that recognizes differences of race since discourses of the down-low, as
academic C. Riley Snorton has argued, are often deployed as a way to question the
honesty and decency of gay black men. This argument works to further question the
‘coming out’ process as a naturalized process of self-identification since it requires us to
acknowledge “that being an out gay man is not a uniquely privileged identity but rather
becomes a viable alternative to the trickery and treachery of men on the down low”
(2014, p. 27).
25

Disidentifications and ‘Coming Out’
As previously outlined in the introduction to this dissertation, disidentifications
provide a useful optic for thinking through sports and sexuality. This is seen in later
chapters as sports fans transfigure sites of heteronormativity and hegemonic masculinity,
produced through normative iterations of sports culture, into hybrid formations that
circulate amongst a variety of cultural platforms and locations. These disidentifications

24
I am drawn to the use of reconfiguring, rather than rejecting, in particular because of the way this
argument is influenced by disidentifications, which does not require one to discard contradictory identities
or practices of identification.
25
While outside the parameters of this chapter, I would like to engage with the media coverage of Collin’s
ex-fiancé who claimed disappointment and “deep emotional hurt” since Collins did not inform her of his
sexuality and questioned the honesty of his announcement since he had not been “honest” with her in the
past.

158

and resources both establish new possibilities while still echoing the cultural
arrangements of their previous sources. However, in this first exploration of
disidentifications as a resource for sports and sexuality, the focus is centered on how
racialized bodies interplay with disidentifications. As José Esteban Muńoz argues, the
delimiting nature of identity categories forces those who do not fit into a preconceived
mold to rework codes to fit, and often survive, existences produced by these conflicting
positionalities. There is a constant negotiation of these identifications that causes a
“traveling back and forth from different identity vectors” that allows for minority
subjectivities to, at best thrive within, and at worst learn to negotiate, these clashing
categories (Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics,
1999, p. 32). The argument I make in the following section, using Collins and Sam’s
‘coming out’ narratives in comparison to that of Soccer player Robbie Rogers, is that the
experiences of the former players as black gay men allowed them to utilize
disidentifications to better reconcile sports and sexuality.
As argued earlier, there is importance in recognizing Sam and Collins as black
gay men – not only within analysis but also through self-identification. The situating of
their marked bodies, both racially and sexually, supports an understanding that any claim
to homosexuality, as argued earlier, also necessitates an attention to the ways in which
whiteness is cryptically connected to sexuality and citizenship. Collins and Sam could
not counteridentify with these terms, which implies a reinstatement of dominant
discourses by opposing their unquestioned logics, but rather disidentified in order to work
through the way that blackness and gayness are ideological discourses that contain
contradictory impulses, but nonetheless also create material realities for individuals with

159

intersectional identities. As Jason Collins writes, he’s learned to embrace himself as a
“puzzle” (2013). Collins and Sam are not rejecting their gayness, their blackness, or their
athleticism, but instead acknowledging and incorporating these forces and influences –
they are utilizing them to inform their own strategies for navigating sports and sexuality
since their existence is one that if full of ideological contradictions (Muñoz, 1999). For
these athletes, ‘coming out’ was another moment that forced them, and the public, to
recognize the seams and contradictions produced by positions at war not to abandon
them, but to see what we can learn about their constrictive nature and the possibilities of
revealing in uneasiness.
I situate these moments of recognition in contrast to the ‘coming out’
announcement of professional soccer player Robbie Rogers. On February 15
th
, 2013,
Robbie Rogers announced both his sexual orientation, and his simultaneous retirement
from professional sports on his blog. Rogers, at the time, had accomplished an incredible
sporting feat as one of the few American born players to compete in the English Football
League. At the time of his announcement, he was a member of Leeds United Football
Club, which plays in the English Championship Football League, the second tier of the
English football league system (the top tier is the Premiere League). However, this
second tier is still extremely popular as professional sports leagues are concerned. The
championship league made up of 23 British teams and 1 Welsh team, and reported
revenues of 491 million pounds for the 2013-204 season (Wilson, 2015). Furthermore,
the three tiers of the English Football League make up the world’s richest soccer league,
with over 4 billion pounds in revenue, putting them on par in terms of economic
importance and media visibility with any of the four major American sports leagues.

160

Rogers announced his homosexuality, and his retirement, by writing “People love
to preach about honesty, how honesty is so plain and simple. Try explaining to your
loved ones after 25 years you are gay… Now is my time to step away. It's time to
discover myself away from football” (Rogers, 2013).
26
For Rogers, ‘coming out’ was
not the answer to his reconciliation of sports and sexuality, nor was a lack of overt
homophobia the cause for creating a safe space; in fact, Rogers’s exit from professional
soccer was predicated on his inability to reconcile his identity as an athlete with his
identity a gay man. As opposed to Collins and Sam, who put their blackness front and
center in their announcement, Rogers never mentions his whiteness; however, it
circulates as an unmarked position, though one which is devalued and disqualified from
sports via his announcement. While Rogers might not have ever had to previously
wrestle with what it means to be white and gay, only gay and an athlete, Collins and Sam
were forced to negotiate identification and ideology, key components to, and productive
aspects of, the work done by disidentifications.
As Rogers further writes, “My secret is gone, I am a free man, I can move on and
live my life as my creator intended” (2013). And yet, Rogers did not feel free to move on
with his life within professional sports. Though academic Eric Anderson argues that
athletes “exist within a much improved social and sporting landscape, one in which
young gay men are more able to be out to their teammates…” this did not hold true for
Rogers despite is position as a young gay man (Anderson, Masculinities and Sexualitities

26
Rogers is a white US born soccer player who was 25 and playing professionally in the UK at the time of
his retirement. He has represented the United States in international competitions and owns a clothing line
in Los Angeles, his hometown.

161

in Sport and Physical Cultures: Three Decades of Evolving Research, 2011).
27
For him,
his positionalities were incompatible. Unlike Collins and Sam, who used
disidentifications, no doubt produced through a life of navigating racial bias, Rogers did
not have this grammar, this mode of analysis, to work through his conflicting
positionalities. Rogers was unable, initially, to resist the models of self that would
disassociate athleticism and gayness, and I would argue that his reliance on whiteness as
a dominant mode for operating within American and British culture worked as a
disservice when coming to terms with his homosexuality.
28
For Rogers, it made the most
sense to step away from sports when announcing his homosexuality, rather than as a
practice through which he could invest new life into sports culture via nonnormative
sexuality.
I offer this example not as indicative of all gay professional athletes, but as
support for a multi-modal analysis that involves both questioning the normative aspects
of whiteness and gay culture, in order to better understand how racialized bodies must
recognize their minoritarian subjectivity, but also as a way to understand the generative
aspects of disidentifications spurned on by conflicting categories of identification.
Disidentifications, as seen through Collins and Sam, provided a way for them to rewrite
their scripts, rather than dismiss or abandon them.

27
Anderson is also writing from a UK-specific context, so it is particularly applicable to Rogers who was
playing in the UK at the time.
28
Rogers eventually returned to the United States and signed a contract with the Los Angeles Galaxy of the
MLS.

162

Complicating ‘Coming Out’ Through Gender
The ‘coming out’ narratives of Collins and Sam provide a discursive terrain from
which it is possible to think through multiple optics of analysis, not only in their relation
to neoliberalism and the expectation of individual responsibility to authenticity through
sexual truth production, but also in relation to notions of race and disidentifications. It
allows us to analyze and understand the ways that social scripts can be both limiting and
generative of new ways of thinking about sports and sexuality. Nevertheless, because all
of these examples come from the world of men’s sports, it makes it more difficult to
cultivate a sense of the gendered implications of these narratives outside of traditional
conceptions of masculinity. It makes sense to analyze these narratives together because
of the economic stakes of their stories and professions. While the potential of financial
success within sports, spurned on by neoliberal tenets, often constructs the ‘coming out’
narrative as the only option available to individuals, an analysis of the mediated ‘coming
out’ of Britney Griner and Megan Rapinoe helps to gesture towards what alternatives
might not only be available to male athletes, but might also counteract some of the regret
expressed by Sam years after his announcement. As opposed to the planned
announcements of Sam and Collins, the carefully orchestrated media events that
coordinated their ‘coming out’ narratives with newspaper articles and television pieces
between an array of mainstream and alternative sports media sources, Griner and Rapinoe
vocalized their nonnormative sexuality on media platforms in far different ways.
On April 17
th
, 2013, just under two weeks before Jason Collins made his historic
announcement, Britney Griner, the number 1 overall pick in the WNBA draft made a
similar announcement: that she was gay. As opposed to the planned and strategic

163

announcement coordinated for Collins and Sam, Griner’s announcement came in a far
more prosaic way. Her announcement happened during a video interview for Sports
Illustrated. Griner was interviewed joined with fellow college seniors and WNBA draft
picks Ellena Delle Donne and Skylar Diggins. Just two days earlier these three rising
stars were selected as the top three overall picks in the WNBA draft, and they later
became the faces of marketing blitz by the league which identified them as “the three to
see” in the upcoming WNBA season. The three players sat for an informal interview that
covered a wide-range of topics. About 3 minutes into the interview, Sports Illustrated
video host Maggie Gray turned to the topic of sports and sexuality. She started the
conversation, as may come as no surprise, with a reference to men’s sports. I’ve included
Gray and Griner’s exchange on the topic below:
Gray: Another big topic in sports recently is sexuality, especially with the NFL. In
football it was rumored that maybe one or more players were going to come out--
that would become huge news in the sports world and in general. In female sports,
women's sports, in the WNBA, players have already come out, and it's really
accepted. Why is there a difference between men and women in that issue?

Griner: I really couldn't give an answer on why that's so different. Being one that's
out, it's just being who you are. Again, like I said, just be who you are. Don't
worry about what other people are going to say, because they're always going to
say something, but, if you're just true to yourself, let that shine through. Don't
hide who you really are.

164

Gray: You're in a different position where you're not just a regular person, you’re
a famous athlete, you're the number one pick in the WNBA draft. How difficult
was it for you to make the decision?

Griner: It really wasn't too difficult, I wouldn't say I was hiding or anything like
that. I've always been open about who I am and my sexuality. So, it wasn't hard at
all. If I can show that I'm out and I'm fine and everything's OK, then hopefully the
younger generation will definitely feel the same way. (Griner, Delle Donne,
Diggins discuss sports and sexuality, 2013)
While this exchange is certainly ripe for analysis, I’d like to focus first on the importance
of Griner’s language of ‘coming out’ that offers us an alternative to the spectacularized
events of Collins and Sam, and secondly, to recognize that even this alternative approach
still exists within a framework of heteronormativity and neoliberalism.
First, it is interesting to see that Griner, even in unprepared remarks, as it was
widely circulated after the interview that this response was not preplanned, still utilized
some of the language seen in similar discussions of sexual production. Griner outlines
that “if you're just true to yourself, let that shine through.” Again, here we see a reliance
on the truth of sexuality as a rescuing and resuscitating of nonnormative sexualities in the
face of discrimination. That the most important factor is to be “true” to who you are.
Again, we see the difficulty in the reliance on honesty and authenticity because it ignores
the ways in which truth does not always produce idyllic results – it is not always a
panacea to discrimination and it often invokes the assumption that individuals lived

165

confined and constrained lives prior to making a public statement about their
nonnormative sexuality.
Secondly, when Griner is asked about her “decision” to come out, especially since
she was the number one draft pick and arguably one of the most mediated female athlete
in America, she says, “It really wasn't too difficult, I wouldn't say I was hiding or
anything like that. I've always been open about who I am and my sexuality” (Griner,
Delle Donne, Diggins discuss sports and sexuality, 2013). This statement is important for
two reasons. The first is that it exemplifies a different approach to ‘coming out’ which
forgoes the press conference and coordinated media announcements of men’s sports.
29
It
gestures towards a new conception of ‘coming out’ that relies on everyday language. As
she later told espnW, “I've always been really open about my sexuality and who I am. I
never thought a big coming out was necessary” (ESPN.com news services, 2013). For
Griner, she didn’t feel the need to call a press conference, or issue a press release. She
also calls attention to the restrictive and unrealistic binary set up by the boundaries of the
closet – that one is either all the way in or all the way out of the closet. Griner
reconfigured the logic of the closet by refusing to identify with its constraints, instead she
attempted to forgo the politics of the closet by refusing to confirm a timeline that would
configure her body, historically, as either closeted or uncloseted.
However, while her statement does offer us a queered potential for other ways of
discussing sexual orientation that bypass the closet, it still does so within the language of
neoliberalism. As Griner identifies, “just be who you are. Don't worry about what other

29
I would add that I make this statement in reference to the recent “coming out” moments that exist in a
culture that more openly engages with questions of sexuality. Also, it should not ignore the fact that
previous female athletes, such as Sheryl Swoopes, did engage in a “coming out” narrative that included
coordinated media releases and corporate sponsorships from LGBT businesses (in her case, Olivia Cruises).

166

people are going to say, because they're always going to say something, but, if you're just
true to yourself, let that shine through. Don't hide who you really are” (2013). Here again
we see a reliance on empowerment through personal responsibility. The need for the
individual to just “be who they are” in order to affect change. While I truly believe that
her stance to the ‘coming out’ process is important as it gestures towards an otherness of
sexual identification, its reliance on neoliberal discourses should not be ignored. As
academics have argued “empowerment through visibility reifies empowerment, justifying
it as an end in itself rather than as a starting point for material change and feminist social
justice” (Banet-Weiser, 2015, p. 185). What is effaced in this attention to personal truth
and honesty is the fact that even though Griner felt comfortable to be who she was, she
also played at a University which has a “statement on human sexuality” that considers
“homosexual behavior” as a violation of the university’s code of conduct (Baylor
University, 2009).
30
Additionally, the statement advises that students “will not
participate in advocacy groups which promote understandings of sexuality that are
contrary to biblical teaching.” In fact, Griner was advised by her coach Kim Mulkey not
to discuss her sexuality and, as Griner describes, the administration “overlooked that part
of my life” and the PR department “shaved away” any questions posed by the press about
her sexuality” (Deitsch, 2014).
While it is not my attempt to discredit the positive feelings Griner holds towards
her alma-mater, she received a full scholarship from the University and national exposure

30
Baylor’s full statement on human sexuality reads as follows: “Baylor University welcomes all students
into a safe and supportive environment in which to discuss and learn about a variety of issues, including
those of human sexuality. The University affirms the biblical understanding of sexuality as a gift from God.
Christian churches across the ages and around the world have affirmed purity in singleness and fidelity in
marriage between a man and a woman as the biblical norm. Temptations to deviate from this norm include
both heterosexual sex outside of marriage and homosexual behavior. It is thus expected that Baylor
students will not participate in advocacy groups which promote understandings of sexuality that are
contrary to biblical teaching.”

167

as a member of the highly ranked basketball team, we cannot disregard the fact that the
university was willing to “overlook” her inability to live up to the “standards” of
heterosexuality explicit in their expectations of their students because she was also a
lucrative investment for the university. Griner herself has even vocalized the
ambivalence she feels towards an institution that simultaneously caused her immense
pride as a basketball player and yet immense pain as an individual (Griner & Hovey,
2014). During Griner’s four years at Baylor they lost only 15 games which included a
national championship and an undefeated season. She graduated as the all-time NCAA
leader in blocked shots, a three-time AP All-American, and two-time national player of
the year. In the four years leading up to her attendance the program lost 28 games and in
the season after she left, the program lost only five; however, this is the same amount of
games they lost over a three year period with Griner in the program, and the exposure
afforded to the University because of Griner’s play significantly improved their ability to
recruit players nationally.
Here, we see neoliberal tenets that use economic advantages to justify exceptions
to anti-gay policies. As long as Griner did not discuss her sexuality openly, and as long
as the University was winning, there were exceptions to her inherent sexual misconduct:
Baylor wanted to sell “themselves as a Christian university, but they are more than happy
to benefit from the success of their gay athletes. That is, as long as those gay athletes
don’t talk about being gay” (Griner & Hovey, 2014). Here again we see how neoliberal
policies desexualize homosexuality, especially as it pertains to the perceived economic
viability of the body in question. Moreover, her reliance on the language of personal
responsibility furthers a neoliberal ethos that ignores structural inequalities and bias,

168

since the expectation for change is placed on the individual, even if that same individual
is prohibited from participating in language or advocacy that would challenge antigay
frameworks and institutions.
Furthermore, the announcement by Griner, which came just weeks before Collins,
reminds us of the ways in which women’s advancements in sports and sexuality are
immediately dismissed because of their gender. While some reporters and analysts felt
Collins’s announcement was not as important as it could be because he was not a high-
profile player, they did not apply that same logic to Griner, who was widely considered to
be the most impressive female basketball player to enter the WNBA in years. Though
many agreed that Griner’s play could change the game of the WNBA, they did not
believe her nonnormative sexuality could do the same. While it is clear, from this
example, among others, that men’s sports still continue to be the standard from which we
set the benchmark for “important” and “newsworthy” events as they relate to sports and
sexuality, further investigations might also consider how ideas of male privilege allow for
male athletes to understand their announcements as inherently more important than
women’s.
A second example within the world of women’s sports, that of Megan Rapinoe, a
member of the 2015 Women’s World Cup winning US soccer team, is useful in the way
it highlights our continued preoccupation with sexual truth production, performative
language, and ‘coming out’ at the expense of other interpretations. I believe this instance
could additionally help remind us of alternatives to our normative approach. In July of
2015, shortly after The United States won the Women’s World Cup, Megan Rapinoe
went on ESPN’s Sportscenter as part of the team’s victory tour. When asked, along with

169

some of her teammates, to write down one word she would use to describe herself, she
penned a very emphatic, though very succinct, answer. She described herself as
“GAAAAY.” Not surprisingly, many latched on to this announcement with regards to
her sexuality – but what was lost in our preoccupation with sexual truth production, with
whether or not this was her “official” ‘coming out’ – was her double usage of the term, as
both a descriptor of identity and affect. She was referencing that she identified as a gay
woman, but she was also referencing that she was just really, really happy about winning
the world cup. Her confession of glee should have, could have, been read right along
with her confession of gayness.

Figure 3: Megan Rapinoe

170

As I end this section on ‘coming out,’ performative language, and its relation to
neoliberalism, I do think it is important to consider, in conversation with the queered
potentiality of the ‘coming out’ narratives of Griner and Rapinoe, that these moments
were not necessarily born out of complete choice. While Collins and Sam initially
benefited from a carefully orchestrated team of professionals who planned and executed
their mediated announcements, no doubt with their own financial gain in mind, as
explored in the next section, the same cannot be said for Griner and Rapinoe. This is, I
believe, important for recognizing that these moments of queered potentiality were
fostered because of gendered disparities that dictate what stories, what knowledge, and
what accounts become important and newsworthy. There is no doubt that had a team of
professionals helped Griner, arguably one of the most talented and promising women to
ever join the WNBA, announce her sexuality it would have been transmitted with the
same reach as Sam and Collins, two players who did not have the same name recognition
nor potential for athletic success. But even though Griner did not benefit from this
market-driven interest in telling her story, her queered version of ‘coming out’ is
important as a worthwhile alternative. As Sam stated almost a year after his
announcement, “If I had it my way, I never would have done it the way I did, never
would have told it the way I did…I would have done the same thing I did at Mizzou.
Which was to tell my team and my coaches and leave it at that” (Corsello, 2014). Sam’s
comments seem to gesture towards the generative potential of Griner’s own experience.
To forgo a mediated announcement, a spectacularized event, but one must question if this
estimation still relies on the ‘coming out’ narrative to “tell” teammates or coaches about

171

one’s sexual identity. It still relies, in some ways, on the notion of the closet and ideas of
confession, as opposed to Griner’s more queered alternative.
It is also worth noting that some might see the comparison of Collins and Sam, to
Griner and Rapinoe, of their options and expectations, as a false correlation because of
the extreme disparities in men’s and women’s sports. And while we could easily engage
in a conversation as to the stereotypes of men’s vs. women’s athletics, and the ways in
which gay men break stereotypes of athleticism while gay women confirm them, this, I
believe, is an overly reductive reading of women’s sports. In particular, women’s
collegiate basketball, just like men’s, has a history of cultivating homophobic
environments at a variety of schools, from Pepperdine to Penn State. As identified
earlier, Griner herself was asked by her coach not to discuss her sexuality publicly and
Baylor University, where Griner played, has antigay language written into its student
code of conduct. That being said, I do believe that the notion of authorship plays a large
part in the ‘coming out’ narrative. While Griner and Rapinoe were able to produce
alternatives to the traditional “coming out” narrative, I argue that this was based out of
gendered practices of looking that privilege the right of men to speak more openly and
with the expectation that more people want to hear what they have to say. Just as the
friction of Collins and Sam’s identification of black and gay played a role in their ability
to reconfigure sports and sexuality, so too do I believe that disidentifications played a
role in Griner and Rapinoe’s ability to cultivate new practices of ‘coming out’ within
sports. Though the traditional avenue of ‘coming out’ in a planned and prescribed
manner might not have been available to them in an equal way as it was for Collins and
Sam, I argue that this entitlement of authorship expected by men confines their ability to

172

explore new avenues in the manner that allowed Griner and Rapinoe to recreate and
rewrite bias as a new and generative resource for identification.

The Commodification of ‘Coming Out’
“From a marketing perspective, if you're a player who happens to be gay and you
want to be incredibly rich, then you should come out, because it would be the best
thing that ever happened to you from a marketing and an endorsement
perspective. You would be an absolute hero to more Americans than you can
ever possibly be as an athlete, and that'll put money in your pocket.”
- Mark Cuban, Owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks (2007)

Neoliberalism, and its reliance on expectations of personal responsibility,
circulates throughout the previous examples of ‘coming out’ narratives. We also see in
these stories the ways in which ideas of truth and authenticity operate in uneven ways.
They function both within positive and negative valences, they are crystalized, and, even
more so, they are commodified. This notion of commodification and corporatization of
‘coming out’ is important as we work to understand who benefits from these narratives
and, additionally, in how they further undergird neoliberalism. As it is performed
through sports engagements, this ‘coming out’ narrative becomes part of a cottage
industry of sorts – an industry whose product is ‘coming out.’
There is a move towards the commodification of ‘coming out’ – the bottling of
the process as a saleable entity. One way we see this, which is explored in the next
chapter, is in how the ‘coming out’ storyline dominates the pages of outsports.com, the
most recognizable LGBT-focused website, both in media mentions and unique user
visits. But these moments of sports and sexuality are not confined to alternative
organizations such as outsports.com. They have also produced an industry of

173

professionals focused on facilitating ‘coming out’ narratives within media industries.
Individuals such as Public Relations guru Howard Bragman have made a career
specializing in the orchestration of “coming out” for celebrities – an area he says he has
specialized in since 1991. From making connections for closeted athletes to members of
the media and advisors within LGBT sports worlds, to brokering deals for interviews, to
crafting press releases and dictating media appearances, he, along with others, profit off
the sexual truth reproduction of these athletes. But their support for these individuals
only goes as far as their economic viability. While it is difficult to ascertain the exact
timeline of the relationship between Bragman and Sam, I did reach out to Bragman in
August of 2015 to speak to him about his role in Sam’s announcement.
31
Despite the fact
that Bragman had no qualms about speaking about the importance of his role in the
successful ‘coming out’ narratives of celebrities at an academic conference I organized in
2013, just months prior to Sam’s announcement, his company denied my request for an
interview for this project. They referred me to Sam’s sports agents as they said they no
longer represented Sam. This stands in contrast to a report in September of 2015, 6 weeks
after our email correspondence, where Sam announced he had recently separated from his
agents and publicist (Breech, 2015). While it is not my intention to parse through the
specifics of their business arrangement, what is of importance is the way in which
Bragman, and his firm Fifteen Minutes Public Relations, leveraged their relationship with
Sam during the height of his “15 minutes” of fame, but distanced themselves both after

31
As a point of clarity, the timeline that brought Bragman and Sam together is much easier to ascertain,
since he gave many interviews about how he was instrumental to the formulation of Sam’s ‘coming out’
plan. However, there are no such public proclamations about the end of the relationship nor of how the
plan might not have been formulated correctly.

174

Sam failed to make an NFL team and after Sam released statements expressing regret as
to how his announcement was facilitated and managed.
32

When Sam was still considered a viable commodity, Bragman positioned himself
front and center as the public face for Sam after it was decided that it would be in Sam’s
best interest not to give further interviews after his initial ‘coming out’ statement.
Instead, Bragman did offer quotes to a variety of news organizations, such as USA Today
and The Daily Beast, regarding the importance of his coordination of the event. He also
offered, in a self-written piece entitled “PR Lessons For All From Michael Sam's Coming
Out,” and released just days after Sam’s announcement, his understanding of the “coming
out” process. In his estimation “In every case there is a ‘before’ and an ‘after.’ Before
inevitably involves nerves, anxiety and self-questioning. Afterward, every person feels
like a weight has been lifted, they feel empowered and free and honest” (Bragman, 2014).
Here again we see a reductive estimation of the ‘after’ of ‘coming out.’ There is not an
attention to how the individual must navigate this new terrain, but simply a reliance on
the power of truth and “honesty.” As Bragman and Sam realized first-hand, this after of
‘coming out,’ especially within sports contexts, requires a more nuanced approach that
attends to the contradictions and ambivalences of sports and sexuality.
It is worth noting that Bragman, Sam’s agents, and advisors from outsports.com
and various LGBT sports organizations had originally decided not to announce Sam’s
sexuality until after the NFL combine. However, this changed when Bragman received
unconfirmed information that another news outlet, other than the ones he had chosen,
might have heard about Sam’s announcement. Therefore, Sam’s advisors decided to

32
Though his representatives did secure him a spot on ABC’s popular show Dancing with the Stars after he
failed to make a team.

175

move his revelation, from the spring of 2014, to early February. While Bragman, Sam,
and others repeatedly relied on the narrative that Sam’s planned announcement was a
chance for Sam “to tell his story,” one must question how much this change was made to
benefit Sam, or to benefit the media partners that Bragman had promised the story to.
The narrative that ‘coming out’ allows athletes to speak for themselves must be critically
engaged with to ask: who it is they are worried is “speaking for them?” Though Collins
identified news outlets such as TMZ that might nefariously tell his story in a way that
contradicts the narrative he would like to produce, within an environment that prioritizes
the economic windfall of these announcements, one must look more expansively at all
those who profit from these announcements.

‘Coming Out’ and Consumer Citizenship
This neoliberal commodification of the ‘coming out’ narrative within sports can
also be seen in as an opportunity for established corporations to show support for LGBT
causes through consumer citizenship. Here, consumer citizenship is meant to represent
the ways in which corporations allow citizens to participate in the furthering of liberal
ideals, such as freedom and equality, among others, through their purchases and
consumptive practices. (Banet-Weiser & Lapsansky, 2008). As Banet-Weiser further
argues, “Like other forms of social or political activism, commodity activism hinges on a
central goal of empowerment. However, despite the social-change rhetoric framing much
commodity activism, the empowerment aimed for is most often personal and individual,
not one that emerges from collective struggle or civic participation” (Banet-Weiser,
2012). In this estimation of the neoliberal consumer it is then up to the individual, rather

176

than social policy, to affect change through consumption. The consumer “does good by
buying good” (Banet-Weiser, 2012). Furthermore, these moments are experienced
individually, and often in isolation, rather than through collective action or community
engagement. As Banet-Weiser and Lapsansky further articulate, political efficacy is then
understood through loyalty to goods and brands.
With regards to sports and the ‘coming out’ narrative the ambition to control and
capitalize on the ‘pink dollar’ is evident in multiple ways. One example is the
announcement by Adidas, in February of 2016, that they would not drop an athlete they
sponsor if the athlete were to ‘come out.’ The announcement was carefully coordinated
with a marketing campaign, aimed at the LGBT community, where they sold shoes,
apparently worn by two women with the slogan, “The love you take is equal to the love
you make.”
33
While the company should no doubt be applauded for a proactive stance
towards supporting LGBT athletes, their support hinges on the individual athlete’s ability
to ‘come out’ rather than any push by the company to support political action that would
work to counteract heteronormative culture or homophobic policies.
In fact, one of the company’s biggest sponsorship deals is a 13 year, $200 million
contract with Houston Rockets guard James Harden (Heitner, 2015). While it is
productive that Adidas is taking the stance that if Harden were to ‘come out,’ they would
support him, their carefully curated selection of pride shoes would do little to counteract
the fact that, as of November of 2015, Houston rejected an equal-rights ordinance (the
Houston Equal Rights Ordinance, or HERO) that “would have prevented employers and

33
I include the qualifier “apparently” since the advertisement relied on an implicit reading of the message
rather than an explicit statement. The image of the two “women” was actually just two shaven legs,
wearing Adidas shoes with pink accents, positioned as if they were in an embrace or kiss. The images
connote lesbian coupling without visualizing this moment of homosexual affection outright.

177

landlords from discriminating against people for a number of reasons, sexual orientation
and gender identity among them” (Deruy, 2016). While Adidas shows their support for
LGBT rights through the sale of products aimed at the community, and rhetoric meant to
encourage more athletes to ‘come out,’ this ignores the ways in which the LGBT
community is still continually marginalized and disempowered through political and legal
actions.
But Adidas is actually not the first athletic company to employ the tactic of
neoliberal consumer citizenship with regards to the LGBT community. They, as many
reporters (oddly) lamented, were late to the game. Nike was the first major athletic
company to reach out to the LGBT community through their #BeTrue campaign.
34

Capitalizing on this notion of “truth” so essentialized in the ‘coming out’ narrative, Nike
released the #BeTrue line of products, which consists of shoes, tshirts, and other athletic
gear adorned with the highly stylized and rainbow colored-logo and city names, such as

34
It is worth noting that in February of 1995, almost 14 years after the initial AIDS epidemic began, and
just a few years into a so-called “second wave” of the epidemic, a groundbreaking advertisement premiered
on television. The 30 second spot for Nike followed marathon runner Ric Muñoz as he traveled through a
sun soaked and tree lined park. As he navigated his way through the rugged terrain the audience was
shown the copy, “80 miles every week. 10 marathons every year. HIV positive.” As the ad faded to black
the familiar “Just Do It” tagline and Nike swoosh were the last images seen. However Nike’s Director of
Advertising Joe McCarthy claimed that “this is not a statement about Nike getting behind some social
cause” but rather, an ad about running and “...about a guy who is out there pushing and challenging his
limits.”

178

Portland, San Francisco, and New York (also represented in rainbow colored font).
35

Figure 4: Items from the Nike #BETRUE Line of Products
“The colorful #BeTrue collection by Nike is designed to celebrate “the passion and
pursuit of sport by all athletes” (Wallace, 2015). The products, which were initially
produced in 2011, are released to coincide with various gay pride festivals every June in
an attempt to provide a material counterpoint to the more ephemeral production of truth
that accompanies so many narratives of sports and sexuality. As Tim Hershey, VP of
global merchandising for Nike, explains “We’re rallying the world to embrace #BETRUE
as a call-to-action for all athletes to be their most authentic selves in June and all year

35
Unsurprisingly, the products still conform to traditional gender binaries, as the shoes, shirts, and even
socks are sold as separate lines from men and women.

179

long” (Hinzmann, 2015).

Figure 5: Jason Collins Wearing Nike #BeTrue Clothing
Just as Sarah Banet-Weiser (2012) argues that companies, such as Dove, used
female empowerment spurned on by second-wave feminist discourse as a way to
counteract male-dominated society, so too does Nike capitalize on discourses of “truth”
embedded in ‘coming out’ narratives and neoliberal understandings of the importance of
individual action and personal responsibility as a way for LGBT individuals to counteract
homophobic culture. However, just as with Dove, the ability for citizens to best speak to
their “authenticity” is through the consumption of products. But again, this political
action through personal consumption ignores how too narrow a focus on representation
and incorporation into the mainstream, even as a celebration and acceptance of
difference, will often come at the expense of other identities that many argue the LGBT
community should be standing in solidarity with (as opposed to looking for solidarity

180

within that which previously excluded). So, too narrow a focus on representation has
local, national and global ramifications.
By local, I mean that as the LGBT community accepts a sketching of the
community as a packaged good, as a branded and saleable entity, it forces, through
assimilation, the shedding of those members of the LGBT community who exist outside
of commodification. This type of singular focus on truth rarely allows for much nuance.
It obscures the neoliberal, and often unattainable, quality of authenticity and ignores more
fluid understandings of sexuality and identification. So a celebration of Nike’s including
the LGBT community in the same representational practices as straight athletes, as
treating them just as economically viable, means that it ignores those who exist outside of
this rigid understanding of the community.
By global, I mean the way in which this type of consumer activism asks the
LGBT community to agree with, or at least ignore, unfair labor practices associated with
the company. This is even more important in the case of LGBT activism because Nike’s
#Be True line represents a business model that allows for the funding of aggressive and
niche marketing campaigns through the money it saves by outsourcing its manufacturing.
And, as others have noted, this outsourcing includes low wages and poor working
conditions for workers in foreign countries (including slave wages, forced overtime,
arbitrary abuse, unsafe working conditions, such as locked doors, and unsafe chemicals)
(Nisen, 2013). Therefore the LGBT community must accept a representational and
political victory, obtained through consumption, on the backs of exploited labor.
By national, I return again to a similar critique of Adidas’s efforts to support
LGBT athletes while simultaneously ignoring the material realities of discrimination that

181

might hinder their ability to ‘come out.’ Adidas is not alone, as Nike sponsors athletic
programs at the publically funded University of Houston and the Football Players at
Baylor University.
36
Though Nike shows a commitment to “truth” as political action in
the service of LGBT rights, this approach does little to account for high-rates of LGBTQ
homeless youths, especially queers of color, above average murder rates of transgender
individuals, and a lack of uniform and effective employment non-discrimination laws at
both the local, state, and federal level, among others.
Within this formation of neoliberalism, LGBT-themed pride products fit squarely
within an affirmative, rather than a transformative, framework. They do not work to
transform the system, but rather affirm a growing trend of politically based products. For
Nike and Adidas, consumption becomes the process through which political action is
realized. Now you can not only voice your truth, you can purchase it too.
While it is comforting to bolster calls for ‘coming out’ as a vehicle for change, it
is necessary to be cautious of calls for a “gay Jackie Robinson” that do not recognize how
the very words and actions we use to advocate for diversity within sports are already
inculpated by relations of power.
37
Furthermore, this specific call for visibility is not
available for all individuals and overlooks very important intersectionalities. As Pat
Griffin writes, “The color of our skin and our access to economic resources can have a
huge impact on how we choose to present our” identities to others (1998, p. 164).
However, this quote is used not to assume that race or class are qualities added to

36
However Griner’s former teammates, the Baylor Women’s Basketball Team, are sponsored by Adidas.
37
Furthermore, the reliance on a “gay Jackie Robinson” ignores the historic and economic factors that went
into Robinson’s breaking of the color line within Major League Baseball. Robinson was a carefully
selected player, one whose participation was predicated on a cultural and economic connection to the
Negro baseball leagues. And it should not be forgotten that there were economic factors that made
integration an attractive concept to many – not necessarily because of its ability for social change, but
because of the financial windfall from new nonwhite fans.

182

sexuality (which would function then as the core of identity), but rather that these
multiple articulations of identity must be interrogated in order to understand who is made
legible within specific types of gay sports visibility. Here, my approach is not interested
in simply liberating the homosexual from oppression, but rather committed to the
interrogation of the production of sexual knowledge and the ways in which it structures
social life, institutional practices, and individual identity formations. It is this attention to
heteronormativity and the privileging of heterosexuality outside of specific acts of bias
that attends to the gaps normally overlooked by a preoccupation with homophobia.
Overall, this chapter makes the claim that by relying on the necessity of knowing,
on the need to categorize athletes as gay in order to protect them not only places an unfair
expectation on the gay individual to announce one’s sexuality, in an admittedly
heteronormative world. But it also delimits the possibilities of self-identification by
forcing individuals of nonnormative sexualities to adhere to a stringent category of
neoliberal self-identification in order to “be counted.” These formations work to
crystalize LGBT categories as entry points for accessing sporting spaces. Athletes are
encouraged to challenge anti-gay policies and heteronormative culture by ‘coming out,’
and yet this emphasis on personal responsibility ignores the ways in which it forces
LGBT individuals to uphold neoliberal power structures that favor economics over
individuals. Additionally, the ‘coming out’ narratives reliance on truth, and its
subsequent commodification through products such as the #BeTrue line, show how a
focus on truth is interested in a strategic answer rather than engaging in LGBT activism
and radicalism.

183

Lastly, in the context of sports culture, this necessity to come out forces
individuals to place themselves above and beyond the team in a way that is seen as
detrimental to sports participation and achievement. We expect an individual to produce
themselves as gay, and yet this production then places them outside the realm of proper
sporting culture behavior and at odds with tenets of a sports organization. We expect gay
individuals to be honest, and yet we see no place for the type of spectacularization
produced by this honesty within sports culture. Furthermore, this double standard brings
us back to questions of the private and the public, of secrecy and disclosure. There are
expectations of what should be spoken about and what should be kept to oneself, with
homosexuality often discursively produced as a private and secret matter (what you do in
your sheets is your business). But this ignores the very ways in which heteronormative
society places these expectations around the conflicting expectation to ‘come out,’ to be
honest, and to live one’s truth openly, no matter the consequences.

184

Chapter Three:
Challenging The Clubhouse: Outsports.com and Digital LGBT Sports
Scholarship
Jim Buzinski and Cyd Zeigler Jr., two former print journalists, out gay men, and
avid sports fans, founded Outsports.com in 1999. The website was created as a media
outlet that allowed gay sports fans a place “to get together and talk sports the way they
wanted to talk sports” (Buzinski & Zeigler Jr., 2007, p. xiii). Implicit in this description
of outsports.com is that the company provides a specific space for LGBT individuals to
discuss sports and sports culture that attends to issues relevant to the LGBT sports
community, but also that it is different from mainstream sports media sources because it
is run by gay men, for the LGBT community. The site continues a thread first identified
by the reading of Pride and Progress in chapter one, and continued throughout this
chapter, that there is a need for LGBT media sources to be able to speak for themselves.
Since its inception the site has grown and gained notoriety in both the general
sporting and LGBT worlds. Both founders have appeared on ESPN and SiriusXM’s
OutQ radio, along with television shows such as Face the Nation (CBS), This Week
(ABC) and other programs featuring stories about gay sports issues. Buzinski and
Zeigler have also published a 300-page book entitled The Outsports Revolution (2007).
1

In 2011 the website received over 250,000 unique visitors per month and had 12,400
members in its clubhouse feature; an LGBT sports hybrid of dating website match.com
and identity portal gay.com – though almost exclusively targeted at, and populated by,

1
OutQ was a Sirius/XM radio channel geared towards the LGBT community. Sirius/XM canceled the
network abruptly in March of 2016 after over 14 years on the air.

185

gay men (Buzinski, 2011).
2
In 2015, two years after SB Nation acquired the site, a
purchase I discuss later in this chapter, outsports.com received 10 million unique visits
and 17 million page views (Buzinski, 2016).
Although the most established, outsports.com is not alone – other websites, such
as competenetwork.com, widerights.com, thesportspectacle.com, and thesportsfag.com
cater towards the LGBTQ sports community, along with a host of sports-oriented blogs
from youth athletes to passionate fans. There is even a dating website,
LGBTSportZdate.com, which is bills itself as “the first and only dating site to cater
specifically to sports enthusiasts within the LGBT community” (LGBTSportZDate.com,
2015).
3
And in a moment of proliferating multi-media platforms, these websites are
unique in their ability to engage members of the LGBT community. As media scholar
Larry Gross argues, it is important not just to focus on representations of minorities but
also to unpack both who produces these images and whom they are geared towards.
Using a pattern suggested by sociologist Elihu Katz, Gross argues that the “smallest
portion of media content” is produced by and for minorities (2001, p. 12). This line of
reasoning is extended to outsports.com as a website designed “by gay sports fans for gay
sports fans” (Gough, 2007, p. 160). The multitude of websites aimed at the LGBT
sporting community provide for a unique engagement with questions of sports and the
gay community. In particular, Outsports.com’s place as the most visited and widely
publicized website, along with its 2013 acquisition by SB Nation, a subsidiary of Vox

2
The clubhouse feature was removed from the site after the acquisition by SB Nation. While it was
initially communicated that this feature was being re-tooled and would reappear, it was eventually
abandoned. While no official reason was given to users I was informed that the rise of sites such as Grindr
and other social media platforms meant “there were many ways for LGBT athletes to connect” and it was
too difficult to manage this aspect of the site (Buzinski, 2016).
3
LGBTSportZdate.com and SportZdate.com are owned by Sports Fan Match LLC, a dating and social
network company that started in 2013 as “a service for the 6.3 million members of the USA Sports Fan
Association” (LGBTSportZDate.com, 2015).

186

Media, situate it as a unique forum through which to investigate how media texts are
situated, understood, and made meaningful within the LGBT community.
4
These digital
spaces allow users to engage with aspects of their identity, and the subsequent restrictions
placed on those subjectivities, which might be prohibited in concretized (non-digital)
spaces. While many members of the LGBT sports community can gather in non-digital
spaces, as explored in chapter four, many turn to forums such as outsports.com because
the physical realm carries with it a wide range of constraints due to political, familial,
workplace or other kinship limitations. The construction and deployment of these online
identities (situated as interconnected realms of the political and the personal) are
important spaces for LGBT community building and can tell us something about how
communities are created, become meaningful, and ultimately, affect social and political
change.
Outsports.com’s long history of existence (relative to other online LGBT sports
portals), its track-record of documenting gay athletic achievements, its history of
providing a space for athletes (former professional, current collegiate, and amateur alike)
to ‘come out,’ and its active, and vocal, coverage of LGBT issues and discriminatory
practices within sports culture have uniquely positioned it as a “go to” forum for
discussing sports and sexuality.
5

While this analysis focuses on online engagements it recognizes that blogs and
websites use affiliations with traditional publishing and television programs to bolster

4
The acquisition of outsports.com by Vox Nation in 2013, and the subsequent implications brought about
by this purchase, will be further explored later in this section.
5
While this chapter engages in a critical content analysis of outsports.com, it should be recognized that
Buzinski and Ziegler have been some of the loudest voices in working to both mediate the intersection of
sports and LGBT identities and hold sports leagues accountable for anti-LGBT behavior and policy. For
instance, when cites and states have passed anti-LGBT legislation outsports.com has lead the charge in
requesting that sports organizations move sports events, such as the 2015 NCAA men’s basketball
Championship and Superbowl LI (2017) in Houston, out of cities with anti-LGBT policies.

187

their reputation. Outsports.com makes these connections through television appearances
referenced earlier, but also in its partnerships with mainstream and non-LGBT oriented
news sites in fostering and “organizing” the ‘coming out’ of professional athletes. Most
notably the website was instrumental in advising Michael Sam and his agents and PR Rep
on how, when, and where to ‘come out’ and brokering the deal with ESPN and The New
York Times to cover the story. This particular case study, and its accompany
commodification of ‘coming out’ and the situating of these men as ‘coming out’
consultants was explored previously in chapter two. These relationships, and the
exposure afforded by them, have bolstered outsports.com’s position as the premier LGBT
sports news organization. Finally, outsports.com is unique in the way it straddles the
divide between “traditional” and more “modern” approaches to news reporting.
Outsport.com leverages the immediacy and low-barrier of entry inherent to online forums
while still positioning itself as a news blogs similar to traditional news organization’s
websites. The founders have used their history as journalists and their connections to
institutionalized news making sites (television, radio, print) as an important way in which
they set themselves apart from other online websites.
This chapter explores the role outsports.com plays in the construction of LGBT
sports fandom and community. First, it continues an existing scholarly thread regarding
the importance of mediated publics in providing alternative spaces of subjectivity vital
for the LGBT community. It follows previous scholarship that seeks to distinguish
between gay and queer theorizing and questions how “queer” the web truly is (Weight,
2002). It adds to this notion through the recognition of remote intimacies (Tongson,

188

2011) and digital acquaintanceship as unique and necessary to the formation of LGBT
sports communities.
Second, it explores the ways in which everyday/quotidian understandings of
sexuality are renegotiated through online engagements. It is attuned to how sports fans
interact with, and make sense of, sports media. In particular, I argue that the
(re)negotiation of language and the queering of terminology through digital platforms can
work to reconcile the ambivalent and often conflicting positionalities of LGBT identity
and sports affinity. I contend that these sites illuminate how a slippage within
identification practices does not shut down the conversation of identity and affinity.
Rather I content that these contestations open up a space with which to think through and
problematize, dialectically, the tightly scripted narrative of sports and sexuality. Put
another way, forums like outsports.com both recreate narratives that reflect dominant
mainstream ideas about sports and sexuality while also allowing writers and readers to
engage in a conversation that is unavailable on mainstream sites. Spaces such as
outsports.com allow for an open engagement with, and dialogue about, sports and the
LGBT community: users do not subordinate one for the other. Though these discussions
do not erase dominant ideologies and identifications the struggle over static meaning and
fixed terms implies that heteronormative power is both reinforced and undermined in
these spaces. These oppositional positionalities exist in conversation with each other, the
residue of both informing and altering the other. There is an ambivalence to many of the
discussions seen by user comments about the relationship between sports and the LGBT
community. I track how users often revel in these gaps and how others attempt to resolve
the ambivalence through a fixing of what is often incoherent and unreadable.

189

However, this work continually recognizes that although there is queer
potentiality provided by these spaces, these moments of possibility arrive within, through,
and in relation to institutionalized and systemic understandings of hegemonic masculinity
and heteronormativity. Following scholars such as Anne Balsamo, I argue that the
technology of outsports.com is not neutral, but rather a complex set of relationships that
can be both simultaneously inspiring as well as disciplining. Put another way, while sites
likes outsports.com offer users an opportunity to explore identification practices and re-
code static terminology, these moments of possibility are still produced within arenas
dictated and influenced by normative beliefs of the relationship between sports culture,
economic capital, and hegemonic understandings of masculinity and sexuality. This line
of reasoning returns again to the question of an affirmative versus a transformative
framework. There is a way in which outsports.com replicates real-world relationships
while simultaneously producing new relationships and experiences. But that we are
never free of the masters tools, as evidenced both in the technical design of the website
and the way in which stories are often presented or written. Ultimately, I argue that while
outsports.com often falls into an affirmative framework there are still moments of user
engagement that push the site, and the larger discussion of sports and LGBT identities,
towards a more transformative schema. I believe that that these queered fissures should
not be dismissed because of their origin from, or proximity to, (hetero)normativity, but
rather we must attend to how and when these moments make sense to individuals and,
conversely, how the comfort of traditional ideologies move in uneven ways through
discussions of sports culture and LGBT identity.

190

Sports and Digital Media: A Case Study of Outsports.com
The LGBT community has a long history of using communicative technologies as
tools to connect across disparate, and often hostile, spaces and as agents of political
organizing and action (Alexander 2002; Gross, 2007; Gray, 2009, among others). They
were one of the first minority communities to use the Internet as a connective tool in the
early and mid 1990s and throughout its history the Internet has provided a space that
might otherwise be unavailable to LGBT individuals because of spatial, temporal,
political, and/or economic limitations. Furthermore, LGBT online engagements further
problematize the online disembodiment thesis, the notion that “there is a radical
disjuncture between experiences in the physical world and those found in cyberspace”
(Campbell, 2004, p. 5). The constant (re)introduction of the corporeal into online
communities and identities complicates previous understandings of online interactions
and shows how offline identities influence how LGBT individuals access, utilize, and
create meaning among online worlds. Rather than thinking of the offline and online
worlds as mutually exclusive, scholars such as Campbell argue that the way in which
LGBT communities engage with one another online is reflective of real-world
interactions and experiences. Additionally, LGBT individuals use these online
interactions and kinship structures to expand their social networks in the physical world
and/or as a resource that allows for the engagement with identification practices that
might be hidden or unavailable within concretized settings. Online and offline
relationships are mutually constitutive and one should not conflate the physical world
with the “real world”; a move that often occurs at the expense of important and
meaningful online relationships.

191

This chapter takes as a starting point the notion that “the activities that people do
online are intimately interwoven with the construction of the offline world” (Baym, 2006,
p. 86). This connection and, at some points, tension between the online and offline is
especially important to discussions of sexuality since queerness, which operates against
normativity, might still be bound up in discussions, decisions, and understandings of
realness and authenticity that are always already relational to constructed ideas of
heteronormativity. Put another way, while looking for moments of queer potentiality we
must recognize that they are often ignited by products, experiences, or identities that are
decidedly nonqueer. Here we see how the circulation of alternative identities,
identification practices, and subcultural communities struggle to imagine new relations
within and through commodities and experiences that often, at first glance, seem to
foreclose any emancipatory potential.
This dissertation contends that these two spaces are mutually constitutive and that
presentations of identity are deployed unevenly in “real” spaces just as they are in virtual
spaces; they are constructed and stitched together in real life presentations just as they are
online, though particular constraints to presentation vary accordingly. As my field
studies of gay sports bars shows in the following chapter, notions of authenticity are often
ambivalent. The organizing and implementing of differing aspects of one’s identity are
carefully negotiated no matter the setting. In fact, the notion of “community” seems to be
so fraught for LGBT sexualities because it is both a constraining organizing principle and
yet provides for engagements either unavailable or unsafe in other arenas of life. On one
hand, certain aspects of digital LGBT sports spaces, as shown in the following examples,
simply promote an affirmative space where a few homonormative members of the LGBT

192

family feel at home. Alternatively, other examples that emphasize a contestation with
static language and an attention to, and interrogation of, heteronormativity would provide
for an opening of a new more inclusive and transformative space no matter one’s
identification.
Outsports.com exists as a continuation of the migration of subcultural spaces into
virtual worlds. While a further interrogation into the construction of the website follows,
first I believe it’s important to elucidate two key theoretical aspects that underpin the way
users network and connect on LGBT sports websites such as outsports.com. The first,
remote intimacies, and the second, digital acquaintanceships are both vital in this
continued discussion of how LGBT identity and sports affinity interact with media texts,
become meaningful, and gain traction within a particular community.
The concept of remote intimacies is particularly useful here in understanding how
sports fandom connects LGBTQ individuals across disparate realms. Here, a remote
intimacy is taken from the work of Karen Tongson to imply both “simultaneous moments
of consumption” across long distances and “networked forms of intimacy among
strangers online” (Tongson, 2011, p. 23 and 93). Specifically, in this case, remote
intimacies refers to shared knowledge of sports culture and the ability to find a queer
forum to express rearticulations of a traditionally heteronormative culture. Remote
intimacies allow for a conversation across “traditionally accepted” realms of LGBT
meaning making.

193

Remote Intimacies on Outsports.com
As previously discussed, sports and gay culture, historically, were produced as
oppositional concepts despite the close connection between the two (Pronger, 1990).
Conversely, though modern sports culture has engaged more with the connection between
the two positionalities it continues to rely on modes of citizenship (the husband, the wife,
the good family man and the caring mother, the soldier) not available to LGBT
individuals, or available unevenly. Finally, many members of the gay community
experienced sports affinity before fully understanding how exactly they situate
themselves as sports fans. Though many would not deny feelings of same-sex desire at a
young age, most would agree that their position as a particular type of sports fan was an
earlier and easier identification and vocalization to make before doing the same with their
nonnormative sexualities. These connections to sports fandom are useful in the way they
are reincorporated as positive resources in their establishment of an LGBT identification.
Fans, on outsports.com, and in other spaces of LGBT sports culture, use their
shared connection to particular teams, sports moments, or sports industries, created often
without any other gay individuals in proximity, as a common ground to connect with
members of the LGBT community. In some instances this is as simple as shared fandom
of a particular team, but in others it serves as resource for thinking through the affective
qualities of particular sports moments: examples of this are the way fans remember,
share, and work through their own feelings about the moment tennis player Billie Jean
King beat Bobby Riggs, Magic Johnson’s announcement he had AIDS, the press
conference Mike Piazza held denying allegations of homosexuality, and, more recently,
the day NBA player Jason Collins came out, Britney Griner’s selection as the number one

194

overall pick in the WNBA draft, and Michael Sam’s selection in the NFL draft.
6
These
moments mean something different to individuals who position themselves as sports fans
or sports participants and allow for a link within the LGBT community that utilizes more
than just sexual object choice as connective tissue.
Remote intimacies are also apparent in the multiple ways that the website inspires
content produced by users. While the ‘coming out’ of professional athletes garners the
most web-traffic, so too do stories of high school and collegiate LGBT athletes. In
particular, these stories, often written in the first person, recognize previous ‘coming out’
stories featured on the website as the catalyst for their own decision to share their
individual experience. While a website such as outsports.com gives priority to stories
sanctioned by the editors, as seen in their prominent placement on the site’s homepage,
there are fan forums which allow for individual users to post stories and threads to share
with other fans. In a digital formation of the para-social contact hypothesis, these
amateur and collegiate athletes find kinship within their shared experiences as sports
spectators and/or participants. This collective interaction allows them to work through
issues and ideas of sexuality. They are able to find solace and comfort in their shared
experiences despite often never having met or spoken to these individuals except through
the reading of their stories digitally.

6
It’s important to keep in mind that these moments are filled with tension and hard to situate as either
entirely positive or negative. King’s triumphant win was dampened by allegations that Riggs had thrown
the match to repay a gambling debt. Johnson’s emotional announcement, and the much needed attention it
brought to a misunderstood disease, was tempered by his appearance on The Arsenio Hall Show when the
studio audience applauded his admission that he had contracted the virus through heterosexual sex with
women other than his wife, etc. Britney Griner, while the most dominant woman in college basketball, was
advised by her coach to keep her sexuality a secret.

195

Digital Acquaintanceships on Outsports.com
The second aspect that ties together members of the outsports.com community are
digital acquaintanceships, which I use to reference the familiarity embedded in
interactions seen on the website. Many users post frequently on the site and, while the
details of their own identifications is not always known, these consistent exchanges help
to produce a type of digital familiarity.
It is also interesting to note that commenters on outsports.com refer to the original
owners and head editors by their first names and much of their language reflects a more
personal relationship, thus further disrupting the “real life” versus “digital life” binary.
The familiarity that many readers have with the website’s founders does not necessarily
stem from a personal acquaintance with them. The blurring of the active versus passive
user further bolsters this notion since users do not simply read the pages of
outsports.com, but are provided a space to produce their own stories and threads. These
lines are continually crossed not only in the comments section of “sanctioned” articles
but also in the robust fanposts section of the website. Users are encouraged to share their
stories and experiences in relation to the stories produced by the website’s writers.
Furthermore, many of the ‘coming out’ stories, especially those focusing on high
school and collegiate athletes, are featured because these individuals are self-identifying
members of the outsports.com community. They started out as viewers of the website
before offering up their own stories. Many of the stories are written by the athletes and
posted to the website, with slight editing changes, by the cofounders. In fact, in many of
their articles they precede ‘coming out’ stories by reminding readers that they too can
‘come out’ on the pages of outsports.com. Before their 2013 year end roundup of who

196

‘came out’ they wrote: “If you would like to increase that number before the end of the
year -- or start 2014 by coming out publicly -- drop us a line at outsports@gmail.com.”
However, the requirements necessitated to actually make it on the “pages” of
outsports.com are not made publicly available. These two notions help to tether the
community of LGBTQ sports fans unique to website such as outsports.com

Templates, Site Construction, and the Production of Normativity
As argued earlier, an attention to the way in which a site such as outsports.com is
important to understand how it fits within affirmative frameworks. Through a cursory
examination of the site’s homepage, site construction, and general branding we see that
outsports.com relies on previous tactics that position the site as a part of the LGBT
community. The website provides, in one digital space, information and stories
previously dispersed or unknown regarding the LGBT community and sports culture,
though it does so similarly to other gay websites, by first reasserting the primacy of
sexuality as a core attribute. In fact the website’s tagline “Outsports: The galactic leader
in gay sports” unknowingly reinforces a critique of gay websites in that they often lend
themselves to hyperbolic and assertive markings that often overestimate the
generalizability of the LGBT community and carry with them the imposition of “sexual
category” boundaries. While the site lacks gay-friendly identifiers such as pink triangles,
rainbow flags, or other symbols associated with the gay community and mapped onto
LGBT digital spaces (Alexander, 2002), its logo depicts two white hands pushing open a
gym locker from the inside out: an homage to the closet and the ‘coming out’ process,

197

though one which highlights the website’s focus on sports culture by replacing the closet
door with the locker door.

Figure 6: Outsports.com Logo
The website’s current layout follows the standardized design template that guides
all blogs within the SB Nation portfolio (which as of this writing includes 311 blogs).
7

This template, from a design standpoint, is an upgrade from the website’s previous static
layout that remained unchanged from the site’s inception until its acquisition by SB
Nation. All blogs under the SB Nation umbrella include a prominent navigation/menu
bar that includes the following tabs: home, fanposts, fanshots, galleries, sections, about,
and shop. The shop feature directs fans to fanatics.com where users can purchase items
associated with their favorite teams. In the case of outsports.com, this menu bar is
amended to add an “out athletes” section after fanposts, and fan shots.

Figure 7: Outsports.com Menu Bar
Most sites are dedicated to individual teams and also include tabs that direct
readers to team rosters and official team sites, along with information on how to obtain

7
SB Nation is a popular website that organizes sports fan communities mostly by team affiliation. This
extends to professional sports and collegiate teams. Therefore, the addition of outsports.com is a departure
from traditional model based on team affinity rather than individual identity.

198

tickets. Though these sites are standardized within the SB Nation name, the “sections”
tab allows for each individual blog to customize sections that are most “appropriate” for
their fans: these sections serve as the discursive and organizing principles that guide the
website. For outsports.com, these specialized sections include: coming out stories,
homophobia, out athletes, galleries, coming out stories, and straight sports from the gays,
and archives (which provide information on articles posted before the migration from
independent website to SB Nation). This section has undergone some changes as the it
previously included a section titled “straight allies” instead of “straight sports from the
gays.”
Interesting, the subsections of galleries and out athletes are also given their own
placement next to fan posts and fan shots in addition to their inclusion in the outsports-
specific sections tab. These layout formats are not, it should be noted, particularly unique
to the website. The prioritizing of photo galleries, and the visual, replicates previous
findings that gay male websites have more galleries than women’s pages (Alexander,
Homo-Pages and Queer Sites: Studying the Construction and Representation of Queer
Identities on the World Wide Web, 2002). Furthermore, the section categories follow
predictable patterns in their estimation of the “stories” privileged by the gay community.
In particular, the notion of ‘coming out,’ and its accompanying linear logic of sexual truth
production, serves as the focus for many stories on outsports.com. There is a continued
drive within the LGBT community to create a list of out LGBT individuals for
recognition; a reliance on a specific type of visibility that requires adhering to traditional

199

forms of coming out in order to both gain recognition for oneself and for the importance
of the community based on a taxonomy of “outness.”
8

A visit to the outsports.com homepage shows that the images, stories, and focus
of the website not only follow institutional norms in its preoccupation with the “Big four”
American professional sports but, more importantly, recreates gendered and raced
disparities as the common focus is on gay male white athletes. This is further
undergirded by the ‘coming out’ storylines, which represent the dominant foci of the
website.
Despite the predominance of racial diversity within American sports, and the
history of sports connections within the lesbian community, the storylines featured by
outsports.com skew towards a focus on white gay male athletes. Additionally, this focus
on the ‘coming out’ storylines reinforces the critique of ‘coming out’ as a mode of
visibility most available for white male cisgender individuals. For example, though the
professional athletes emphasized earlier in this dissertation were both black men, the
majority of the ‘coming out’ stories featured on outsports.com are of white high school
and collegiate athletes. These images and storylines create and produce dominant
discourses and meanings associated with gay sports culture that over-represent the space
as white and male and rely on the ‘coming out’ storyline as a vital, though
unproblematized, avenue for categorizing and producing gay sexualities: as previous
work has documented ‘coming out’ stories remain a favored storytelling technique for “a
community looking for its own story to be replicated” (Alexander, 2002). These
examples point to the arguments I make regarding affirmative versus transformative
frameworks. While outsports.com engages with questions of sports and LGBT

8
This idea is explored more in chapter two of the dissertation.

200

sexualities, it does so in ways that fit within an affirmative framework that relies on
templates constructed for mainstream sports engagements.
While I would not accuse outsports.com of nefariously focusing on gay white
male experiences, I think this focus, particularly since many of these storylines are
initiated by the athletes themselves, forces a recognition of who the ‘coming out’
narrative is most “suitable” for. This venue reaffirms whiteness and maleness as the
dominant modes towards normative citizenship and while outsports.com provides a
venue for athletes to ‘come out,’ and to do so within an environment deemed safe, this
opportunity is not universally available for all individuals. In fact, an unpacking of the
discussion surrounding ‘coming out’ points to the fact that nonwhite athletes routinely
reference and acknowledge their race in the discussion of their sexuality while whiteness
continues to replicate itself as an unmarked or absent signifier for white individuals.
Additionally, the ‘coming out’ process works to mediate an individual in a hyper-visible
manner, a mode that privileges white individuals while ignoring the ramifications such an
announcement carries for those LGBT people who must also navigate their intersections
with other minority positions. While the website provides forums for a diversity of
athletes to tell their stories, on a whole, the ‘coming out’ of white athletes continues to
dominate.
In particular, the value of the ‘coming out’ narrative, and outsports.com’s general
approach to sports and sexuality, is positioned in economic terms. This is reminiscent of
the way in which the LGBT community historically has been overimagined as white,
male, and wealthy, despite evidence to the contrary (Sender, 2004). As Kevin Lockland,
the VIP of SB Nation’s editorial operations stated after the acquisition of outsports.com,

201

“We look to target young, male, affluent influencers and the Outsports audience fit that
profile really well” (Raphael, 2013). For SB Nation and Vox Media, outsports.com
represents a perceived lucrative market.
Additionally, one cannot forget that Outsports.com also has stakes in the game.
Their ability to create, organize, and leverage the LGBT sports community in a particular
way (read: white and male) is economically advantageous for them since “national
corporate advertisers increasingly looked towards gay consumers as a new, desirable
target market, and toward the gay press as a means to reach them” (2004, p. 36).
Though the ‘coming out’ story might seem linear, heteronormative, and/or unequally
available to all LGBT individuals, it still represents an easily reproducible storyline that
quantifies LGBT sports members and delivers the promise of a “pink dollar” to a market
ever expanding: it should not be lost that sports is big business. This is, of course, no
better represented than in the acquisition of outsports.com by SB Nation and Vox Media.
Blogs typically featured by SB Nation cover team and sport specific sites, so the
acquisition of outsports.com represents a departure from their traditional model. Within
the layout of the website, the categories it (re)produces, and the storylines and modes of
storytelling it privileges, it is difficult to make a case for a queered rendering of sports
and sexuality; however, as the next section will argue, user engagements provide for an
opening with which to assert some queered readings of these sites.

Language and Limits: Discursive Contestations on Outsports.com
Rather than looking to stories of professional or collegiate gay athletes to
understand how their experiences speak to systemic issues of heteronormativity, this

202

chapter takes a cue from previous theorists such as Jenkins (2006), Ward (2008),
Edwards (2010), and Hamner (2010), among others, in order to examine how fans
theorize for themselves. Specific to this case study is the investigation of how
disruptions of stable sexual categories and terminology are discursively produced and
renegotiated online through outsports.com. By focusing on how fans struggle over the
meaning and usage of modern gay categories this chapter observes the “community’s
desire to claim their ability to define their own terms, rather than be defined through the
terms of (heterosexual) others” (Edwards, 2010, p. 167).
9

This focus is less interested in the sexual self-identification of individual sports
fans but rather in how conversations surrounding sports and gayness are queered through
discussions that challenge, disrupt, and/or question understandings of sexuality and
sexual binaries that carry with them negative or unspecific meanings.
10
The analysis is
not meant to advocate for one term over the other, but rather focuses on how a struggle
with these terms produces a new conversation concerning the signifiers we regard as
normative. It does not disagree with the idea that sports is a realm that both undergirds
and replicates heteronormativity and compulsory heterosexuality, but contends that this
recognition should not undermine the ability to queer the discussion through discursive
transformations. While we might question the “queerness” of digital gay sports portals, a
discussion attended to later in the chapter, the following case studies present an argument

9
It should be noted that the majority of terms used, contested and suggested are drawn from the existing
vocabulary of gay-oriented terms. While conversations do gesture towards an attempt to queer traditional
meanings and assumptions associated with these terms they, less often, offer up new nomenclature to
represent such queerings.
10
Since users identify their own sexuality in a variety of ways (both obvious and covert), this chapter does
not assume that all users of gay-oriented sports portals self-identify within the LGBT umbrella; however, it
does assume that their active engagement with, and participation on, the website implicates them as
belonging to the imagined LGBTQIA community.

203

for transformative frameworks that question the assumptions we overlook when
discussing sports and sexuality.
Here again we see the usefulness of Stuart Hall’s theory of articulation: of the
need to interrogate the socially constructed “links” that legislate and make legible lived
realities. While disagreements over language are not unique to LGBT sports websites,
what is unique are the ways in which these sites function to bridge the gap between
realms previously considered antithetical. LGBTQ sports fans can use individual
experiences, and their relation to an imagined community bolstered by remote intimacies,
to transgress and renegotiate boundaries often over-imagined as inflexible by the cultural
history of sports and sexuality. In particular, these fans produce queer fissures in
traditional discussions of sports and sexuality through discussions of language and
terminology, but unlike other websites where “trolling” often ignites or derails
conversations, the banter or raillery on outsports.com is produced within a space that
understands itself as part of a particular subculture. Relationships on outsports.com are
tethered more distinctly because of user’s shared positions as sports fans and members
(in whatever way) of the LGBTQ community.
11

I argue that fan’s struggle with language discursively within the comments section
of outsports.com in order to expand and problematize the way terminology is deployed in
discussions of sports and sexuality. I accomplish this by looking to two different case
studies from outsports.com. The first is the sexual assault cases at Pennsylvania State
University, in which a retired, though very long tenured, assistant coach for the football
team was discovered to be sexually assaulting young boys in the athletic facilities. The

11
By “traditional,” I am referring to the long-standing relationship between hegemonic masculinity and
sports culture.

204

second story continues this dissertation’s unpacking of the ‘coming out’ narrative by
looking at the way in which British diver Tom Daley’s ‘coming out’ story was discussed
and complicated by users on outsports.com. These are two very different discourses, but
I have chosen them to show the ways in which stories of sports and gay sexualities are
often thought together by media sources, and how users reinterpret both their relationship
to the LGBT community and problematize the language used to situate them. In
particular, I argue that the way in which users discuss and wrestle with terminology
shows that continuing need to reexamine static language and conventions previously used
to connect sports culture and the LGBT community.
This approach builds upon the ideas of discourse analysis first laid out in the
introduction to this dissertation. I return again to the importance of language as a
producer of material existences, especially as it relates to sexuality and the LGBT
community. As Foucault writes, discourse not only refers to the way in which language
produces specific rules and regulations pertaining to the world but also defines who we
are as subjects and how we operate within these structures. Our senses of self, along with
our relationships to structures, objects, institutions, etc., are made legible and
comprehendible through discursive productions. In particular, the classifications that
dictate sexuality as an organizing category work not just to catalogue, but rather situate
these categories as a marker of truth or realness rather than as socially produced. Put
another way, this discourse works as performative language that brings realities into
being.
12
Therefore, the terms associated with the LGBT community are deployed as
axiomatic and yet they are both socially constructed, historically contingent, and
intimately tied to the regulation of individuals who transgress the boundaries of

12
For more on the idea of performative language, please refer to the Introduction, Footnote 30.

205

normative sexuality. When more attention is paid to the construction of realities through
the use of organizing language, which often maintains an affirmative framework, the
better equipped we are to counteract these assumptions and practices. As William
Morgan writes, “social criticism and arguments are an important way to agitate for and
effect genuine, long-lasting progressive change” (2006, p. 212). The users of
outsports.com show that these arguments and contestations with static language
incorporate queer values into the discussion of sports and nonnormative sexualities and
gestures towards a transformative framework.

Is an Act an Identity? Or How to Describe a Scandal
In early November 2011, Cyd Zeigler Jr., one of the cofounders of outsports.com,
posted a story about the Penn State Scandal entitled, “Gay-Sex pedophilia scandal rocks
Penn State football, involving Jerry Sandusky” (2011). Though the article detailed the
breaking news that a retired Penn State assistant football coach was indicted by a grand
jury on 40 counts of sexual abuse related to young boys - crimes he allegedly committed
over a 20 year period while under the protection of the University, it was not the
information of the article but the headline that became the subject of many of the 74
comments in the public forum. The comments on outsports.com were less interested in
the case and more mindful of the language used to describe the events. Readers mainly
took issue with Zeigler Jr.’s use of the word “gay” to describe the accused Sandusky –
again, the headline reading “gay-sex pedophilia scandal.” As one poster wrote, “Cyd,
thanks for bringing the story to my/our attention, it’s very much appreciated. However, I

206

vehemently disagree with your use of the term gay in this case. Sex between adults and
boys is pedophilia.” (The Other Fred, 2011).
13
Another reader added:
I find the usage of the term ‘gay’ in the headline here to be offensive and entirely
gratuitous. The term ‘Gay’ generally refers to people who embrace their romantic
feelings, sexual desires, etc., for persons of the same sex, and who see their
sexuality as part of their basic identity. The person who is accused of these
terrible acts would better be described as ‘homosexual.’ There are many people
who engage in homosexual activities or who even have homoerotic feelings who
do not identify themselves as ‘gay.’ Furthermore, I don’t see how speaking of the
accused as ‘gay’ is necessary here. The actions that presumably took place here
are immoral and illegal not because they involve people of the same gender, but
because they involve an adult taking advantage of minors. Whether the alleged
wrongdoer is gay, or white, or middle class, or whatever, does not need to be
stated in the headline. The inference is that a ‘gay sex abuse scandal’ is worse
than a ‘straight sex abuse scandal,’ which is nonsense. Any sexual abuse
whatsoever of minors by adults is immoral and illegal. (Bennet, 2011).
Despite the website’s sports focus, these comments show how users were less concerned
with the story’s larger implication on the college sports landscape and more interested in
how a casual, and quotidian usage of the term “gay” could further heteronormative
understandings of sports and stereotypes of gay men as predatory creatures.

13
Here we see another example of digital acquaintanceship through the commenter’s use of the journalist’s
first name. The familiarity that many readers have with the websites founders does not necessarily stem
from a personal relationship but is rather indicative of the digital relationships that tether together the
community of queer sports fans.

207

For the sake of comparison, ESPN.com’s article regarding the same scandal
garnered almost 200 posts; however these comments were mainly interested in the larger
ramifications of the scandal on college football. Furthermore, when commenters in the
user section of ESPN did address the social implications they did so in a sophomoric
tone. A post that combines both of these ideas read:
Paterno should have retired years ago. This is going to tarnish his reputation
because he essentially did nothing but "meet his responsibilities" i.e. I passed the
buck and forgot about it. Meanwhile the alleged jock sniffer kept coming around
and he has a charity that helps kids, ha.” (etc, 2011)
Returning to outsports.com, the prior reactions by David Bennet, The Other Fred,
and many others echoes the way that the personal and the political are intertwined
through online queer identity formations; engagements that are especially important for
queer individuals (Alexander, 2002). The comments show users’ struggling with
terminology in ways that are not always available in offline experiences. Again, here we
see how remote intimacies allow for a conversation across “traditionally accepted”
realms of queer meaning making.
As more comments were posted Zeigler Jr. responded by posting: “Wow, reading
these uninformed and incorrect comments is crazy. I never said he was gay. I said the sex
was gay. And that’s what it was. There’s no getting around that. I never ever said this
perp was gay” (2011b). Additionally, in order to help appease some of the comments,
Zeigler Jr. changed the title of the post from “gay-sex” to “same-sex” given the amount
of uproar this conflation of terms caused. Though Zeigler Jr. wrote that it was not an
issue he wanted to fight over he added that “some of the comments above strike me as

208

incredibly over-sensitive” (2011b). However, his alteration in the title did not silence all
his critics as commenter PCC wrote, “‘Same-sex’ doesn’t make it much better as the
gender of the children is irrelevant. The scandal here isn’t the gender. It’s the age”
(2011). Here, although the fans’ original conversations revolved around the news texts,
the conversations soon became a place to work through and (re)negotiate understandings
of self and sexuality.
14
While some members of the chats used the engagements to
publicly state their preferred sexual identification terminology, many others produced
queer positionalities without specifically adhering to a stable sexual orientation. The
haziness with which the chat room participants engaged in questions of sexuality gestures
towards a queered understanding of fandom that prioritizes this decidedly queer
discourse.

Shifting Sexuality, Shifting Terminology: What Tom Daly Fancies
Tom Daley, a British Olympic diver and UK personality, came to prominence
during the 2008 Beijing Olympic games and in 2009, at age 15, was the number one
ranked diver in the world. He won, or was nominated for, a BBC sports personality of
the year award every year from 2006-2010 and was the subject of the 2010 BBC
documentary Tom Daley: The Diver and His Dad that followed his preparation for diving
competitions in the midst of his father’s battle with cancer.
15
In 2012, in front of a home
crowd, he won the first men’s 10m diving medal for Great Britain in over 50 years.
16
He

14
It also references the discussion as to why sexual preference is so tightly focused on gender identity over
all other aspects of identity; that there are, in reality, many choices that guide sexual preference.
15
His father passed away from brain cancer in 2011.
16
Though Daley did not win the competition, his bronze medal was considered a success since he was not
favored in the event. In fact, Daley spent most of the competition far out of medal contention after a poor
first round of dives. In fact, he was so distracted by the home crowd’s attendance he was allowed to redo a

209

parlayed his sporting success into the entertainment world as the star and expert advisor
on ITV’s reality competition Splash (2013-14) and host of ITV2’s travel series Tom
Daley Goes Global (2014). Though he is not nearly as popular in the United States as the
United Kingdom, his young age, boyish good looks, and consistent sporting success
solidified his status as a national hero, television personality, and international star.
17

In early December of 2013 Tom Daley ‘came out’ as bisexual in a blog posted to
his website. The almost five and a half minute long video entitled “Something I want to
say,” included, among other revelations, that he was currently in a relationship with a
man: “I met someone, and it made me feel so happy, so safe, and everything feels so
great. And that someone… is a guy.” Later on he says, “Of course I still fancy girls. But
right now, I’m dating a guy. And I couldn’t be happier.”
18
This admission of bisexuality
is not an uncommon vocalization for many people coming to terms with, and announcing,
their sexuality. For some, this identification provides a transitory middle-ground on their
way to articulating a gay or lesbian identity while for others it more accurately speaks to
the dual or fluid attractions they feel. And though Daley would eventually ‘come out’ as
a gay man (HuffPost Gay Voices, 2014) what is key to this discussion is not a debate
about the “authenticity” of his original announcement, or even the debate surrounding the
assumed progression from straight to bisexual to gay, but rather the way in which the
announcement of his sexuality allowed for engagements with the cultural boundaries
produced by and through his statement.
19

dive after a particularly poor attempt was attributed to unreasonable and distracting flash photography by
his legions of fans in attendance.
17
In 2014 he was featured with Olympic Gold Medalists Gabby Douglas (American gymnast) and Ian
Thorpe (Australian Swimmer) in US commercials for Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines.
18
It was later revealed that he was dating Oscar winning American screenwriter Dustin Lance Black
19
It is worth noting that this example is also representative of ‘coming out’ as a statement that fixes
sexuality when in fact it is often a fluid process for many.

210

After outsports.com posted his revelation (Zeigler, Jr., 2013) one commenter
asked why ESPN “isn’t reporting on this story” especially given Daley’s international
appeal and its coverage of other high profile athletes who had come out (BenjaminLasky,
2013). To this question, another poster replied, “The dubiousness of his statement
probably gives sportscasters at ESPN more willies than the usual non-traditionally
sexually-oriented revelation” (Sportinlife, 2013). This remark then sparked the following
exchange:
Mdterp01: What is dubious about his statement? He’s 19 years old, a rising star,
and Olympic medalist with a huge UK fanbase. I think he was somewhat nervous
about what to say, but I appreciate the fact that it was genuine and not some
rehearsed speech. I certainly hope you aren’t referencing doubts that he is truly
bisexual. I know that there are many who don’t believe a person can be bisexual,
which is unfortunate. Along with transgendered persons, bisexuals are often
ostracized within the GLBT community as well. I totally believe in bisexuality as
an orientation. Everyone I’ve met who is bisexual has had a preference for one or
the other, but still found meaningful intimate relationships with both sexes. I don’t
see the dubiousness of it at all. He’s 19 year old and telling his story. He’s dating
a guy now, has dated girls and the past, and still “fancies” them. Seemed pretty
clear to me. (Mdterp01, 2013)

Sportinlife: ‘I still like girls’ and ‘I'm dating a man.’ Seems clearly dubitable to
me. And the contradiction in that term reflects that in his statements. As you and I
both said he is only 19. (sportinlife, 2013)

211

Mdterp01: Isn't that what being bisexual means? While he didn’t label himself as
bisexual, I still fail to see what is dubious about saying he’s currently with a guy,
but still “fancies” girls. That’s bisexuality. (Mdterp01, 2013)
While it would be easy to rationalize this discussion as an insignificant struggle
over language, it is this struggle that is key to understanding how affinity portals, such as
outsports.com, provide the space for fans to make sense of the normative frameworks that
guide discussions of sexuality. Theorists have situated conversations such as these as
decidedly queer in their fluid and transient understandings of static sexuality (Hanmer,
2010). Again, here the emphasis is not on the morality of Daley’s decision or on whether
or not his non-heterosexuality affects his stance as an athlete (the focus of many
discussions on non-LGBT oriented sports websites), but rather about how differing uses
and understandings of the term bisexuality resonate among members of the community.
The discussion moves from a micro-focus on Daley to a larger discussion regarding the
place of bisexuality within the LGBT umbrella and its contested status within the straight
and gay communities. As Monica Edwards writes, conversations such as these make “the
community look back at itself in a new way” (p. 162) and the venue provided by
outsports.com allows for these contestations to take place within a sports context not
available through other venues.
It’s also important to note that while both commentators struggle over the term
bisexuality, Daley never vocalizes this identification himself. Rather, it is the
commentators, and the author of the article who ascribe the term to his announcement.
Another article titled “Worldwide reaction to Tom Daley's bisexual revelation” (Zeigler

212

Jr., 2013) helps to further illustrate this moment. Daley’s admission that he “still fancies
girls” while having found “safety” in a relationship with a man does not necessarily bind
him to one particular sexual identity or another; however, the need to delimit Daley
within a socially constructed and identifiable category is problematized by commentators.
As user Tampazeke writes:
He didn't make a bisexual revelation... In fact he clearly said that he eschews the
labels; at least at this point in his coming out process. He even said that he’s dated
girls but never felt serious. And what gay man doesn’t fancy girls? I do and I’m
100% sexually attracted to men. (2013)
Another poster by the name of Gary Puppet (a frequent poster on outsports.com) wrote to
Tampazeke, “‘gay’ isn’t a label. You are gay. I am gay. Deal.”
20
Which garnered the
following reaction from another user, Be26, who wrote, “No. Gay is very much a label.
As is straight, as is bisexual, as are many others. We’ll let Tom decide how he wants to
identify himself, not either of you.” Tampazeke responded to this comment by writing:
Um, THAT was my point. He didn’t say he was bisexual or gay and said he
eschews the labels. My point wasn’t that he was “gay” or should identify as such.
My point was that he didn’t say he was bisexual (as the article title stated) and it’s
inappropriate to assume that he identifies as “bisexual” just because he said he
dated girls in the past and still “fancies” girls. I gave as an example that I dated
girls and still “fancy” girls but I’m not bisexual. That had nothing to do with how
Tom does or doesn’t identify.

20
Here too, Gary Puppet’s status as a frequent contributor affects the way in which his comments are read
and responded to. While on other websites comments such as these might be seen as derogatory, Gary’s
constructed membership within the imagined community of outsports.com, combined with his
identification as a gay man, helps to focus the discussion on the implications of terminology rather than
their value (gay is not meant as an insult but rather as a category).

213

While the use of specific terms, especially in the headlines for these articles,
could be configured as a moment of strategic essentialism, it is necessary to remember
that the use of terminology to unify a group runs afoul when those terms are divorced
from their cultural or historical production. This is especially problematic when those
moments of essentialism are privileged above critical assumptions or are utilized to assert
identities as natural or biological. The mere fact that these moments were contested
forces us to question the usefulness, politically and socially, of these terms in this
particular moment. Again, this is not to say that individuals are incorrect in their
deployment of strategic essentialism, but rather that the questioning of this usage allows
for a reexamination that highlights not who were are, but rather who we might become.
Tampazeke’s comments, which invoked a larger discussion surrounding the use of labels,
the moral value they carry, and the need to categorize and mark non-normative
sexualities again points us to outsports.com as a space that allows for sports and sexuality
to be explored in uniquely queer ways. Again, these discussions are focused not on how
sexuality, as an essentialized quality, dictates athletic performance or belonging, but
rather on how the language we use produces particular lived realities.
21

These exchanges, which are mostly focused on the shifting terrain of terminology,
show how LGBT sports fans engage with more than just sports or hegemonic
understandings of the sports world. While their shared knowledge, produced through
remote intimacies, allows them to operate within the same forum and speak a shared

21
By “belonging” I am referencing the longstanding debate as to which sports attract athletes of particular
sexual orientations: where gay athletes “belong” in sports in comparison to straight athletes and what sports
they are “predisposed to excel at” because of their adherence to one sexuality or another. This discussion
can be seen as an application of social constructionism and biological essentialism to the discussion of
sports and sexuality – are particular sports more prone to athletes with nonnormative sexualities because of
some essentialized quality of their sexuality or because these sports are socially constructed as more
amenable to nonstraight athletes. A fantastic book length entry into this conversation can be found in
(Rand, 2012).

214

language, their interests in the nuances of often overgeneralized terms shows an ability to
queer sports conversations. As opposed to the comments on ESPN, which resorted to
questions of gayness only when attempting to use the term as a slur or negatively
reference the identity, outsports.com allows users to converse in ways that challenge an
essentialized understanding of sexuality, gayness, and sports (along with the conflation of
terms such as same-sex, gay, and queer, among others).
Furthermore, as is argued by Edwards (2010), the inconclusiveness of their
debate, as seen in the users’ insistence on meaningful distinctions (or not) between terms,
only adds to the queerness of their conversation. “The outcome of the conversation as a
whole is a sexual discourse that is fluid and contextualized” (p. 169) and its
indefiniteness helps to mirror the fluidity of queer dialectics. Whether or not one agrees
with the commentators or with the author of the article, it is obvious that the fixity of
terms currently used to categorize, delimit, and deconstruct gayness and sports lacks the
ability to fully encapsulate the multiplicity of meanings associated with modern notions
of queerness. Moreover, while previous work has been focused on specific homophobic
acts imbued with bias, this debate points to the heteronormative assumptions already
inculcated in language. And while no doubt outsports.com’s user guidelines, which ask
that viewers “treat our comment threads the way you'd treat your favorite sports bar”
22
by
keeping “the conversations fun, engaging and respectful” help to shape some approaches
to user engagement, these guidelines are no more stringent or strictly enforced than on

22
The continued connection between the virtual space of outsports.com and concretized spaces such as gay
bars continues to support claims made by this dissertation that both realms work as mutually constitutive
spheres of LGBT meaning making, community, and identity work.

215

other websites where the conversations lack this critical engagement with terminology
and structures of existence (Community Guidlines).
23

These online debates illuminate how LGBT identities are being queered in
modern sports culture. Online conversations regarding representation engender important
discussions among online communities, ultimately giving individuals the chance to
challenge traditional understandings of sex, sexuality, and gender. This strategy allows
for the opening of possibilities within prescriptive terms while continuing to “echo” the
prescriptive aspects of an identification practice: they are about “expanding and
problematizing identity and identification, not abandoning any socially prescribed
identity component” (Muñoz, 1999, p. 29). Here again we see the ways in which sports
and gay sexuality overlap and inform one another without vacating the contradictions and
(often negative) affective qualities produced, historically, by the discussion. These users
point out the discursive dependence of ideologies on static definitions of sexuality in
order to gesture towards a reconfiguring of outmoded identity categories; one that
imagines a more inclusive conversation regarding nonnormative positionalities. The
commenters on outsports.com are able to utilize a shared space to participate in queered
readings of sports and social issues. These interactions among users represent “points of
location to negotiate boundaries and collective identity as it connects to the political
landscape” (Edwards, 2010, p. 165).
The use of language, in particular as it relates to the LGBT community, is often
foreclosed by its inability to find a singular term that recognizes the diversity of

23
The full user guidelines are as follows: “This community is designed to bring you quality sports content
and a forum to discuss that content. We encourage you to share your perspective, and to react to our authors
and their opinions. Please, treat our comment threads the way you'd treat your favorite sports bar: keep the
conversations fun, engaging and respectful. Help make our site a satisfying place to hang out. Welcome!”

216

experiences queerness seems to undergird. However, it is this queer failure, this lack of a
coherent “term” or institutionalized answer that should be seen as productive of a new
discussion and an engagement with subjugated knowledges.
24
By queer failure I mean
the ability to see potential in outcomes that are less than desirable or in moments that are
incapable of neatly resolving themselves (Halberstam, 2011). However, failure, in this
estimation it is not a position to be resigned to, but rather a mode that provides
opportunities to recalibrate the experiences and positionalities that can’t help but fail
within modern heteronormative estimations of success. Rather than seeing this absence
of a clear or universal term as an inability or limitation of language, we should focus on
these conversations and contestations as a transfiguring or re-formatting of objects
already authorized by restrictive logics. Put another way, the lack of a clear agreement
about terminology, and who is and is not included in these renderings, should focus our
attention, acutely, on the importance of questioning normative beliefs. This attention
allows individuals to release their subjectivities from the tight scripts of terminology, and
to allow for difference to guide us towards more open conversations regarding how the
LGBT community “sees” itself and how normative sexualities bracket, contain, and
control marked differences. This rendering of action would aim to be more inclusive of
coalition building across difference rather than reliant on sameness within difference.
As documented by Probyn (2000), Pronger (2000), and Wellard (2006), among
others, and reinforced through this critical reading of outsports.com, traditional (and
heteronormative) sports culture continues to be the dominant mold to which LGBT
athletes aspire despite attempts at establishing a queered substitute. Though Wellard

24
Here I am referring to “subjugated knowledges” as those forms of knowledge that “have not simply been
lost or forgotten” but rather “have been disqualified, rendered nonsensical or noncenceptual or
‘insufficiently elaborated’” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 11).

217

argues that the “emancipatory power which appeared initially within the gay and lesbian
community, particularly in its approach to sport, has been quelled in recent years through
the attempts to ‘normalize’ and become part of mainstream sports” (p. 85), this chapter
identified the productive power of community engagements, particularly through digital
media platforms, as relevant to discussions of queered sports fandom. While it does not
disagree with general findings that established heteronormative practices undermine
resistance to, or challenges of, traditional identification practices, it does suggest that
what is lost in this broad overview of LGBT sporting practices and fandoms is a
recognition of the (re)negotiation of community and sports that is necessitated when
framing their existence in a queer light, and particularly through the frameworks provided
by digital media. While it remains that these moments are born out of institutions and
platforms that disqualify or are less than welcoming to many members of the community,
the proliferation of digital platforms aimed at the LGBT sports community, and the
continued challenging of static terminology by members of these digital communities, not
only means that more LGBTQ athletes and sports fans are both able to tell their stories
and communicate with one another in productive and dynamic ways.

218

Chapter Four:
The Queer Clubhouse: Community, Consumption, and Gay Sports Bars
It’s late January 2015 and Gym Sports Bar, in the Los Angeles neighborhood of
West Hollywood, is filled to capacity.
1
The National Football League’s Seattle Seahawks
are playing the Green Bay Packers for the right to represent the National Football
Conference (NFC) in next month’s Super Bowl. For most of the game a large group of
Packers fans cheer loudly as their team jumps out to an early, and almost insurmountable
lead. But in true playoff fashion, the Seahawks clamor their way back into the game,
force overtime, and eventually score the go ahead touchdown to send their team to Super
Bowl XLIX.
This scene, one of elation for the group of 25 or so vocal Seahawks fans, and
absolute dejection by the similarly sized group of Packers fans, is no doubt playing out in
similar fashion at the more than 100 Sports Bars across Los Angeles.
2
However, Gym
SportsBar has a distinction none of these other establishments can claim: it is the only bar
in Los Angeles that counts itself as both a Sports Bar and a Gay Bar. Opened in 2009,
West Hollywood’s Gym SportsBar is part of a growing group of gay sports bars opened
across the country over the past decade.
3
From New York to Los Angeles, Chicago to
Washington D.C., and Atlanta to Boston, sports bars aimed at the LGBT community are
beginning to provide a new home for gay sports fans. Their proliferation provides a new

1
West Hollywood, while often referred to as a neighborhood of Los Angeles, incorporated in 1984. The
city is considered home to the majority of Los Angeles’s LGBT community and serves as a hub for LGBT
culture and commerce.
2
According to Yelp.com there are approximately 109 establishments classified as “Sports Bars” within the
city of Los Angeles. This figure includes bars located in autonomous cities, such as Beverly Hills, Culver
City, and West Hollywood, among others, that are bordered on all sides by Los Angeles. When you open
the search to bars and restaurants that are associated with sports programs, but not fully classified as sports
bars, the number balloons to approximately 844.
3
Gym Bar opened its first location in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood in 2005 and a third location
in Ft. Lauderdale, FL in 2015.

219

space with which to think through the overlapping realm of sports and sexual cultures and
to ask how these locations facilitate gay cultural production and how LGBT individuals
begin to make sense of these spaces.
4

This chapter, in its broadest sense, uses a field study of gay sports bars across the
country to better understand how members of the LGBT community make meaning
within concretized sites of sports and gay cultures. While the notion of a “gay sports bar”
no doubt elicits particular assumptions about how they look, who their patrons are, and
what their place is within LGBT sports culture, this chapter attempts to connect the
mediations of sports with LGBT social activities. As previous chapters have focused on
the media industries and texts that construct and cultivate our understanding of sports and
sexuality, this chapter emphasizes the particular interactions produced by LGBT sports
culture in a more traditional setting of LGBT consumptive practices. If many of the
previous chapters focus on epistemological questions raised through the production of
media narratives, this chapter concentrates on empirical data – on what we can learn from
the ways people act in real life situations while at gay sports bars and the meanings they
draw from such interactions. And while earlier chapters have argued that digital
mediations of LGBT sports culture allow for the maintenance and connection of identities
despite their geographical distance, this chapter builds upon that notion to argue that
concretized spaces of community still play a vital role in this same process.

4
I have categorized these bars as gay sports bars to speak to their classification as both a bar that focuses
on sports culture and one aimed at members of the LGBT community. In a similar manner, we could call
them sports gay bars to reflect their dual position. While they are all marketed as spaces for the entire
LGBT community, they’re reflective of other bars and clubs geared more directly towards the gay male
subset of the community. Therefore I rely on them as gay bars as opposed to LGBT bars to try to more
specifically address both the ways in which they position themselves and the ways in which the community
inhabits them. This is not to say that only gay men patronize these spaces, a notion I engage with further in
this chapter.

220

While mediated content consumed within the spaces of gay sports bars certainly
provides the resources necessary for these connections, the specifics of the content would
not be classified as LGBT-specific, as they are the same programs, events, and
competitions broadcast at non-LGBT oriented sports bars.
5
Rather, the focus on how
community members use these resources as “jumping off” points for claims about
authenticity, community, and kinship work to connect it more directly to LGBT and
queer theoretical ideas. Put another way, if earlier chapters use texts as the catalyst for
interaction, and place a great deal of attention to the decoding of media narratives, this
chapter begins first with interaction to see what they might tell us both about texts, but
also about how physical interactions spurned on by media texts are decoded within the
context of sports and LGBT culture.
Here a return to Mary Gray’s work is useful in the way it reminds that media is
neither produced nor consumed in a vacuum. While much of this dissertation takes into
account subjectivities hailed or dismissed by particular media formations, we cannot
forget the importance space and place play in cultivating a sense of who someone is
and/or how they are understood. As Gray writes, media reception is not a “singular one-
way passive act” but rather “constellations of active moments of engagement saturated in
histories and contemporary experiences of raced, classed, and placed identities” (Gray M.
L., 2009, p. 15). Gray’s work also cautions against ethnographic work that focuses to
singularly on conditions for viewing at the expense of a more nuanced understanding of
the relationship between media and the “broader social terrain of experiences” that

5
An exception to this would be the evening Gym Bar West Hollywood dedicated its screens to the ESPN
documentary Renee, which chronicled the life story of transgender tennis professional Renée Richards.
The documentary, which aired on October 4
th
, 2011, was part of ESPN’s regularly schedule line-up;
however, sports bars usually do not air this type of programming – they focus on game action since that is
the biggest draw for fans, but is also not predicated on providing audio in a crowded bar.

221

cultivate identitarian practices. While this chapter firmly centers its analysis in the space
of gay sports bars, and their accompanying digital forums, it does so while still
acknowledging the ways that multiple social, political, gendered, racialized and classed
discussions of sports and sexuality influence these experiences.
This chapter also argues that the ambivalent and often contradictory way media
formations approach sports and sexuality extends to material/lived realities. Gay sports
bars become spaces for behavior, conversations, and representations that both undergird
traditional hierarchies of hegemonic masculinities and also, at times, transgress normative
boundaries. For example, the contradictory ways in which patrons describe the “proper”
way to act in a sports bar, explored in more depth later in this chapter, points to this
ambivalence. While many of the interactions described in earlier chapters are often
produced in isolation, or through online mediations, this chapter sets about to describe the
spaces of gay sports bars and interactions produced by their presence.
Before proceeding to a history of bar culture in America, and the LGBT
community’s relationship to this consumptive practice, I would like to discuss how I am
approaching the classification of these spaces. While there are numerous sports bars
across the country that cater to the LGBT community, there is little consistency in the
way they classify this focus. Some identify, through promotional material, news pieces,
and/or interviews as gay sports bars, while others as sports gay bars, and even some as
LGBT sports bars. I also hear them described as gay bars that cater to the LGBT sports
community and, less frequently, as queer sports bars. This inconsistency is, I believe,
important to show some of the difficulty in appealing to a particular sexual community
with regards to sports. While these spaces are no doubt welcoming to all members of the

222

LGBT community, their reliance on mainstream sports, and their connection to a history
of bar culture as a male space make it hard to imagine these institutions as equally
serving all members of the LGBT community.
Therefore, I am, for the purposes of this project, referring to these spaces as gay
sports bars to recognize their reliance on male patrons and masculinity within sports.
However, I do not want to this lexical turn to exclude the many lesbian, straight, and
otherwise individuals who visit these establishments, nor do I want it to further entrench
these spaces as male and gay only. Also, for the purposes of this chapter, I refer to sports
bars that do not specifically focus on the LGBT community as traditional sports bars.
While many of the patrons I spoke to at gay sports bars actually referred to these
establishments as “straight sports bars” I have chosen the word traditional because I think
it conjures up a space that the reader might be familiar with, as many of us have found
ourselves in a bar overflowing with sports fans, and also because, as the chapter will
argue, these are not necessarily “straight spaces.” While they do work to reaffirm
heteronormativity within sports culture, I think it works against many of the arguments of
this chapter (and dissertation) to assume that they are spaces devoid of homosexuality.
6

In fact, the struggle over whether to classify these spaces as gay sports bars or
sports gay bar is a nod to the shifting and ambivalent nature of identity and affinity seen
in these spaces. Many patrons had very strong understandings of gay identity versus
sports affinity, and yet others felt a more complicated relationship to these concepts. In

6
While I attempt to create a consistency in description for the purposes of this chapter, there will no doubt
still be confusion as to who is included or excluded by the mere naming of a space as gay versus LGBT
versus queer. Therefore, the classifications put forth in this chapter are deployed keeping in mind the fact
that a heterotopia reproduces classifications that confound – it does not exist outside of classification,
necessarily, but rather always exists as a critique of normative spaces, or the urge to normalize in order to
better understand.

223

general, gay identity is meant, in this estimation, to reference the way the individual self-
classifies an intrinsic part of their being (such as sexuality, race, gender, etc.) whereas
sports affinity refers to a natural enjoyment of a place or thing (here meant to be sports
and sports culture). However, these terms are not completely discrete as it would be
disingenuous to say that gay identity and gay affinity are one in the same. Certainly, as
some of the comments made by patrons of gay sports bars shows, gay identity can lead to
an anti-gay affinity.

A (brief) History of Bars and the LGBT Community
It is impossible to discuss homosexuality, its culture, and its history without also
discussing the institutionalized and dominant heteronormativity that situates its existence.
So much of being queer means recognizing the everyday heterosexism inherent to
society. While the heterosexual norm has been predicated on historically rigid sexual and
cultural limitations, homosexuality has often been associated with a more flexible
sociality.
7
It is this fluid stance on relationships that has allowed freedom with regards to
how alternative relationships and sites of community are cultivated. This nonconformity
to heteronormative ideals has kept the homosexual community at odds with the
dominating heterocentric class, but has also allowed for the creation of uniquely
“othered” spaces of consumption. Additionally, the reductive focus of homosexuality as
a sexual deviance from heteronormative standards has created an assumption that sexual
desire is the only defining factor in the creation of gay identities and sites of community.
The fluidity with which sexuality is approached within the community also extends to its

7
While the history of socially constructed gender roles is a vast and complicated subject, the major changes
and codifications of heterosexual identity occurring during the Great Depression are most significant to this
specific argument regarding the importance of bar culture.

224

points of view on other ideas of sociability and classification, such as the way in which
relationships and friendships are cultivated. Standardizing the community under the
guise of regulated communal classification fetishizes its identity and reduces its
population to a homogenized commodity; thereby reinforcing patriarchal heterosexual
cultural norms.
From their inception, saloons have challenged America’s dominant family-
centered culture by providing a gendered space for male congregation and sociability
outside the home. At the turn of the 20
th
Century bars became especially popular in
working-class neighborhoods because of the lack of adequate private space:
Indeed, the whole saloongoing experience affirmed communal over
individualistic and privatistic values… It was a way of carousing with friends,
neighbors, and fellow workers whom one could not (or should not) bring into the
home. And because such socializing took place outside the home, it was more of
a public occasion, and therefore open to a much wider group than the kinfolk that
one might normally bring into the home… the saloon rejected the developing
individualistic, privatistic, and family-centered values of the dominant society.
(Rosenzweig, 1991, p. 145)
Historically, this rise in the popularity of bars occurred simultaneously to the
formation of “gay ghettos” in working-class neighborhoods.
8
Historian George
Chauncey (1994) argues that gay communities were particularly accepted in these
neighborhoods for two reasons: The first being that working-class neighborhoods held a

8
Again, this discussion will use varying terms for “gay men” and their community and though these terms
carry with them historical implications, their use should be seen as contextual rather than anachronistic or
discursively productive. As many historians have noted (Chauncey, 1994; Foucault, 1980; Kaiser, 1997)
the terms we use today to identify nonnormative sexualities are both temporally bounded as well as
culturally constructed and understood.

225

more flexible social stance on sexual activities and sexuality as opposed to puritan and
culturally traditional middle-class neighborhoods. The second being that there was an
organizational shift historically in working-class neighborhoods towards focusing more
on the “single” lifestyle. The sexualization of urban culture provided for an atmosphere
of social and sexual adventure and exploration. Furthermore, while newly acquired
“leisure time” was more strictly delineated for middle-class families, those in the
working-class, who now found their relationships no longer strictly bound by
reproductive organizations, were able to participate in more fluid sexual relationships.
This not only provided a space for homosexuals to find refuge within urban settings, but
also created a gay community from the inside out.
French philosopher Henri Lefebvre (1991) argues that space, like other
commodities, is itself actively produced. That space is not a passive source where ‘things
just happen,’ but rather is the result of hegemonic forces which shape its existence in
order to reproduce desired meanings among sociable settings. It is no wonder that much
of urban public space revolves around consumption and production, a natural result of a
capitalist society. In regards to the creation of “gay ghettos” and “othered” sites of
existence, the LGBT community takes on an additional capitalist constraint. Bars are
both sites of community building and sites of consumption; as Dennis Altman wrote,
“One of the ironies of American capitalism is that it has been a major force in creating
and maintaining a sense of identity among homosexuals, and so far such identity seems
attainable only within existing capitalistic societies” (1982, p. 21). However, this
reliance on consumerist sites of community based in economic capital can be explained
through both historical and cultural examples. As Michael Warner explicates:

226

The predominance of white, middle-class men in gay organizing, after all, is not
simply the result of evil intent, personal discrimination, or willed exclusion. In
the lesbian and gay movement, to a much greater degree than in any comparable
movement, the institutions of culture-building have been market-mediated: bars,
discos, special services, newspapers, magazines, phone lines, resorts, urban
commercial districts. Nonmarket forms of association that have been central to
other movements – churches, kinship, traditional residence – have been less
available for queers. This structural environment has meant that the institutions
of queer culture have been dominated by those with capital: typically, middle-
class white men. (p. xvi-xvii)
As David Harvey further argues, “distinctive spatial practices and processes of
community construction – coupled with distinctive cultural practices and ideological
predispositions – arise out of different material circumstances” (1990, p. 261).
While the history of gay visibility in 20
th
Century America is vast and detailed, it
should be noted that even though the gay community was generally considered harmless
at the turn of the century, they soon became a stigmatized community during the Great
Depression. Since jobs were scarce, and mainly revolved around physical labor, men
were more likely to be chosen for employment. Additionally, men with families were
seen as more dependable and deserving of jobs. This prioritization of married men
worked to codify and standardize the 20
th
Century idea of heterosexuality as an idealized
state over other subcultures. The establishment of heterosexuality as a preferred “state of
being” positioned any differing sexuality as a deviant subculture. Furthermore, as
documented by Chauncey (1994) and Kaiser (1997) this idealized position of ascendancy

227

during the 1930’s translated into a Post-World War II reassertion of heterosexual
superiority based on the tenets of sexual reproduction. As soldiers returned from battle
there was a greater emphasis placed on the necessity to procreate to make up for the
generation of men lost during the war, and to participate in an economy based on
consumption.
While World War II had allowed many men the opportunity to leave small towns
and settle in urban sectors, such as New York City and San Francisco, gay communities
were still underground affairs. Bars and taverns, with their ability to provide both
sociability and protection, became the heart of the LGBT community even while the
visibility of homosexuals dwindled in post-WW II America. As Roderic Crooks argues,
by way of Manuel Castells, “bars became a focal point of social life for gay people since
World War II” for pragmatic concerns since they provided “protection in numbers from
violence and police brutality” and as space for political organizing (2013). But the also
reflect the desire of the gay community “to set up their own organizations and institutions
in all spheres of life” (1983). It was not until the Stonewall Riots in 1969 that gay men
and women were able to more openly identify as such. It was no surprise that this
important moment of gay rights activism, along with the lesser discussed 1968 riots at
The Patch in Los Angeles, were initiated by the space of gay bar culture:
The establishment of gay villages then occurs as a struggle for civil rights, but
also as an assertion of identity politics, as an alternative social organization set in
contrast to the prevailing hegemony of the family and the rejection of sex in the
culture at large. Gay villages can be important spaces in the formation of gay

228

identity in that they combine ‘real and imagined physical attributes with social
and personal characteristics’ to create a particular vision of what it
means to be gay in a given time and place. (Crooks, 2013)
Therefore gay bars became the physical manifestation of the gay community’s attempt to
cultivate an identity based on more than sexual acts. They provide a territorial strategy,
though one based in consumptive practices, which serves a variety of needs for a variety
of LGBT individuals. While initially seen as a covert social center before the gay
liberation allowed for more open meeting places, they are now understood, in addition to
a gathering space, as relative safe sites of gay cultural production and as “symbols around
which gay identity is centered” (Forest, 1995, p. 137).
It is important to recognize that historians, as mentioned before, argue that the
material circumstances that produced bars as a site of community were and are influenced
by issues of capital. While this analysis is not offered to institutionalize “bar patterns”
monolithically across the LGBT community, this structural environment has meant that
the institutions of LGBT culture have typically been dominated by middle-class white
men. Furthermore, it should be noted that the majority of the focus of this chapter is on
the relationship between self-identifying gay men and bar culture. It is organized as such
to reflect the patrons observed during field studies and my own analysis of user names
associated with online posts and still recognizes the often over predominance of gay male
theorizing within the academic realm of queer and LGBT studies.
9
Again, this works

9
Additionally, this definition of sexuality is not to be interpreted solely in sexual object choice, but rather
includes all those who seek out other queer men for the creation of both communal bonds and meaningful
relationships. And this idea of “meaningful” should be not be assumptive of solely heteronormative
definitions but should also include queered understandings of the term. While it is not meant to advocate
for or against the classification of gay men as solely homosexual, it should also not ignore the fact that
many of those who inhabit these sites identify as such.

229

back to the sedimentation of heteropatriarchy that continues to haunt gay bar culture.
Since bars were created, historically, as places for men their continued domination by
men and masculinity comes as no surprise.
When attempting to institutionalize ‘bar patterns’ within the LGBT community,
one encounters the distinct issue of standardizing a culture that is itself predicated on
objecting any naturalizing behavior:
If over forty years of research about homosexuality tell us anything, it is that
generalizations about entire categories of people who organize their lives around
various sexual orientations cannot be adequately made. Some of us lead
mainstream lives; others of us lead transgressive ones, often linked to variations
in race and social class. The lesson from the postmodern and queer theorists is
that the variations are often the answer, not just the similarities. We are just like
everyone else, and we are not like anyone else. We are centering in the
mainstream and we are contesting on the margins. There is not a homosexuality,
but homosexualities. (Nardi, 2002, p. 47)
However, this chapter is concerned less with the specificity of individual cultural choices
and more with a focus on larger ideas of community and consumption. Michael Warner
argues that “the notion of a community has remained problematic if only because nearly
every lesbian or gay remembers being such before entering a collectively identified
space” (1993, p. xxv).

While the growth and visibility of the modern gay movement
forces some to see the collection of individuals as a population rather than a community,
discrete bars, as specific in their clientele as they might be, serve as the groundwork for
both the assumptions about, and the creation of, a unified gay community. Arguments

230

regarding the specificities of queer assimilation and/or homogenization aside, gay bars
both recognize the differences within the community and help to bring together similar
self-identifying men.

A (brief) History of Sports Bars
If we are to imagine sports arenas as men’s cultural centers, as developments that
are, primarily, built by men - for men - in the service of men, then sports bars, just like
early 20
th
century saloons, become carefully constructed satellite sites of male physical
culture. The first sports bar is attributed to St. Louis’s Palermo Bar, which opened in
1933 (Palermo). Because of its close proximity to Sportsman’s Park, Palermo’s, which
was a confectionery store before a tavern “had always been a gathering place for sports
figures and fans” (Palermo). The bar’s opening actually coincided with the end of
prohibition.
The sports bar combines masculine market-driven concepts of sports and alcohol
consumption. No doubt one need only casually watch a professional sport on television
to see an abundance of advertisements for beer, liquor, and other alcoholic beverages.
The sports bar becomes the actualized space where in these two realities can merge, but
in much closer proximity, and usually much less expensively, than attending a game
itself. While there are certainly nuances in the decor of each bar, at their core they share
many of the same traits: wall-to-wall television screens, sport paraphernalia, and
advertisements for alcohol (often in the shape of traditional neon signs). These spaces
are by in large populated and run by men, just as with sports arenas and popular
imaginations of the sports locker room. When women are employed it is often as cocktail

231

waitresses or servers, rarely as bartenders. But the sports bar, while often reinforcing
hierarchies of gender, has also served historically to contest class hierarchies since it
produced as a space of inter-class mingling (Klink, 2006).

Unpacking Gay Sports Bars
Media and screen technologies have a rich history within gay bar culture. It is not
uncommon to walk into any bar in Chelsea or West Hollywood or the Castro and see
screens doting the walls and/or tucked into corners. These come in the form of both
traditional television sets and gaming machines – which are either stand-alone arcade sets
or screens built into the physical bar-top.
10
While more traditional gay bars vary in the
imagery they show, they often reflect a cultural resource and connection to the gay
community – a piano bar might play popular show tunes from musicals while a leather
bar might feature gay pornography.
11

But a sports bar, in this estimation, is more than just a television set tuned to a
game in the corner of the bar – or a special night where television sets are tuned to sports.
The gay sports bar puts sports front-and-center; it is concomitant to the experience of
sports and the LGBT community, not tangential. Media serves, in this estimation, not as
ambiance or wallpaper, but rather as vital to the construction of the space. It’s also worth
noting that while mainstream sports populate the screens of a gay sports bar, there are
also opportunities for concretized game playing within the bar itself. The majority of

10
Popular games include sports trivia, and photo hunt, a popular game where two images are placed side-
by-side and the player uses a touchscreen to note the discrepancies between the two, seemingly, identical
images. Many bars also offer an X-rated version of the game that features nude pictures.
11
An example of both can be found in Chicago, IL where Sidetracks features musical Mondays and
Rawhide provides a healthy amount of pornography on weekends.

232

bars visited featured dartboards and/or a pool table for patrons to use, and they also often
sponsored and hosted local LGBT pool leagues.
Media as object further promotes this construction of the bar as an inherently
male space since the majority of games focus on men’s collegiate and/or professional
sports.
12
In fact, after spending hundreds of hours in these spaces, I did not see a single
women’s sporting event screened except for the Women’s Tennis Matches that featured
either Serena or Venus Williams, NCAA Women’s Volleyball tournament, the occasional
WNBA game, and the Women’s World Cup (held every four years).
13
During many of
these showings I asked the bartender if someone had requested the women’s professional
game, as it is not uncommon for sports fans to request a singular screen be tuned to a less
popular game. However, with the exception of women’s volleyball, which was requested
by members of the local LGBT volleyball league, and the women’s world cup, which was
a featured game, never once was a bartender able to recall if a patron specifically
requested the game. In most instances, they either guessed, or confirmed, that the game
was on because there was little else to show at that particular time or because a specific
baseball game was on rain delay.
While LGBT sports bars are not advertised or promoted as specifically male
spaces, their reliance on a cultural history that prioritizes male bonding and sex
segregation, and on media artifacts that promote sports as naturally male (and reliant on
masculine traits), influence their place as a predominantly male space. Additionally, the

12
Specifically the same sports explored earlier in this dissertation – the National Football League, the
National Basketball Association, Major League Football, and, to a lesser extent, the National Hockey
League, Major League Soccer, and the English Premiere League
13
For a point of comparison, men’s tennis matches were shown even when the match did not feature an
American player or the top seed.

233

gendered make-up of these bars no doubt influences these masculinity tendencies as all
bars visited employed only individuals who self-identified as male.
However, while gay sports bars are a more recent addition to the LGBT social
scene, this does not mean that sports culture and gay bars have not previously overlapped.
Establishments that self-identify as gay sports bars began to crop up around 2004, with
the opening of Chicago’s Crew Bar; however, gay bars, dependent on their clientele, have
forged connections with gay sports leagues through sponsorship and also served as
viewing locations for important sports events. For example, in the 1980s gay bars
utilized advertising space on the Gay Cable Network’s Pride and Progress to support
sports culture and connect their establishments to the larger community of sports fans.
For example, The Badlands ran commercials before the program’s sports report that
featured images of the bar and a voiceover that stated: “Badlands, the friendly bar at the
corner of West and Christopher streets. Is a place to meet for a game of pool, watching
good entertainment on their large video screen, or just enjoying a healthy drink.
Badlands is proud to sponsor the following sports news.”
Another example can be seen in the Florent Restaurant, a popular gay-owned
restaurant in New York City’s Meatpacking district, which utilized an image of baseball
players in a 1992 print advertisement that both promoted safe-sex practices and the
establishment itself. In small print below the image text reads “Before or After the game,
stop in at 99 Gansevoort Street.” While the advertisement does not specifically reference
screens for patrons to watch the game, they do situate the restaurant as a welcoming and
natural space for sports fans to congregate. The first association of a gay bar as a gay
sports bar can be seen in New York City’s Champs Bar. The bar, which opened in 1994

234

but closed a few years after included a bank of bleacher seats around its dance floor.
However, advertisements for the bar do not identify it overtly as a gay sports bar, but
rather a cruising bar.

Figure 8: Advertisement for Champs Bar

235

Figure 9: Advertisement for Florent Restaurant

236

More so than other traditional markers of gay bars, which might feature common
identifiers of the LGBT community such as rainbow flags or pink triangles, gay sports
bars put sports culture front-and-center. While many of the bars visited did have
examples of this traditional gay iconography, it was often difficult to see at first glance.
What was not difficult to find were the plethora of sports memorabilia hanging from the
walls. Every bar contained at least one flag that advertised a sports team – though
sometimes these flags reflected the local sports teams and sometimes they did not. I
asked bartenders at each bar how they chose the teams and heard a mixed response.
Some locations, obviously, displayed colors and logos for their local teams while others
allowed displayed emblems and flags brought in by patrons to reflect their favorite teams.
Some of the staff I asked didn’t know how their particular bar came to be decorated.
Some bars, in addition to sports logos, prominently displayed sporting trophies won by
LGBT sports leagues sponsored by the bar. While the décor does not follow a particular
design, for the most part the bars replicated traditional sports bar motifs, with dark wood
bar tops and tables, brick walls, and gun-metal accents – one bar used reclaimed wood
from a former gymnasium for their table tops.
14
In all, the bars work to replicate
traditional notions of masculine design choices, but again, their connection to gay
moniker’s can be found if one squints hard enough, as one bar had a rainbow neon sign
amongst the requisite beer advertisements. Many of the bars that served specialty drinks
or food did so with names that invoked the gay community – such as a drink named the
Tight End (which consists of Beefeater gin, Campari, lemon, wild raz, simple syrup, and

14
This décor at Hi-Tops is shown in the below images.

237

orange bitters), or a pizza called The Twink (Tomato, extra virgin olive oil, mozzarella
cheese).
15

All of the locations seem to evoke an imagined community of sorts – a perceived
understanding of how to hail sports fans and how to situate a bar to sports culture. But
again we see the importance of sports culture first and gay culture second.
16
In this case,
it is important, through visual markers, to connect the space of the bar to sports, and
establishments either relied on conspicuous markers of the LGBT community, location,
or advertising to make the secondary connection.

Figure 10: Nellie’s Sports Bar, Washington D.C.

15
Both of these products are offered at Boxers Sports Bar.
16
Put another way, here we see a prioritizing of sports affinity over gay identity, an important idea echoed
throughout this project as many individuals worked through these two positionalities which often felt,
and/or were positioned, as oppositional.

238

Figure 11: Hi-Tops Sports Bar – San Francisco, CA
These sports bars, which cater to a particular clientele, can then be recognized as
significant counterpublics. Similar to the Habermasian public sphere, a counterpublic
enables subaltern communities to establish meaning and collectivity usually considered
critical of traditional power relations; however, these arenas do more than just merely
represent the interests of gendered or sexualized persons. They:
can work to elaborate new worlds of culture and social relations in which gender
and sexuality can be lived… [They] can therefore make possible new forms of
gendered or sexual citizenship – meaning active participation in collective world
making through publics of sex and gender. (Warner, 2005, p. 57)
The recognition of these spaces as counterpublics helps to bridge the existence of
homosexuals in isolation to a discussion of collaborative and communal LGBT culture.
Again, while these spaces are no doubt influenced by understandings and experiences
based in heteronormativity, there existence as mediated publics, rather than natural

239

collections of people, serves to continuously challenge normative understandings of the
LGBT community.

Situating the Gay Sports Bar Through Advertisements
Advertisements and social media become one of the most prominent ways to
situate the gay sports bar as unique to the gay community. While the physical
characteristics of the spaces might not distinguish the establishment as catering to a
particular sexual community, the advertisements and images that populate their Facebook
pages, twitter accounts, and other social media sites are not so subtle. For example,
GYM SportsBar features homoerotic images prominently in many of their
advertisements.
17
Additionally, they highlight their staff, often playing sports or in
proximity to sports sites such as basketball courts, football fields, dugouts, etc. While
participation in particular sports is not a requirement for employment, every employee I
spoke to either participated in some sport activity or considered themselves an active
sports fan.
18
However, while the ads feature toned and muscular bodies, they do not
make much of a distinction between the fit body and the athletic body. While athletes
often represent what we would consider an “ideal” muscular or toned body, this type of
body hierarchy usually privileges a non-athlete who is able to workout in a gym setting,
rather than one who might be athletic without being muscular. These images further
entrench the stereotype that what is ideal is not necessarily a strong body, one that could

17
Examples of these are shown in the following images on subsequent pages.
18
It is worth noting that this information was not consistently verifiable. I was able to confirm some of the
employee’s participation in sports organizations but not everyone. Also, two employees mentioned that
they collegiate sports, one as a volleyball player, which I was able to confirm, and one as a basketball
player, which I was unable to confirm.

240

be produced through day labor, but rather a chiseled physique often produced through the
help of gym memberships, personal trainers, and other expensive workout regimens.
These advertisements also work to establish the imagined patron of the bar.
While a traditional sports bar might focus solely on sports media and alcohol or by
advertising local games or teams or highlighting food and drink specials, gay sports bars
focus on the homoerotic, to remind patrons of the “eye-candy” the bar provides in
addition to the mediated event. While there was, of course, variation among
advertisements placed, the majority of all featured some sort-of of male figure in addition
to information about drink specials, bar hours, and other pertinent information. The
advertisements suggest that sports, in these establishments, are never separate from
sexual attraction to a sporting body.
Furthermore, not a single advertisement featured a female body. Again, here we
see the privileging of the male body and the gay community as the imagined patron of a
gay sports bar. While certain bar locations seemed to have more female patrons than
others, this was not consistent across “brands.” For example, very few women were seen
in GYM SportsBar in New York but were far more frequent visitors to GYM SportsBar
West Hollywood. Because of the lack of multiple gay sports bars in all cities but New
York, it makes it difficult to prove that a particular city’s community might dictate how
friendly a gay sports bar is to those who identify as woman and those who identify as
men.
19
The way in which the bar presents itself as a site of LGBT community building

19
One key to parsing through this difference would be to establish how many patrons felt as though the gay
sports bar was a location for watching games only or as a space they could just go to drink. Establishing
this difference might help to distinguish if a bar seemed to cater to all members of the LGBT community
who identify as sports fans, or just those who are members of the “gay” community.

241

hyper focuses on the male body, and in effect renders the female invisible. This symbolic
annihilation only adds to sports culture’s reputation as a male domain.

Figure 13: Advertisement for GYM Sports Bar – New York, NY

242

Figure 14: Advertisement for GYM Sports Bar – West Hollywood, CA

Situating the Gay Sports Bar Through Location
While most gay bars locate themselves squarely within pre-established gay
neighborhoods, such as Chicago’s Belmont St., San Francisco’s Castro Blvd, or West
Hollywood’s Santa Monica Blvd, gay sports bars often exist outside of these
neighborhoods.
20
This flexibility in the way gay sports bars are able to position
themselves in relation to the LGBT community further shows their vacillating concern
for sports affinity and gay identity. The close proximity with which many gay bars are
situated, often next door to one another in concentrated gay neighborhoods, means that
individuals do not necessarily have to pick between them but can “bar hop” throughout
an evening. For gay sports bars, while this concern was no doubt the reason why many

20
It is worth noting that market considerations must also be taken into account since rents in these
neighborhoods are often very expensive and can price many new bars out of the market.

243

establishments chose their location, for others they relied on sports affinity as the driving
force. For example, Nellie’s, Woofs, and Crew are all located outside of their respective
city’s gay-berhood. A traditional gay bar might see location, that of the gay-berhood, as
the motivating factor for attracting gay patrons since it offers a plethora of options for
socializing. Alternatively, the gay sports bar relies on the mediated event, that of the
sports game, as the motivating factor for attracting patrons. This positions the gay sports
bar as more closely aligned to other niche gay bars, such as the leather bar, which relies
on a particular subset of the gay community to keep it in business.
This flexibility with which gay sports bars approach location also differentiates
them from the locality of traditional sports bars. Most sports bars attract a local crowd,
those individuals who live or work in the neighborhood and can easily walk or commute
to the bar or attend a bar because it caters to fans of a specific team. However, gay sports
bars find locality more generally as many of the patrons I spoke to did not live within
walking distance to the bar. This finding is interesting in that it suggests that while sports
might be the main reason patrons suggest for visiting a bar, sports alone does not trump
proximity or connection to LGBT community. Many individuals cited that there were
non-gay focused sports bars closer to where they lived or worked but didn’t mind
traveling to a gay-oriented space. While this finding could easily point us to the
conclusion that patrons of gay sports bars feel more “comfortable” at these
establishments, it’s important to note that many patrons still felt ambivalent as to the
“authenticity” of a gay sports bar, as unpacked later in this chapter. Furthermore, one
needs to take into account any sample biases since I was speaking to patrons who, for the

244

most part, had chosen to patronize these establishments and do not currently have data on
gay-identified individuals at traditional sports bars.
21

Negotiating Identity and “Authenticity” in Gay Sports Bars
Interestingly enough, questions of identity and identification practices are
common throughout these spaces. As it comes as no surprise, questions of identity and
assimilation crop-up often within academic LGBT theory and the addition of sports
studies to this realm further complicates how we discuss and interrogate notions of
masculinity, sexuality, and identification. Scholars of both sports and sexuality studies
have documented the ways in which “we do not simply create our sexual lives, but rather
inherit them and contribute to their ongoing reproduction by the ways that we perform
sexuality” (Pronger, 2001, p. 470) Furthermore, they have elucidated how the center of
sports culture, despite movement along the fringes, remains a thoroughly patriarchal and
heteronormative realm. Similarly, we must ask ourselves if gay sports bars function as a
site of cultural change or if they continue to promote sexual and gender conservatism.
While the answer might not be easily defined as one or the other, the following uses
conversations with patrons of gay sports bars to better understand how they see the space
functioning within gay sports cultures. I also bring to bear the notion of a heterotopia to
better understand the physical and discursive failures identified within discussions of
authenticity in order to see how this ambivalence might be reconfigured in productive
ways.

21
Future research might attempt to find meet-up groups of gay individuals at traditional sports bars to find
out why they chose a non-gay oriented space over an LGBT-focused one.

245

Here, I am using Foucault’s notion of a heterotopia a site that is “capable of
juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves
incompatible…” (Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 1986, p. 25). Academic Lawrence
Wenner uses this concept of heterotopia when discussing traditional sports bars; however,
he writes that the postmodern sports bar, as opposed to the traditional or “neighborhood”
bar, exemplifies a heterotopia through its “reappropriation of nostalgia” (1998, p. 326).
Alternatively, in this instance, I believe the gay sports bar better represents a heterotopia
of sorts: a bricolage of authenticity claims that vacillate between heteronormative
reproduction and queered reappropriation.
But we must also keep in mind that a heterotopia does not necessarily always
refer to a literal space. A heterotopia is also a spatial imaginary that marks
“epistemological or discursive failure” and whose instability means that attempts at
comparison, in particular to the stability of utopias, often falls short (Hong & Ferguson,
2011, p. 5). As Foucault writes, “Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they
secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that,
because they shatter or tangle common names…” (1994). It is this formation of a
heterotopia as a site of both literal and figurative dissonance that is important to keep in
mind as one unpacks the physical space of gay sports bars, and, in particular, the ways in
which individuals come to interact with, and discuss, them. The often conflicting
statements made by single individuals about the space’s connection to authenticity and
identity should not be dismissed because they are contradictory, but rather would bolster
a claim for these spaces as heterotopias since they exhibit moments of epistemological or
discursive failure. It is also the reason why I have resisted the urge to create a taxonomy

246

for better understanding these places – since this desire to make “things” and
“interactions” legible in a normative manner works against the logic of a heterotopia,
and, more broadly, queerness as a mode of critique, description, and/or analysis.
As I attempted to unpack and categorize many of the conversations I had with
patrons of these bars, I found that responses were unsurprisingly diverse. However,
generally, answers fell into two distinct, yet opposing views that echoed conceptions of
the gay sports bar as a heterotopia – as a site that confuses and confounds definition and
understanding. In particular, questions of authenticity and identity became a common
thread for many of the individuals I spoke to at gay sports bars.
The rise of the concept of authenticity is well documented in Lionel Trilling’s
book Sincerity and Authenticity (1971). Trilling makes the argument that the notion of
authenticity was promulgated by the worlds of art history and museum studies in order to
reference a work’s history or provenance. The question was as surface as one can get, “Is
this piece what it is appears to be?” This slight, but important difference between
verisimilitude and veracity, between appearance and reality, is a question that has been
asked by philosophers for hundreds of years. However, while authenticity once conjured
up images of “people, as animate subjects, verifying inanimate objects” it has now been
reified into an attributable and required aspect of human identity (Jackson, 2005, p. 14).
While the requirement for authenticity can take on a surprisingly diverse subset of
qualifications, its use within the context of these spaces connects it intimately to notions
of masculinity and for the discursive need to authenticate sports affinity in relation to
sexual identity.

247

For some individuals, they saw the gay sports bar as a space to wrestle with
notions of gay identity and sports affinity. These forums allowed them to disidentify
with traditional understandings of both sports and gay culture. This remaking and
refashioning of experience a distinctly queer way might also point us towards the
importance of recognizing failure within LGBT sports cultures. For others, and it is this
approach that I will document first, they saw these incongruous positionalities of gayness
and sports culture as too diametrically opposed to naturally coexist. Put another way,
they felt as though the gay sports bar was a place where gay individuals, performed
masculinity that they somehow lacked in other areas of their life.
22

The following analysis incorporates conversations I had with patrons along with
online reviews since conversations regarding what it means to be “the right kind-of gay
man” and the “right kind of sports fan” not only crop up at the physical sites but also spill
over into the online realm. One particularly interesting archive that helps to supplement
offline experiences are the yelp pages for these establishments.
23
Both sports and LGBT
identities are formed by understandings of corporal experiences, so online reconstructions
of these spaces are useful for further problematizing how the body is constituted
discursively; “the importance of a new space is [then] viewed not as an end in itself, but
rather as a contextual feature for the reaction of new versions of the self” (Wakeford,
2000, p. 411). An unpacking of these online spaces show that patrons, while providing
seemingly banal reviews, use these forums to work through questions of identity in a
similar manner to my discussions with them in the physical space of the gay sports bar.

22
It should be noted these references to performance were inherently negative. As explored later, many felt
that people “tried too hard” in these spaces.
23
Again, this project takes as a starting point the notion that “the activities that people do online are
intimately interwoven with the construction of the offline world” (Baym, 2006, p. 86).

248

Many users debate the merit of gay sports bars by situating their similarity or
dissimilarity to “traditional” sports bars – here we see the conflation of straight with
original and authentic.
24

They’re Trying Too Hard: The Art of Identifying an Act
As I navigated the space of the sports bar, as both observer and conversationalist,
I was surprised to hear that so many patrons felt let down by the space, not because of its
ability to recreate a traditional sports space, or even in the sports it showed, but rather in
the interactions of patrons themselves in the bar.
25
However, these critiques often came
up in two very different ways. The first was that individuals who frequented a gay sports
bar were often “trying too hard.” That their actions within the space felt disingenuous, as
if they were “putting on an act.”
Here we see an interesting reading of “performativity” as inherently negative.
Rather than noting that identity is constantly performed, by gay individuals and straight
alike, performance, in this estimation, was specific to gay individuals who otherwise lack
this quality. We also find an interesting interpretation of masculinity as inherently
deficient in gay men, and sport as a recuperative process. This notion of sports as
curative relies on the implicit claims of sports as a masculine pursuit. While the
individuals I spoke did not think that they were making up for a lack of “authentic

24
Additionally, it should be noted that multiple notions of what a straight sports bar is and how it operates
are often reified into a monolithic understanding.
25
As a side note, I do think it’s telling that on numerous occasions when discussing my project – a field
studies of gay sports bars – I was often asked if media was the deciding factor in how the sports bar was
established as gay-focused. While it was often presented in a half-joking manner, many individuals
assumed that a sports bar was gay because it only showed “figure skating” or “ gymnastics.” These
comments came from both gay and straight individuals alike, from those I would deem progressive and
liberal. Though tied to a joke, it shows how important media are in establishing cultural interactions and in
promulgating stereotypes and implicit understandings of what is straight and what is not.

249

maleness,” they did see others as “trying too hard.” Again, I pushed patrons to try to
pinpoint what allowed certain individuals to “pass” for authentic sports fans and which
ones did not. Often these rested on both the visual and the instinctual.
With regards to the visual, some patrons pointed to individuals who might not be
read as traditional sports fans based on their body types, their body movements, or their
general demeanor. Their position as sports fans and their place within the sports bar was
dismissed because they did not present as traditionally masculine. Here we see the body
as a key site for the struggle over identity and sexuality and one that echoes the notion
that a “physical sense of maleness and femaleness is central to the cultural interpretation”
of masculinity (Connell, 2005, p. 52). One’s ability to present a body as normative is as
important to situating oneself as a “real” sports fan as is sports knowledge or even sports
participation.
The “instinctual” was a more difficult concept to define, but for many patrons
they said they “could just tell” if another patron was a sports fan or not. While I strongly
believe that many of these references to “instinctual” were attempts to side-step judging
someone’s relationship to sports culture based solely on observations of their corporeal
actions, I also believe it points us to the work done by discursive practices which distance
sports from gay male culture. Put another way, it seemed as though in many instances
“not a real sports fan” became a metonym for homophobic discourses that see gay men
and sports as inherently incompatible. It was interesting to see that many of the patrons
who questioned the authenticity of others used normative beliefs of what a proper fan
looks and acts like even if this normative reasoning might be the same used by straight
individuals to disqualify all non-straight sporting cultures. While it might seem

250

surprising to think that gay men would reproduce this language within a space of gay
culture, a return to Brian Pronger’s (1990) work reminds us that gay men often see the
extreme hegemonic masculinity and heteronormativity of sports as a way to distance
themselves from any homosexual feelings they might be experiencing. That the easiest
way to prove that one belongs within straight culture is to prove that one belongs within
sports culture: to be good at sports is read as to be good at straightness.
While it would be impossible, within this forum, to prove internalized
homophobia, the responses gesture towards the difficulty many find in “unlearning”
discourses of homophobia ingrained in male athletics as an early age. Furthermore, as
documented by Mike Messner, extreme homophobia within sports culture “often leads
gay males to consciously create identities that conform to narrow definitions of
masculinity (Messner, 1992, p. 35). This is no better illustrated than by the comments
made by patrons insisting on real sports fans emulating notions of masculinity that would
seem entirely at odds with a more queer-friendly and fluid version of masculinity.
26

This distancing of the homosexual from the masculine is important for two
reasons. The first is that it supports the claim that homophobia within sports keeps men
and boys from becoming too close by situating the definition of masculinity within very
narrow terms and policing transgressions (Messner, 1992). The second is that it ignores
the homosociability inherent in traditional sports bars. However, these acts are routinely
dismissed in “heterosexual” environments when men have the ability to shore up their
own masculinity through discourses and actions that disparage and/or objectify women.
Since this particular type of sexual objectification is not possible in the same manner

26
It should also be noted that masculinity, just like femininity, works hierarchically. Hegemonic
masculinity is not a singular concept and there are various levels within the term that allow for certain
masculinities to be privileged over others.

251

within gay sports bars, it creates a “Catch 22” wherein gay sports bars are never able to
replicate hegemonic masculinity since they are unable to completely reproduce these
demands. Therefore, the use of the “authentic” or “real” are always unattainable
attributes: individuals in these arenas are disqualified automatically by the very tropes
they are attempting to replicate.
The alternative to the man who “tries too hard” is the man who “does not try hard
enough.” This critique, also intrinsically tied to the body and bodily discipline, identified
behavior such as cheering and talking as both too flamboyant and too distracting. As one
commentator wrote, “I have to say that I've never seen too many people be here just to
watch sports, even though they're always on the TV. It's just not quite as sporty as I'd
like.” This sentiment is echoed by another patron who said “it’s difficult to just watch a
game here. There are all sorts of extra-curricular activities going on that distract from the
game. It’s much easier to watch at a straight bar to avoid so much sexual tension.”
And another who added, “As a gay man, I hold this truth to be self-evident: that
gays in a room full of other gays will spend a lot of time checking each other out. This
means that attention at a gay sports bar will never be primarily centered on the game.”
For these patrons, the lack of focus on the game, and solely the game, and the addition of
homoerotic flirtations among the patrons took away from their enjoyment. I believe
comments such as these are important in the way they over-imagine the traditional sports
bar as a space devoid of sexuality and sexual desire. While homosexual interpersonal
interactions at a gay sports bar are far more explicit than at a traditional sports bar, to say
that men are solely focused on sports in these spaces would be difficult to prove.
Furthermore, not a single patron ever expressed an issue with seeing homosexuality,

252

specifically, but rather had trouble with men who focused more on desire rather than
sports. However, it is this fixation on gayness as taking away from the game that is
important, especially since it implies that straightness operates unmarked in these spaces.
For these individuals, gay bars fail, and individual fans fail as well, because they
do not live up to the expectations of traditional sports bars as straight spaces. However, it
would be impossible to resuscitate gay bars within the context of straight success. To
predicate the success of a sporting space as reliant on a distancing from non-normative
sexuality automatically disqualifies the LGBT community from the process. However,
by reconfiguring what it means to succeed within sports cultures, we might provide for a
more supportive, accommodating, and welcoming configuration of sports. It is with
these thoughts in mind that I would now like to point us towards a grouping of
oppositional comments made about the queered potentialities of gay sports bars.

I Can Be Me: Queering Normative Assumptions
While many comments positioned gay actions within sports bars as distracting
and as an undoing of sports culture, there were also many patrons who saw these very
same disruptions as positive and politically destabilizing. They identified the exact same
male interactions and explicit moments of homosociability as not requiring them to either
abandon their gay status or sports fandom, but rather as a chance to problematize and
expand what these two categories might delimit. As one patron told me, “some gay men
love sports and some gay men don’t, but I feel comfortable being myself here. It's not an
issue of wanting to be straight-acting, it's an issue of comfort.” For this patron, along

253

with many others, gay sports bars allows fans to engage with their sports and gay selves
in a manner that does not require the sublimating of one for the other.
In particular, patrons recognized the “ease of conversation” in gay sports bars as
compared to both traditional sports bars and traditional gay bars. While at the former
they often recognized that they censored their actions – everything from the way they
ordered drinks to the way they cheered for their team – and at the latter they discussed the
inability to start a conversation. As one patron identified, “I never have any idea what to
say to someone next to me besides to comment on what they’re drinking or what they’re
wearing.” However at gay sports bars they find common ground through their shared
affinity for sports. These conversations are made possible by patrons inhabiting
positionalities as both LGBT individuals AND sports fans. They are again connected by
remote intimacies. Specifically in this case this refers to shared knowledge of sports
culture and the ability to find a queer forum to express rearticulations of a traditionally
heteronormative culture. These patrons recognized that some of their most vivid
memories, both positive and negative, were tied to their positionalities within LGBT
culture and sports culture. While it is not my intention to position anti-gay violence as
equal in pain and suffering to the pain and suffering of the home team losing an important
game, what I think is important is that these affective memories circulate uniquely within
the space of a gay sports bar. These remembrances allow for individuals to find common
connections with one other. For many of the individuals I spoke to, there was a feeling of
disqualification that had previously haunted their sporting interactions. But interestingly,
while they felt far more comfortable in gay sports bars they did not necessarily feel as
though they had rid themselves of the imposter syndrome articulated in previous

254

comments. Rather, they felt as though they had found a group of like-minded individuals
who also connected over the pleasure and pain of identifying as gay and as a sports fan.
They were all individuals who failed to recreate the heteronormative requirements of
sports culture but had found commonality in this failure.
While the queer aspects of sports are often ignored or disregarded by an industry
wary of the implications brought about by recognizing its homosociable qualities, gay
sports bars use these common codes to establish queer interactions between seemingly
foreign members of the community. One can look towards the interactions established
within gay sports bars as renegotiating (and potentially reveling in) what it means to be
out of step with straight time. The notion of straight time (Halberstam, 2005) helps to
locate how success is queered within sports bar settings. Though regulated by the linear
aspect of sports seasons, ordered and predictable programming schedules, and the
totalizing frameworks and rules of each individual game, gay sports bars also allow for a
slippage or interruption of heteronormative comportment and viewing habits. Common
knowledge of sports, mutual interest, and/or shared experiences, once produced,
understood, and grounded in a decidedly heteronormative manner, are used as prompts to
engage in queer connections. Gestures, or citational signs, such as slapping butts, drawn
from disparate settings once seen as incompatible, are now incorporated into a hybrid
hetero/homo vocabulary. However, they are reconstituted to situate both positive and
negative polarities to show how “the pleasure and pain of queerness are not a strict
binary” (Muñoz, 2009, p. 74).
These gestures, recognizable and reconstituted, derivative and innovative,
additionally provide further connections across race and class boundaries. These spaces

255

allowed for individuals to connect across boundaries of difference through their shared
knowledge of sports. In Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999) Samuel Delany
makes an interesting case for the importance of public venues for sexual encounters. He
writes:
Similarly, if every sexual encounter involves bringing someone back to your
house, the general sexual activity in a city becomes anxiety-filled, class-bound,
and choosy. This is precisely why public rest rooms, peep shows, sex movies,
bars with grope rooms, and parks with enough greenery are necessary for a
relaxed and friendly sexual atmosphere in a democratic metropolis (1999, p. 127).
While Delany is focused on sexual encounters, at a time of gentrification in New York
City, I think his argument helps to show the ways in which a public space such as a gay
sports bar similarly produces a relaxed and friendly atmosphere. These spaces are reliant
on cultural connections that transcend classed and racialized boundaries. Though it
would be naïve to ignore very prevalent issues of race in the mediation of sports, it would
be equally reductive to dismiss sports language as a cultural mode unable to connect
across differences and intersectionalities. The space of the gay sports bar is conducive to
offering up an alternative vision of the proper mode of gay cultural links.
While no one offered up the gay sports bar as the perfect setting, they did
recognize that moments of disruption were permitted: ideology is permitted and protested
in uniquely queer actions. For instance, one evening, during a blow-out game in which
the fans were starting to lose interest, patrons began to use their cell phones to recreate
the kiss-cam seen at so many sporting events. While the kiss cam normally features only
male/female couples, this version featured the spotlight on a variety of pairings. From

256

male/male, to female/female, to female/male, to male/female/male, almost every
combination of sexual pairing was put under the spotlight. Not only did this version of
the kiss-cam not rely on opposite sex pairings, neither did it relegate itself to two person
relationships as I witnessed the light shine on two men, before adding a third. This
creation of a space that recognizes and promotes patrons’ actively resisting the encoded
directives to watch and identify as a heterosexual can be understood as a disidentification
in that “it is not about assimilation into a heterosexual matrix but instead a partial
disavowal of that cultural form that works to restructure it from within” (Muñoz, 2009, p.
28). These sites additionally allow for engagements between identity and affinity (meant
here as sexual identity and sports affinity) in a way that does not require LGBT
individuals to subordinate one for the other. Rather, they exist in conversation with each
other, the residue of both informing and altering the other.
Furthermore, the linear concepts of success and/or winning, as they apply to
sports, take on a different meaning when the (literal) end game is not the end of
engagement with queer sporting bodies. Though many use sports as a reason for, or
justification of, their attendance at a gay sports bar, rarely does their team’s success
dictate their further engagements with the space and its patrons. Winning, in the
traditional sense, is quickly reimagined to include the winning of queer friendship. As
many patrons told me, they “had never felt so much a part of the LGBT community as
[they did] in a gay sports bar.” And, though the “game proper” might serve as the initial
temporal container for interaction, its finitude need not dictate the conclusion of
involvement; in most instances it solely serves as the instigation. One patron put it more
succinctly when he said, “I come to this bar alone to watch a game, but I realize I’m

257

never lonely for companionship here.” Another added, “I hate going to other bars alone.
Here I never am, even when I walk in not knowing anyone.” This “something else” of
queer success marks the beginning of a queered relationship that takes sports as its start,
but certainly not its end.
Though it’s safe to say that gay sports bars should still be pushed to expand the
gendered and assimilationist notions of sports consumption, this call should not override
the importance we place on contradictions as generative forces nor should it disregard
sports as a “locked-down dead commodity” incapable of being (re)articulated to serve a
queer purpose. While many patrons of gay sports bars find it difficult to imagine and
understand sports culture that is not reliant on heteronormative foundations, others
seemed better adept to find moments of possibility within the overlapping, and often
contradictory, realm of LGBT and sports culture. If we are to think of “queerness as
always in the horizon,” (Muñoz, 2009, p. 9) then the promise of queer potentiality,
situated within quotidian acts of sports consumption, might help us strain our vision
towards that anti-antiutopic horizon.

258

Conclusion:
Sports, Media, and Gay Sexualities: The Pleasure and the Pain
Throughout this dissertation I have made the argument that sports and gay
sexualities, once considered to be either incongruent or antagonistic positionalities, are
mediated through one another and articulated together far more than previously thought.
I contend that in a world where we more openly engage with the visibility of gayness,
sports culture becomes a unique site over which to better understand and queerly contest
normative frameworks.
This project tracked these conversations across a diversity of temporal and spatial
locations to better understand when and how these narratives become authorized and
relevant. In particular, I have argued that recent conversations of sports and sexuality rest
on the ‘coming out’ narrative in order to discuss their significance, but often do so
without critically attending to what this process requires. Through my attempts to queer
‘coming out’ I have worked to connect its reliance to neoliberal forms of personal
responsibility and consumer citizenship, while also interrogating the very language of
truth and authenticity it necessitates. I believe this approach is necessary not only to
better situate how our current estimation of sports and gay sexualities works to affirm
existing frameworks, but also to help point us towards transformative alternatives. This
particular approach rests on a movement away from a discussion solely of homophobia in
order to critically assess how heteronormativity often circulates and undergirds these
conversations.
I have also suggested that a critique of the ‘coming out’ process might help us to
contend with the ambivalence of “outness,” particularly as a type of visibility that

259

necessitates mediation as empowerment. I argue that if we are to critically assess what it
would take to produce a world in which heterosexuality wasn’t assumed and imbedded,
and homosexuality necessary of announcement and containment, it would force us to
attend to the structures and practices of living that produce the ‘coming out’ narrative. If
we work towards a world in which we do not need to ‘come out’ we will also be working
towards identifying and eradicating heteronormativity. When we ‘come out’ we fix
ourselves in time, and we ignore the call that understanding our sexuality and our identity
is a life-long and forever changing process. I suggest that instead of needing to contain,
to know, we can revel in the unknowing. While we still need to be visible as a political
organizing practice, we must still think of whom that visibility serves and how our voices
are being used.
So, while calls for gay visibility through state-regulated institutions have garnered
much of the publicity regarding modern gay politics this dissertation is committed to
problematizing what exactly this type of visibility, specifically as it relates to the ‘coming
out’ of professional athletes, produces and what gaps and fissures exist in its vision of the
LGBT community. As theorists have argued, “In funneling our energies into a fight for
the ‘inclusive’ rights to marry or retain domestic-partner benefits, we should at the very
least acknowledge how these social practices within late-capitalist society marginalize
and exclude a host of others” (Gray M. L., 2009, p. 175). Just as Gray argues that rural
spaces compel a rethinking of what is required of LGBT individuals to “create belonging
and visibility in communities where they are not only a distinct minority but also
popularly represented as out of place” (pp. 3-4), so too must we rethink how gay
visibility and sports are connected. Furthermore, because professional sports are a

260

uniquely racialized space, one cannot engage this arena with discussions of gay cultural
production that are overimagined as exclusively white. As Roderick Ferguson argues,
“nonwhite populations were racialized such that gender and sexual transgressions were
not incidental to the production of nonwhite labor, but constitutive of it” (2004, p. 13).
Therefore it is impossible to divorce questions of sports and sexuality from those of
sexuality and race. Additionally, since sports are markedly tied to ideological
understandings of patriotism we must be aware of “the state’s regulation of nonwhite
gender and sexual practices through Americanization programs… [that] press nonwhites
into gender and sexual conformity despite the gender and sexual diversity of those
racialized groups” (Ferguson, 2004, p. 14). Simply bracketing the question of sports and
sexuality within a framework of ‘coming out’ does little to attend to the complicated and
contradictory understanding of agency within sports and sexuality, and ignores the
ruptures and disidentifications that individuals formulate in relation to both sports and
sexuality. Pressing for gays to become visible in order to obtain citizenship ignores the
ways that citizenship has necessitated a shedding of both nonwhite and nonstraight
identifications.
1

One of the most difficult aspects, personally, of writing a critique of ‘coming out’
is contending with the feelings of joy, liberation, relief, etc. that accompany such
announcements. On one hand, I feel it is important to engage in such a critique if only to
recognize that these feelings often mask larger forces that work against the interest, and I
mean that broadly, of many LGBTQ people. But on the other hand, I do not think this

1
As Roderick Ferguson lays out, “African American culture has historically been deemed contrary to the
norms of heterosexuality and patriarchy” since their “fitness for citizenship was measured in terms of how
much their sexual, familial, and gender relations deviated from a bourgeois nuclear family model
historically embodied by whites” (p. 20).

261

examination necessitates the vacating of those feelings. Rather, a critique such as the one
set forth in this dissertation works to invest those feelings in a way that does not rely on
‘coming out.’ It asks how we can provide structures of living for nonnormative
individuals that disarticulate these feelings from the necessity to ‘come out.’
Still, even within these moments of heteronormativity, mediations of sports and
gay sexualities also provide important contestations with static and confining language
and axioms. LGBT individuals find an ability, through discursive formations and
concretized sites of community, to question the normative ideas that still guide the
understanding of sports and sexuality even in a culture that more openly engages with,
and shows support for, certain types of homosexuality. These fissures support the
significant claim of William Morgan, who writes of the important role that “argument
plays in changing people’s social outlook, in getting them not just to see the error in their
ways but to correct those errors where it most counts, in the so-called real world in which
we live, work, and play” (2006, p. 212). There is perhaps no better combination of work
and play than sports culture. While it does not make sense to measure sport’s critical
value “by the same instrumental standards by which we assign the seriousness of such
practically necessary activities as work and such morally obligatory ones as saving
someone’s life” (2006, p. 206), neither does it make sense to dismiss them as trivial. As
this dissertation contends, sports culture and sports media have a great impact on the lives
of American’s, gay, straight, or otherwise, and they are an arena through which we can
both interrogate heteronormativity and push for new frameworks of inclusion and equity.
But this is a story not just of ‘coming out’ and neoliberalism, but of the way that
politics and policy and binaries and privilege, operate. I am not advocating for a

262

wholesale destruction of sports or sports culture, but rather of the necessity to continually
connect stories of sports and gay sexualities to the larger frameworks of existence that
cultivate them. If we are to care about the ‘coming out’ of Michael Sam, then we should
care about the ways in which teams assessed his athletic viability through the lens of
heteronormativity. If we are to celebrate Derrick Gordon or Brittney Griner for ‘coming
out’ while playing collegiate Division I basketball, then we must also attend to the fact
that they did so for schools that have anti-gay policy written into their student’s code of
conduct.
Despite ESPN’s claim to the contrary, what I argue in this dissertation is that
sports culture is intimately tied to political and cultural formations that often
disadvantage LGBT individuals, or restrict their ability to live alternatively and openly
without fear of what doing so means in a heteronormative society. I argue that thinking
through sports, media, and gay sexualities with a more critical eye does not force us to
abandon them wholesale, does not require us to desert the pleasure they bring, but rather
asks us to acknowledge the pain they also facilitate: that pride should not come at the
expense of the pain. I believe this points us towards a more queered horizon, since “the
pleasure and pain of queerness are not a strict binary” (Muñoz, 2009, p. 74). They exist
together, and the recognition of such begins our journey from the affirmative to the
transformative.

263

References
About Us. (n.d.). Retrieved January 20, 2016, from StandUp Foundation:

http://www.standupfoundation-uk.org/about/

Alexander, J. (2002). Homo-Pages and Queer Sites: Studying the Construction and

Representation of Queer Identities on the World Wide Web. International

Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies , 7 (2/3), 85-106.

Alexander, J. (2002). Introduction to the Special Issue: Queer Webs: Representation

of LGBT people and Communities on the World Wide Web. International

Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies , 7 (2/3), 77-84.

Allen, L. (1997). The lesbian idol : Martina, kd and the consumption of lesbian

masculinity. Cassell.

Altman, D. (1982). The Homosexualization of America, The Americanization of the

Homosexual. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Anderson, E. (2005). In The Game: Gay Athletes and the Cult of Masculinity. Albany,

NY: State University of New York Press.

Anderson, E. (2011). Masculinities and Sexualitities in Sport and Physical Cultures:

Three Decades of Evolving Research. Journal of Homosexuality , 58 (5), 565-

578.

Anderson, E. (2002). Openly Gay Athletes: Contesting Hegemonic Masculinity in a

Homophobic Environment. Gender & Society , 16 (6), 860-877.

Anderson, E., & Kian, E. (2012). Examining media contestation of masculinity and

head trauma in the National Football League. Men and Masculinities , 15 (2),

152-173.

264

Arnovitz, K. (2011, May 23). Joakim Noah: 'That's not who I am'. Retrieved from

ESPN.com: http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/29445/joakim-n

oah-thats-not-who-i-am

Banet-Weiser, S. (2012). Authentic TM: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand

Culture. New York, NY: New York University Press.

Banet-Weiser, S. (2015). ‘Confidence you can carry!’: girls in crisis and the market

for girls' empowerment organizations. Continuum , 29 (2), 182-193.

Banet-Weiser, S., & Lapsansky, C. (2008). RED is the New Black: Brand Culture,

Consumer Citizenship and Political Possibility. International Journal of

Communication , 1248-1268.

Baylor University. (2009, October 2). Statement on Human Sexuality. Retrieved from

Baylor University - Student Policies and Procedures:

http://www.baylor.edu/student_policies/index.php?id=32295

Baym, N. K. (2006). Finding the Quality in Qualitative Research. In D. Silver, & A.

Massanari (Eds.), Critical Cyberculture Studies (pp. 79-87). New York, NY:

New York University Press.

Beacham, G. (2011, April 14). Kobe Bryant fined $100,000 for gay slur. USA Today .

Bederman, G. (1995). Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and

Race in the US, 1880-1917. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Bennet, D. (2011, November 5). Re: Same-Sex Pedophilia Scandal Rocks Penn State

Football, Involving Jerry Sandusky. From

http://outsports.com/jocktalkblog/2011/11/05/same-sexpedophilia-

scandal-rocks-penn-state-involving-jerry-sandusky-ad-tim-curley/

265

Berlant, L. (2007). Nearly Utopian, Nearly Normal: Post-Fordist Affect in La

Promesse and Rosetta. Public Culture , 19 (2), 273-301.

Berlant, L. (2008). The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of

Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Berlant, L., & Warner, M. (2000). Sex in Public. In Intimacy (pp. 311-330). Chicago,

IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Birrell, S., & Cole, C. (1994). Women, sport, and culture. Human Kinetics Publishers.

Borden, S. (2013, April 18). Female Star Comes Out as Gay, and Sports World Shrugs.

Retrieved May 1, 2013, from The New York Times:

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/sports/ncaabasketball/brittney-

griner-comes-out-and-sports-world-shrugs.html

Bragman, H. (2014, February 14). PR Lessons For All From Michael Sam's 'Coming

Out'. Retrieved from LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140214161425-198796846-pr-lessons-

for-all-from-michael-sam-s-coming-out

Branch, J. (2014, February 10). N.F.L. Prospect Proudly Says What Teammates

Knew: He’s Gay. The New York Times , p. A1.

Breech, J. (2015, September 25). Michael Sam fires his agent, plans on making NFL

return in 2016. Retrieved from CBS Sports:

http://www.cbssports.com/nfl/eye-on-football/25315723/michael-sam-

fires-his-agent-plans-on-making-nfl-return-in-2016

Brown, M. (2014, December 10). Major League Baseball Sees Record $9 Billion In

Revenues For 2014. Retrieved from Forbes:

266

http://www.forbes.com/sites/maurybrown/2014/12/10/major-league-

baseball-sees-record-9-billion-in-revenues-for-2014/#4c20fec76cb2

Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.

New York: Routledge.

Buzinski, J., & Zeigler Jr., C. (2007). The Outsports Revolution: Truth and Myth in the

World of Gay Sports. New York: Alyson Books.

Cahn, S. K. (1994). Coming On Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Women's Sport.

Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Campbell, J. E. (2004). Getting it on Online: Cyberspace, Gay Male Sexuality, and

Emobided Identity. New York, NY: Harrington Park Press.

Canaday, M. (2009). The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-

Century America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Carter, B., & Sandomir, R. (1995, August 6). The Trophy in Eisner's Big Deal. The New

York Times , pp. I, II.

Castells, M. (1983). The city and the grassroots: A cross–cultural theory of urban

social movements. London: Edward Arnold.

Caudwell, J. (Ed.). (2006). Sport, Sexualities and Queer/Theory. London: Routledge.

Cayleff, S. E. (1996). Babe: The Life and Legend of Babe Didrikson Zaharias. Urbana,

IL: University of Illinois Press.

Chauncey, G. (1994). Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay

Male World, 1890-1940. New York: Basic Books.

Chawansky, M. (2016). Be who you are and be proud: Brittney Griner, intersectional

invisibility and digital possibilities for lesbian sporting celebrity. Leisure

267

Studies .

Chawansky, M., & Francombe, J. (2011). Cruising for Olivia: Lesbian self-invention

and the cultural politics of coming out in sport. Sociology of Sport Journal , 28

(4), 461-477.

Clayton, B. a. (2009). Sport and metrosexual identity: Sports media and emergent

sexualities. In Sport and Social Identities (pp. 132-149). Basingstoke:

Palgrave Macmillan.

Collins, J. (2013, April 29). Why NBA center Jason Collins is coming out now. Sports

Illustrated .

Condon, P. (2012, September 15). Pro sports are more gay-friendly as athletes speak

out. Retrieved August 1, 2013, from The Associated Press:

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/pro-sports-more-gay-friendly-athletes-speak-

out

Connell, R. (2005). Masculinities (Second Edition ed.). Berkeley, CA: University of

California Press.

Connell, R. (2010) Understanding Neoliberalism. In S. Braedley & M. Luxton (Eds),

Neoliberalism and Everyday Life (pp. 22-36). Montreal: McGill-Queen’s

University Press.

Connelly, C. (2014, February 10). Mizzou's Michael Sam Says He's Gay. Retrieved

August 1, 2014, from ESPN: Outside the Lines:

http://espn.go.com/espn/otl/story/_/id/10429030/michael-sam-missouri-t

igers-says-gay

Corsello, A. (2014, November 12). Michael the Brave. GQ Magazine .

268

Crooks, R. (2013). The Rainbow Flag and the Green Carnation: Grindr in the Gay

Village. First Monday , 18 (11).

Deitsch, R. (2014, April 13). Brittney Griner discusses sexuality, Baylor and her new

book. Retrieved from Sports Illustrated:

http://www.si.com/nba/2014/04/03/brittney-griner-wnba-baylor-book

Delany, S. R. (1999). Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. New York, NY: New York

University Press.

Deruy, E. (2016, February 26). Houston, We Have an LGBT Problem. Retrieved from

The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/02/houston-we-

have-an-lgbt-problem/470709/

Doyle, J. (Ed.). (2013). The Athletic Issue . GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies ,

19 (4).

Dubin, J. (2015, August 14). Michael Sam, first openly gay player, retires for mental

health reasons. Retrieved August 20, 2015, from CBS Sports:

http://www.cbssports.com/nfl/eye-on-football/25270305/michael-sam-

walks-away-from-football-cites-mental-health

Duggan, L. (2002). The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism.

In Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics (pp. 175-

194). Durham, NC.

Duggan, L. (2003). The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the

Attack on Democracy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Dyer, R. (2002). The Matter of Images: Essays on Representation (Second ed.).

London: Routledge.

269

Edwards, M. (2010). Transconversations: New Media, Community, and Identity. In C.

P. Cooper (Ed.), LGBT Identity and Online New Media (pp. 159-172). New

York, NY: Routledge.

El-Tayeb, F. (2011). European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Emerson, R. M., Fretz, R. I., & Shaw, L. L. (1995). Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes.

Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Eng, H. (2006). Queer Athletes and Queering in Sport. In J. Caudwell (Ed.),

Sport, Sexualities and Queer/Theory (pp. 49-61). New York, NY: Routledge.

Ennis, D. (2016, January 20). New Foundation Launches to Support LGBT Athletes and

Coaches. Retrieved from The Advocate:

http://www.advocate.com/sports/2016/1/20/new-foundation-launches-

support-lgbt-athletes-and-coaches

Epstein, S. (1992). Gay Politics, Ethnic Identity: The Limits of Social

Constructionism. In Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social

Constructionist Controversy. New York, NY: Routledge.

ESPN. (2007, February 12). Cuban says openly gay player would clean up. Retrieved

from ESPN: http://espn.go.com/nba/news/story?id=2762656

ESPN News. (2007, February 12). Cuban says openly gay player would clean up.

Retrieved from ESPN News:

http://espn.go.com/nba/news/story?id=2762656

ESPN News. (2016, Ferbuary 14). NBA extends television deals. Retrieved from ESPN:

http://espn.go.com/nba/story/_/id/11652297/nba-extends-television-

270

deals-espn-tnt

ESPN.com news services. (2013, April 17). Brittney Griner discusses being gay.

Retrieved from espnW:

http://espn.go.com/wnba/story/_/id/9185633/brittney-griner-comes-says-

just-are

etc. (2011, November 7). Re: Jerry Sandusky Indicted on Sex Charges. From

http://espn.go.com/ncf/conversations/_/id/7190822/former-penn-state-

coach-jerry-sandusky-indicted-sex-abuse-charges

Fagan, K. (2015, August 17). Michael Sam Needed To Put All His Focus On Football To

Succeed On The Field. Retrieved from espnW.com:

http://espn.go.com/espnw/news-commentary/article/13455478/michael-

sam-needed-put-all-focus-football-succeed-field

Fagan, K. (2013, May 13). Owning the Middle. ESPN the Magazine.

Ferguson, R. A. (2004). Aberrations in Black: Toward A Queer of Color Critique.

Minneapolis, MN: The University of Minnesota Press.

Fernandez, E. (2016, February 25). Warriors Coach Steve Kerr Says More Gay Athletes

Need To Come Out. Retrieved from The Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/warriors-steve-kerr-gay-

athletes_us_56cf2e37e4b0871f60ea4f29

Forest, B. (1995). West Hollywood As Symbol: The Significance of Place in the

Construction of Gay Identity. Environment and Planning , 13 (2), 133-157.

Foucault, M. (1980). The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction. (R. Hurley,

Trans.) New York: Vintage Books.

271

Foucault, M. (1994). The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. New

York, NY: Vintage Books.

Foucault, M. (1986). The Use of Pleasure. New York, NY: Vintage Books.

Fraser, N. (1997). Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the "Postsocialist"

Condition. New York, NY: Routledge.

Freedman, R. (1999). Babe Didrikson Zaharias: The Making of a Champion. New York,

NY: Clarion Books.

Galanes, P. (2014, June 27). Speak Your Own Truth, on Your Own Terms Billie Jean

King and Jason Collins on Being Gay Athletes. The New York Times .

Gallico, P. (1932, October). The Texas Babe. Vanity Fair .

Gallico, P. (1936, August). Women in Sports Should Look Beautiful. Reader's

Digest , pp. 12-14.

Gamson, J. (2000, January 3). Diversity Follies. The American Prospect .

Gamson, J. (1995). Must Identity Movements Self-destruct? A Queer Dilemma. Social

Problems , 42 (3), 390-407.

Gaughan, C. (2013, February 20). Ready or Not, Here He Comes Out: The Time for a

Gay Professional Athlete Is Now . Retrieved February 23, 2013, from The

Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/conor-gaughan/gay-

professional-athlete_b_2678536.html

Giles, S. (2011, May 23). Anti-Gay Slurs Becoming Popluar Fine Material in NBA.

Retrieved October 15, 2013, from The Baltimore Sports Report:

http://baltimoresportsreport.com/anti-gay-slurs-becoming-popular-fine-

material-in-nba-15773.html

272

Gleeson, S. (2016, March 13). Seton Hall's Derrick Gordon the first openly gay player

in NCAA tournament. Retrieved March 13, 2016, from USA Today Sports:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaab/bigeast/2016/03/12/seton-

hall-derrick-gordon-first-openly-gay-college-basketball-player-ncaa-

tournament/81704700/

Gleeson, S. (2016, January 20). Sports Equality Foundation launches to help gay

athletes, coaches come out. Retrieved January 20, 2016, from USA Today:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/2016/01/20/sports-equality-

foundation-gay-athletes-coaches-come-out/79051904/

Gough, B. (2007). Coming Out in the Heterosexist World Of Sport: A Qualitative

Analysis of Web Postings by Gay Athletes. In E. Peel, V. Clarke, & J. Drescher

(Eds.), British Lesbian, Gay , and Bisexual Psychologies: Theory, Research , and

Practice (pp. 153-174). London: The Haworth Medical Press.

Gray, H. (2013). Subject(ed) to Recognition. American Quarterly , 65 (4), 771-798.

Gray, M. L. (2009). Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural

America. New York, NY: New York University Press.

Griffin, P. (1998). Strong Women, Deep Closets: Lesbians and Homophobia in Sport.

Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.

Griner, B. (2013, May 5). Griner Says She Is Part of Mission to Help All Live in Truth.

The New York Times .

Griner, B., & Hovey, S. (2014). In My Skin: My Life On and Off the Basketball Court.

New York, NY: Dey St.

Griner, Delle Donne, Diggins discuss sports and sexuality. (2013, April 17). Retrieved

273

from Sports Illustrated: http://www.si.com/more-

sports/2013/04/17/wnba-griner-delle-donne-diggins-sports-sexuality

Gross, L. (2001). Up From Invisibility: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Media in America.

New York: Columbia University Press.

Halberstam, J. (1998). Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Halberstam, J. (2005). In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural

Lives. New York: New York University Press.

Halberstam, J. (2011). The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Hall, S. (1980). Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms. Media, Culture and Society , 2 (1),

57-72.

Hall, S. (1997). Minimal Selves. In A. Gray, & J. McGuigan (Eds.), Studying Culture: An

Introductory Reader (Second ed., pp. 134-138). London: Arnold.

Hanmer, R. (2010). Internet Fandom, Queer Discourse, and Identities. In C. P. Cooper

(Ed.), LGBT Identity and Online New Media (pp. 147-158). New York, NY:

Routledge.

Hardin, M., Kuehn, K., Jones, H., Genovese, J., & Balaji, M. (2009). Have You Got

Game?’Hegemonic Masculinity and Neo‐Homophobia in US Newspaper

Sports Columns. Communication, Culture & Critique , 2 (2), 182-200.

Harper, Z. (2015, December 11). Rajon Rondo suspended one game for derogatory

language toward referee. Retrieved December 17, 2015, from CBS Sports:

http://www.cbssports.com/nba/eye-on-basketball/25410606/rajon-rondo-

suspended-one-game-for-derogatory-language-toward-referee

Hartmann, D. (2002). Sport as Contested Terrain. In A Companion to Ethnic and

274

Racial Studies. Blackwell Publishers, Ltd.

Harvey, D. (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Harvey, D. (1990). Flexible Accumulation through Urbanization: Reflections on

"Post-Modernism" in the American City. Perspecta , 26, 251-272.

Haugh, D. (2011, May 23). Noah has no excuse for reacting off-color But it takes two,

and fans should be held accountable too. The Chicago Tribune .

Heitner, D. (2015, August 13). What A 13-Year, $200 Million Deal Means To James

Harden And Adidas. Retrieved from Forbes:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/darrenheitner/2015/08/13/what-a-13-year-

200-million-deal-means-to-james-harden-and-adidas/#5e4c94162688

Helin, K. (2015, December 11). Rajon Rondo suspended for “derogatory and offensive

term” to referee. Retrieved December 17, 2015, from NBC Sports:

http://nba.nbcsports.com/2015/12/11/rajon-rondo-suspended-for-

derogatory-and-offensive-term-to-referee/

Helin, K. (2010, May 11). Tim Donaghy makes wildest claim yet, crosses about eight

lines of decency. Retrieved from NBC Sports:

http://nba.nbcsports.com/2010/05/11/tim-donaghy-makes-wildest-claim-

yet-crosses-about-eight-lines-of-decency/

Hevesi, D. (2011, November 13). Lou Maletta, 74, Pioneer of Gay-Oriented TV

Programming. The New York Times , p. A28.

Hill, R. (2011). Gay USA. In J. D. Downing (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Social Movement

Media (p. 215). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Hinzmann, D. (2015, June 5). Daily Crush: Nike’s 2015 "Be True" Campaign For Pride.

275

Retrieved from Out Magazine: http://www.out.com/truman-

says/2015/6/05/daily-crush-nikes-2015-be-true-campaign

Hong, G. K., & Ferguson, R. A. (2011). Introduction. In G. K. Hong, & R. A. Ferguson

(Eds.), Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative

Racialization (pp. 1-22). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

hooks, b. (1992). Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, MA: South End

Press.

HuffPost Gay Voices. (2014, April 3). Tom Daley: 'I Am A Gay Man Now'. Retrieved

April 10, 2014, from The Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/03/tom-daley-gay-man-

now_n_5083865.html

Humm, A. (2009, July 29). 19 Years of LGBT Video History Preserved. Retrieved from

Gay City News: http://gaycitynews.nyc/19-years-lgbt-video-history-
preserved/

Jackson, J. L. (2005). Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity. Chicago: The

University of Chicago Press.

Jares, J. (1969, March 17). George Was Villainous, Gutsy and Gorgeous. Sports

Illustrated .

Jenkins, H. (2006). Fans, Bloggers and Games: Exploring Participatory Culture. New

York, NY: New York University Press.

Jhally, S. (1989). Cultural Studies and the Sports/Media Complex. In L. A. Wenner

(Ed.), MEdia, Sports, and Society (pp. 70-93). Newbury Park, CA: Sage
Publications.

Jhally, S. (1984). The Spectacle of Accumulation: Material and Cultural Factors in the

276

Evolution of the Sports/Media Complex. Insurgent Sociologist , 12 (3).

Johnson, E. P. (2003). Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of

Authenticity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Johnson, G., & Keith, M. C. (2014). Queer airwaves: The story of gay and lesbian

broadcasting. New York, NY: Routledge.

Johnson, W. O., & Williamson, N. P. (1977). "Whatta-Gal": The Babe Didrikson Story.

New York, NY: Little, Brown.

Kahrl, C. (2015, October 30). For gay athletes, what comes after coming out? ESPN

The Magazine .

Kaiser, C. (1997). The Gay Metropolis: 1940-1996. New York: Houghton Mifflin

Company.

Kane, M., & Lenskyj, H. (1998). Media treatment of female athletes: Issues of gender

and sexualities. In MediaSport.

Kellner, D. (2011). Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism, and Media Culture. In G. Dines,

& J. M. Humez (Eds.), Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Critical Reader (3rd

ed., pp. 7-18). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.

Kennedy, J. F. (1960, December 26). The Soft American. Sports Illustrated .

Kian, E. M., & Anderson, E. (2009). John Amaechi: Changing the Way Sport Reporters

Examine Gay Athletes. Journal of Homosexuality , 56 (7), 799-818.

Kian, E. M., Anderson, E., & Shipka, D. (2015). 'I am happy to start the conversation’:

Examining sport media framing of Jason Collins’ coming out and playing in

the NBA. Sexualities , 1-23.

Kimes, M. (2016, February 19). Why on earth does Roger Goodell make so much

277

money? Retrieved February 19, 2016, from ESPN:

http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/14802447/roger-goodell-high-salary-

explained

King, S. (2009). Homonormativity and the politics of race: Reading Sheryl Swoopes.

Journal of Lesbian Studies , 13 (3), 272-290.

King, S. (2008). What's Queer About (Queer) Sport Sociology Now? A Review Essay.

Sociology of Sport Journal , 25, 419-442.

Kirwin, B. (2005). Out of the Shadows : African American Baseball from the Cuban

Giants to Jackie Robinson. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

Klink, W. R. (2006). Sports Bar. In D. R. Hall, & S. G. Hall (Eds.), American Icons: An

Encyclopedia of the People, Places, and Things That Have Shaped Our Culture

(Vol. 3, pp. 641-647). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.)

Cambridge: Blackwell.

LGBTSportZDate.com. (2015, March 26). Home Page. Retrieved February 10, 2016,

from LGBTSportZDate.com: http://lgbtsportzdate.com

Lisec, J., & McDonald, M. G. (2012). Gender inequality in the new millennium: An

analysis of WNBA representations in sport blogs. Journal of Sports Media , 7

(2), pp. 153-178.

Livingston, S. (2009). On the mediation of everything: ICA presidential address

2008. Journal of Communication , 59 (1), pp. 1-18.

Magary, D. (2013, September 12). Is The NFL Blacklisting Kerry Rhodes? Retrieved

September 12, 2013, from Deadspin.com: http://deadspin.com/is-the-nfl-

278

blacklisting-kerry-rhodes-1300128496

Mahmood, S. (2005). Politics of Peity: The Islamic Revival And The Feminist Subject.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Maske, M. (2011, December 14). NFL completes TV deal with Fox, CBS and NBC

totaling about $3 billion per year. Retrieved from The Washington Post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/redskins/nfl-completes-tv-deal-

with-fox-cbs-and-nbc-totaling-about-3-billion-per-

year/2011/12/14/gIQARJdmuO_story.html

McDonald, M. G. (2006). Beyond the Pale: The Whiteness of Sport Studies and Queer

Scholarship. In J. Caudwell (Ed.), Sport, Sexualities and Queer/Theory (pp. 33-

45). New York, NY: Routledge.

McDonald, M. (2008). Rethinking Resistance: The Queer Play of the Women’s

National Basketball Association, Visibility Politics and Late Capitalism.

Leisure Studies , 27 (1), 77-93.

McRobbie, A. (2007). Postfeminism and Popular Culture: Bridget Jones and the New

Gender Regime. In Y. Tasker, & D. Negra (Eds.), Interrogating Postfeminism:

Gender Politics of Popular Culture (pp. 27-39). Durham, NC: Duke University

Press.

Messner, M. A. (1992). Power at Play: Sports and the Problem of Masculinity. Boston,

MA: Beacon Press.

Miss Didrikson Buys First Hat for Trip to U.S. Title Games. (1932, July 11). The New

York Times , p. 19.

Mitchell, H. (2014, May 21). WNBA becomes first pro league to specifically market to

279

LGBT community. The Los Angeles Times .

Morgan, W. J. (2006). Why Sports Morally Matter. New York, NY: Routledge.

Mosse, G. L. (1985). Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality

in Modern Europe. New York, NY: Howard Fertig.

Mosse, G. L. (1996). The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. Oxford,

England: Oxford University Press.

Muñoz, J. E. (2009). Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New

York: New York University Press.

Muñoz, J. E. (1999). Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics.

Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota.

Myrdahl, T. M. (2011). Lesbian visibility and the politics of covering in women’s

basketball game spaces. Leisure Studies , 30 (2), 139-156.

Nardi, P. M. (2002). The Mainstreaming of Lesbian and Gay Studies? In D.

Richardson, & S. Seidman, Handbook of Lesbian and Gay Studies (pp. 45-54).

London: SAGE Publications Ltd.

Newberry, P. (2011, May 23). Another gay slur shows sports still has ways to go.

Retrieved from USA Today:

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/basketball/nba/2011-05-23-

1488540725_x.htm

Newell, S. (2015, December 15). NBA Referee Bill Kennedy Announces He is Gay After

Torrent of Slurs from Rajon Rondo. Retrieved from Vice Sports:

https://sports.vice.com/en_us/highlight/nba-referee-bill-kennedy-

announces-he-is-gay-after-torrent-of-slurs-from-rajon-rondo-update

280

Nisen, M. (2013, May 9). How Nike Solved Its Sweatshop Problem. Retrieved August

20, 2015, from Business Insider: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-

nike-solved-its-sweatshop-problem-2013-5

Nylund, D. (2007). Beer, Babes, and Balls: Masculinity and Sports Talk Radio. Albany,

NY: State University of New York Press.

O'Neil, D. (2011, May 16). Will Sheridan: 'I'm proud of who I am'. Retrieved from

ESPN.com: http://espn.go.com/mens-college-

basketball/columns/story?id=6488036&columnist=oneil_dana

Orgad, S. (2005). From Online to Offline and Back: Moving from Online to Offline

Relationships with Research Informants. In C. Hine (Ed.), Virtual Methods:

Issues in Social Research on the Internet (pp. 51-65). Oxford: Berg.

Outsports.com. (n.d.). Community Guidlines. Retrieved May 1, 2014, from

Outsports.com: http://www.outsports.com/community-guidelines

Palermo, T. (n.d.). America's Original Sports Bar. Retrieved from When It Was A

Game: http://www.whenitwasagame.net/story_pages/osb.html

Pallotta, F., & Stelter, B. (2016, February 1). NFL makes enormous 'Thursday Night

Football' deal with NBC and CBS. Retrieved from CNN Money:

http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/01/media/thursday-night-football-nbc-

cbs-deal/

Pascoe, C. (2005). 'Dude, You're a Fag': Adolescent Masculinity and the Fag

Discourse. Sexualities , 8 (3), 329-346.

Pendergast, T. (2000). Creating the Modern Man. Columbia, MO: University of

Missouri Press.

281

Pride and Progress, Episode No 1. 4 October 1984. Container 1, Box 39. The Gay Cable

Network Archives. Series XXII: Pride and Progress/The Right Stuff. The Fales

Library and Special Collections, The Downtown Collection, New York

University, New York, NY.

Pride and Progress, Episode No 6. 6 October 1984. Container 1, Box 39. The Gay Cable

Network Archives. Series XXII: Pride and Progress/The Right Stuff. The Fales

Library and Special Collections, The Downtown Collection, New York

University, New York, NY.

Pride and Progress, Episode No. 22. 26 February 1985. Container 1, Box 40. The Gay

Cable Network Archives. Series XXII: Pride and Progress/The Right Stuff. The

Fales Library and Special Collections, The Downtown Collection, New York

University, New York, NY.

Pride and Progress, Episode No. 33. 14 May 1985. Container 1, Box 41. The Gay Cable

Network Archives. Series XXII: Pride and Progress/The Right Stuff. The Fales

Library and Special Collections, The Downtown Collection, New York

University, New York, NY.

Pronger, B. (2001). Comments on Eric Anderson's Trailblazing. Sociology of Sport

Journal , pp. 467-471.

Pronger, B. (1990). The Arena of Masculinity: Sports, Homosexuality, and the Meaning

of Sex. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Raphael, T. (2013, March 7). Vox Media Acquires Gay Sports News Site. Retrieved

from Folio Magazine: http://www.foliomag.com/2013/vox-media-acquires-

gay-sports-news-site/

282

Reid, M. (2013). Folklore and Fairy Tales: Babe Didrikson Zaharias Revealed. In D. C.

Ogden, & J. N. Rosen (Eds.), A Locker Room of Her Own: Celebrity, Sexuality

and Female Athletes. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi.

Rogers, R. (2013, 2 15). The Next Chapter. Retrieved 2 15, 2013, from Robbie Rogers

Personal Blog: http://robbierogers8.moonfruit.com

Rogin, G. (1962, April 2). The Deadly Insult. Sports Illustrated .

Rosenzweig, R. (1991). The Rise of the Saloon. In C. Mukerji, & S. Michael, Rethinking

Popular Culture: Contempory Perspectives in Cultural Studies (pp. 121-156).

Berkeley: University of California Press.

Russell, D. R. (1997). Rethinking Genre in School and Society: An Activity Theory

Analysis. Written Communication , 504-554.

Sam, M. (2014, February 9). Michael Sam Opens Up About Sexuality. (M. Orr,

Interviewer) The New York Times.

Scurlock, B. (1953, April 2). Fabulous Babe Descends on Beaumont. Beaumont

Journal.

Sedgwick, E. K. (1990). Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California

Press.

Sedgwick, E. K. (2003). Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading. In Touching, Feeling:

Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Seidman, S. (1993). Identity and Politics in a "Postmodern" Gay Culture: Some

Historical and Conceptual Notes. In Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and

Social Theory (pp. 105-142). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

Sender, K. (2004). Business, Not Politics: The Making of the Gay Market. New York,

283

NY: Columbia University Press.

Silver, N. (2014, April 4). The ‘Big Five’ in North American Pro Sports . Retrieved from

FiveThirtyEight: http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/theres-a-big-five-in-north-

american-pro-sports/

Snorton, C. R. (2014). Nobody is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low.

Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Solotaroff, P. (2011, July). Confessions of an NFL Hitman. Men's Journal .

Sykes, H. (2006). Queering Theories of Sexuality in Sports Studies. In J. Caudwell (Ed.),

Sport, Sexualities, and Queer/Theory (pp. 13-32). New York, NY: Routledge.

The Dan Patrick Show. (2015, September 25). Michael Sam: No regrets for how he’s led

his career, but wishes he had gone undrafted. Retrieved from The Dan Patrick

Show: http://www.danpatrick.com/2015/09/25/michael-sam-no-regrets-for-how-

hes-led-his-career-but-wishes-he-had-gone-undrafted/

Thompson, J. W. (2007). Transitional Decades. In M. Hilmes (Ed.), NBC: America's

Network (pp. 135-152). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Tongson, K. (2011). Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries. New York, NY: New

York University Press.

Trilling, L. (1971). Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press.

Tropiano, S. (2002). The Prime Time Closet: A History of Gays and Lesbians on TV.

New York, NY: Applause.

Wakeford, N. (2000). Cybequeer. In D. Bell, & B. M. Kennedy (Eds.), The Cybercultures

Reader (pp. 403-415). London: Routledge.

284

Wallace, G. (2015, January 12). Brands that love LGBT the most. Retrieved August 20,

2015, from CNN Money:

http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/12/news/companies/lgbt-brands/

Walters, S. D. (2001). All The Rage: The Story of Gay Visibility in America. Chicago:

The University of Chicago Press.

Ward, K. J. (2008). The Cyber-Ethnographic (re)construction of Two Feminist Online

Communities. Sociological Research Online , 4 (1).

Warner, M. (1993). Introduction. In M. Warner (Ed.), Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer

Politics and Social Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Warner, M. (2005). Publics and Counterpublics. New York, NY: Zone Books.

Warner, M. (1999). The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Warren, L. (2015, June 9). Tearful WNBA star Brittney Griner says her month-long

marriage was 'a huge mistake' that she felt pressured into by her pregnant wife.

Retrieved from Daily Mail: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-

3117188/Brittney-Griner-sobs-says-marriage-Glory-Johnson-huge-mistake.html

Wellard, I. (2006). Exploring the Limits of Queer and Sport: Gay Men Playing Tennis. In

J. Caudwell (Ed.), Sport, Sexualities and Queer/Theory (pp. 76-89). New York,

NY: Routledge.

Wenner, L. A. (1998). In Search of the Sports Bar: Masculinity, Alcohol, Sports, And the

Mediation of Public Space. In G. Rail (Ed.), Sport and Postmodern Times (pp.

301-332). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Williams, R. (1983). Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana.

285

Wilson, B. (2015, June 4). Premier League football club revenues and profits soar.

Retrieved October 25, 2015, from BBC News:

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-32931345

WNBA Embraces LGBT Fans. (2014, May 21). Retrieved October 18, 2015, from

AlJazeera America: http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/5/21/wnba-

marketing-lgbt.html

Wojnarowski, A. (2015, December 14). NBA referee Bill Kennedy reveals he is gay;

Rajon Rondo made slur to him. Retrieved December 17, 2015, from Yahoo

Sports: http://sports.yahoo.com/news/nba-referee-bill-kennedy-reveals-he-is-gay--

rajon-rondo-made-alleged-homosexual-slur-to-him-174255321.html

Wojnarowski, A. (2015, December 16). 'The Vertical Podcast with Woj' debuts with NBA

commissioner Adam Silver – and a major announcement. Retrieved Deceember

16, 2015, from Yahoo Sports: http://sports.yahoo.com/news/-the-vertical-podcast-

with-woj--debuts-with-nba-commissioner-adam-silver-–-and-a-major-

announcement-155342838.html

Wolverton, B. (2012, October 11). LGBT Athletes Are Harassed Twice as Often as

Heterosexual Peers. Retrieved August 1, 2013, from The Chronicle of Higher

Education: http://chronicle.com/blogs/players/lgbt-athletes-are-harassed-twice-as-

often-as-heterosexual-peers/31616

Wrenn, M. V. (2015). Agency and Neoliberalism. Cambridge Journal of Economics , 39,

1231–1243.

Yardley, J. (1974, July 22). The tennis babies who managed to come a long way now

detail their progress. Sports Illustrated .

286

Zaharias, B. D., & Paxton, H. T. (1955). This Life I've Led: My Autobiography. New

York, NY: Barnes.

Zeigler Jr., C. (2011 November 5). Same-Sex Pedophilia Scandal Rocks Penn State

Football, Involving Jerry Sandusky. Retrieved 2012 йил 15-April from

outsports.com: http://outsports.com/jocktalkblog/2011/11/05/same-sexpedophilia-

scandal-rocks-penn-state-involving-jerry-sandusky-ad-tim-curley/

Zeigler Jr., C. (2013, December 2). Worldwide reaction to Tom Daley's

bisexual revelation. Retrieved from Outsports.com:

http://www.outsports.com/2013/12/2/5168442/tom-daley-gay-diver-reaction

Zeigler, Jr., C. (2013, December 2). Tom Daley says he's dating a guy and 'everything

just feels great. Retrieved April 21, 2014, from OutSports.com:

http://www.outsports.com/2013/12/2/5166062/tom-daley-bisexual-gay-

diver/in/4933701

Zeigler, Jr., C. (2013, December 2). Worldwide reaction to Tom Daley's bisexual

revelation. Retrieved May 1, 2014, from OutSports.com:

http://www.outsports.com/2013/12/2/5168442/tom-daley-gay-diver-reaction

Abstract (if available)

Abstract In April 2013, Jason Collins became the first professional athlete to announce that he was gay, through media sources, while still actively playing in one of America’s major team sports leagues. His announcement, unsurprisingly, was met with a diversity of responses as to what the revelation meant to the larger discussion of sports and sexuality. ❧ This dissertation, through a combination of discourse analysis, field studies, historical survey, and archival research, explores the complicated interplay between media formations, gay sexuality, and sports culture across a variety of temporal and spatial locations. The following chapters ask how, in a culture that more openly and visibly engages with and mediates questions of sports and sexuality, is the discussion made salient through media narratives and how does the LGBT community access and engage with these mediations? Since media have become the main resource for authorizing stories of sports culture and gay identity, this dissertation interrogates the norms and epistemologies produced by these engagements and traces the ways they circulate through mainstream and LGBT-specific media platforms and concretized sites of LGBT community. ❧ Furthermore, through an examination of media artifacts, produced through a range of platforms such as newspapers, television, and new media/digital sites, this dissertation maps the ways that media workers, literature produced by media industries, and published comments by fans and those invested in the world of sports and/or LGBT culture, to name a few, help to cultivate and contribute to a discourse of sports and sexuality. It also interrogates the way in which these platforms and artifacts are constructed not as neutral texts, but rather as value-laden products that carry with them a wide-range of meanings about normative sexuality, patriarchal power, and the proper place of gay individuals within sports culture. This focus then allows us to better understand how neoliberal ideologies influence our cultural products and media artifacts/frames and, alternatively, allow room for queered fissures. Put another way, the analysis of these media artifacts elucidates dominant ideologies that maintain and, occasionally, disrupt a heteronormative market-driven culture. It also allows us to begin to parse through the ways in which a former focus on homophobia has obfuscated structural issues of heteronormativity within sports culture. It argues that an overreliance on the ‘coming out’ narrative as an authoritative announcement obscures the ways in which this process authorizes neoliberalism. ❧ While media texts provide the majority of the resources analyzed in the first half of the dissertation, the second half reinserts user engagements with sports and gay sexualities that are produced by, and organized around, seemingly neutral spaces of media production. By focusing on the experiences of LGBT sports fans and media practitioners we see how they utilize disparate experiences across sports culture in order to stitch together an understanding of sports and sexual identity. Central to this argument is the way they use media engagements to dialectically question and destabilize normative or restrictive understandings of LGBT personage and queerness. Furthermore, even though LGBT stories are often configured as “out of place” within sports culture, mediated and physical spaces are utilized not only as a way to reconfigure LGBT experiences within sports culture, but also to expand the understanding of how we establish norms and scripts that guide LGBT experiences. LGBT individuals find an ability, through discursive formations and concretized sites of community, to question the normative ideas that still guide the understanding of sports and sexuality. ❧ Key to this argument is that these mediations and experiences work in tandem: they are woven into the fabric of both our digital and corporeal experiences as they work to shape, question, and articulate LGBT identities. Using the tenets of queer theory and an attention to the material consequences of configuring ‘coming out’ as a neoliberal act, this dissertation acknowledges the ways that discussions of sports and sexuality both reinscribe affirmative frameworks and gesture towards transformative possibilities. ❧ Ultimately, this dissertation makes the case that most discussions of sports and the LGBT experience rely on a common narrative of ‘coming out’ authorized through media formations, but that any discussion that rests solely on the number of “out” professional athletes is one that only attends to a small piece of the puzzle, and one that is not representative of the vast array of ways that sports and homosexuality overlap and inform one another in modern culture. It also ignores the fact that this particular type of “outness” is not available to all individuals equally. Put another way, to rely solely on visibility, here promoted by the media through the ‘coming out’ narrative, as a measure of success ignores the uneven manner in which visibility is both deployed and taken up by normative and non-normative sexualities alike.

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Cinematic activism: film festivals and the exhibition of Palestinian cultural politics in the United States

PDF

Reproducing fear amid fears of reproduction: the Black maternal body in U.S. law, media, and policy

PDF

The practice of everyday politics: lifestyle and identity as radical activism

PDF

Kids as cultural producers: consumption, literacy, and participation

PDF

Passionate work and the good life: survival and affect after the recession

PDF

Participatory public culture and youth citizenship in the digital age: the Medellín model

PDF

Temporal dynamics in the lives of health practitioners

PDF

Asian American media activism: past, present, and digital futures

PDF

Focusing the family: the rhetorical construction of "family values" in contemporary cultural politics

PDF

Making her cake and eating it too: the productive feminist politics of food blogs

PDF

Diversity in sports: The female athlete's college experience

PDF

AIDS and its afterlives: race, gender, and the queer radical imagination

PDF

Made with love, sold with love? Ideologies and realities of work for American crafters in the Digital Age

PDF

The pop show: racial performance and transformation in global arts industries

PDF

Advocacy of public interest content in corporate entertainment media

PDF

These are their stories: two decades of Showrunner production, content, and context in Law & Order: SVU

PDF

Food is the medium: food movements, social justice and the communication ecology approach

PDF

Cause of death: AIDS, obituaries, and The New York Times

PDF

How the light gets in: sexual misconduct and disclosure in America's music industries

PDF

Well-being domesticities: mediating 21st-century femininity through physical, mental, and emotional lifestyles

Asset Metadata

Creator Brody, Evan (author)

Core Title The out field: professional sports and the mediation of gay sexualities

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 07/28/2018

Defense Date 04/25/2016

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag cultural studies,LGBT studies/Queer theory,media studies,OAI-PMH Harvest,sports communication,sports studies

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Banet-Weiser, Sarah (committee chair), Gross, Larry (committee member), Halberstam, Jack (committee member), Morgan, William (committee member)

Creator Email brodyevan@gmail.com,ebrody@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-292666

Unique identifier UC11281025

Identifier etd-BrodyEvan-4712.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-292666 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-BrodyEvan-4712.pdf

Dmrecord 292666

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Brody, Evan

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA