People are still talking about that letter from the Editor at Out Magazine to his pro-baseball boyfriend.
And so on, and so on ...
One question I would like to ask Mr Buzinski of Outsports: what country is he living in? Children take weapons to school. Gay men and women are beaten and assaulted for no other reason than that every day. Why is it difficult to believe that assault with a deadly weapon is an issue? (That said, I do think that being attacked in the stadium by a fan with a gun is less likely than being attacked on the streets by a group of fans with weapons ... which I think quite likely. This is not the country of Jackie Robinson's time; all you have to do is look at the crime stats to see that.) In 1973, Hank Aaron received death threats, because he was black and dared to surpass Babe Ruth's home run record.
The plain fact is this: as things currently stand, a midcareer, midlevel baseball player -- or a midlevel player in any team sport, for that matter -- can't afford to come out unless he's prepared to immediately lose that midlevel career. They compare the situation to Jackie Robinson, but what they forget is that Jackie Robinson was a legitimate star, a person whose talent was so great that a team was willing to deal with what both he and management knew would be a truly hideous time. A player who was gay would have to be much much better, comparatively, than Robinson ever was before management would be willing to stand by him.
They also forget what Jackie Robinson endured:
The 1947 Dodgers ... reached the World Series. But the racial abuse didn't stop. "You'd hear a lot of insults from the opposing benches during games," shortstop Pee Wee Reese recalls, "guys calling him things like `rigger' and `watermelon eater,' trying to rile him." The abuse reached new heights when Philadelphia manager Ben Chapman led a barrage of foul language that continued for a three-game series.
And that's the other team, the ones who had relatively little opportunity to do anything. For a gay player coming out, his own locker room would be ... singularly awful. There would be "comments" -- you know the ones. There would be "pranks", such as words painted on his locker or his clothes and equipment fouled. There might well be more, and worse; after all, athletes have forced teammates to drink alcohol and perform degrading acts and even raped them with objects -- and these were people they wanted on the team. (And don't kid yourself that professionals would be much better than these high school and college students. Many baseball players start from high school or college, so there will be a lot of younger players. And as an example of the fun professional athletes get up to, the Chicago Bears football team ran into trouble because one of their rookies was quite seriously hurt when the veteran players hazed them -- I believe he lost some of the sight in one eye and thereby lost his career. And they liked him.)
To be sure, I do fully expect that sometime in the future, possibly within my lifetime, there will be an out, gay, team sports player. He'll appear one of two ways: either he'll have always been out, in high school and in college, but his talent is so incredible that the teams grit their teeth and go forward, or he'll be outed somehow, and decide that he's just tired of hiding. (One hopes for the first, but expects the second. And if it's the first ... by the time he gets to the pros, he'll have been tested in fire, anyway.)
All that said ... do I think that Lemon should have published that letter? No, of course not. Frankly, I believe the letter itself, where it's strongly implied that the boyfriend hasn't seen the letter, and not his later comments, where he insists that he shared it with the boyfriend before publication. After all, why wouldn't you simply say: I discussed this with my boyfriend before publishing, so he knows that I'm doing this. And I simply don't believe that you blindside people you allegedly care about in that way. (There is also, according to Ziegler, the matter of a longtime partner who also apparently didn't know about the boyfriend. I'm guessing that this is not entirely accurate or possibly it's outdated; throwing that many bombs into your own life would be spectacularly stupid, and while Lemon strikes me as quite calculating, he doesn't seem precisely stupid.) To be sure, given publication lead times, it's quite possible that the boyfriend didn't know about the letter before it was written, but was told before it was published ... but in that case, it's also likely that he didn't intend to tell the boyfriend when he wrote it, and only had a change of heart near publication; otherwise, it would be phrased quite differently.
The player is probably going through hell right now. And the sad part is, it's likely that the only person he can really talk to about it is Lemon, who caused it.
As for Lemon himself ... I honestly believe that Lemon got what he wanted, which was not necessarily his boyfriend out of the closet. What he got was a long buzz of discussion about his letter (signifying nothing, but that's beside the point), himself in the spotlight, and everyone on every east coast baseball team looking at all the unmarried players and wondering, "Is it him? Him? maybe him?" If his boyfriend had come out, that would just have been the lagniappe.
All THAT said ... I do hope the guy comes out, but I certainly don't expect it. Like Ziegler, I hope that he dumps Lemon, as well. In fact, I don't think he ought to wait until he comes out; anybody who would use and abuse you in public in this way is not anyone you ought to be involved with.
Copyright © 2001, Iain Jackson, after-words.org
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12/19/2001: vive la france
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