Indians' Prospect Had Gay Porn 'Mistake' (Jim Rome Show, September 9, 2003): Cleveland Indians minor leaguer Kazuhito Tadano is a gay porn actor. That’s not subject to debate. He is. He even admits as much. Well…at least he was a gay porn actor.
Tadano admits that while he was a college student in Japan, he appeared in a gay porno and performed homosexual acts in the film. That would qualify you as a gay porn actor. If you are making movies committing homosexual acts, I’m guessing you’ve met all the requirements.
I’m also guessing that this won’t be a major distraction and it won’t cause any dissention in the clubhouse. A group of enlightened individuals (i.e. ballplayers) wouldn’t have any problem with that. We’ll just assume that people like Todd Jones and John Rocker will embrace Tadano with open arms. [...]
The Indians took a chance on him and brought him over to America to play, fully aware of his history. In fact, Tadano has told both his single-A and double-A teams about his past. He’s told them that he made a mistake and he would prove himself as a teammate. “You could tell he was sincere and embarrassed. I’ve sat in the bullpen with him and he is a good guy. We have all messed up in some shape or form in our life.” [said] Jack Cressand (teammate). That’s all well and good but a baseball clubhouse is one of the last bastions of bigotry and intolerance. That’s not going to fly. You wait and see what happens when he gets to the Majors. Not all of us have made gay porn and there are more Todd Jones’ and John Rockers than Mark Graces in big league clubhouses. More so than anyone wants to admit.
It's going to be interesting to see how long it takes Tadano to make it to the majors, and what happens when he does. Frankly, the smart thing for the Indians to do would be to call him up now. He's probably not ready for it, true. On the other hand, now that the story's broken, they could get the mess out of the way, find out how people are going to react to him (and I do agree with Jim Rome -- and I never thought I'd say THAT -- that things will probably not go at all well, at least not at first). If nothing else, it would get the grand public brouhaha over and done with, although it would probably be mentioned every time he did anything notable in the near term.
Even VH1's Totally Gay, while massively overstating the gayification of American society in recent years, made the point that professional team sports is one of the true bastions of acceptable homophobia. Imagine what will happen when they are presented with someone who has documented evidence of actual (GASP!) homosexual behavior in his background. No doubt many of them will stand up and swear that no matter how much they were paid, they would never ever do such a horrendous thing. And no doubt that most of his teammates will simply ... ignore him.
One wonders what will happen with those that don't simply ignore him.
Posted by iain at September 11, 2003 02:13 AMComments
