Outside the Sports Closet: News Discourses of Professional Gay Male Athletes in the Mainstream

Abstract

Contributing to a growing yet underresearched area of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer issues in sport, this study interrogates news discourses of the most prominent American athletes coming-out stories to date: the National Basketball Association's Jason Collins and the National Football League's Michael Sam. Mainstream media narratives invoked an overall congratulatory tone, hailing these announcements as watershed moments while at the same time emphasizing athletes' physicality and athleticism in ways that reinforced the hypermasculine. Journalists and opinion leaders celebrated these announcements while simultaneously relying on coded and overt homophobic labels and language. Media storytellers subsequently relied upon dualistic, self-contradictory binaries, highlighting the paradoxes implicit in celebrating increased gay visibility within the confines of a commercialized sports/media complex with heterosexuality and hypermasculinity at its core.

An overview of coming out research: Introducing a three‐lens typology

“…If we look beyond the classic office workplace setting, the understanding of work colleagues and superiors broadens. Within sport, for instance, research explored LGBTQ+ athletes, coaches, and sport journalists' coming out to colleagues, teammates, trainers, clients (e.g., athletes, players), and managers (e.g., Gough, 2007;Kavoura & Kokkonen, 2021;Magrath, 2020;Moscowitz et al, 2019;Pariera et al, 2021;Vilanova et al, 2020;White et al, 2021).…”

“…If we look beyond the classic office workplace setting, the understanding of work colleagues and superiors broadens. Within sport, for instance, research explored LGBTQ+ athletes, coaches, and sport journalists' coming out to colleagues, teammates , trainers , clients (e.g., athletes, players), and managers (e.g., Gough, 2007; Kavoura & Kokkonen, 2021; Magrath, 2020; Moscowitz et al., 2019; Pariera et al., 2021; Vilanova et al., 2020; White et al., 2021). And, despite not directly focussing on the ‘coming out to’, Brian Pronger's (1990) classic ‘The arena of masculinity’ functions as an important conversation starter for exploring gay athletes' navigation of masculine power in connection to coming out.…”

With the 249th Pick . . .: Michael Sam and Imagining Failure Otherwise

“…The visibility produced through the “coming out” narrative necessitates that individuals be responsible for creating a visible and authentic notion of “truth” while cultivating ideas that the individual should not take precedence over the team mentality of sports culture. However, this approach to “coming out,” one that imagines the liberation of the closet as a moment of unabashed truth production, fails to acknowledge or attend to the realities faced by African Americans who must “uncloset their sexuality within the context” of an already disadvantaged and visibly marked status (Ross, 2005, p. 183; for more on this, see Moscowitz, Billings, Ejaz, & O’Boyle, 2018).…”

Passing as resistance through a Goffmanian approach: Normalized, defensive, strategic, and instrumental passing when LGBTQ+ individuals encounter institutions

“…Passing is often defined as being and appearing congruent with the normative expectations of a social or institutional context (Moscowitz et al., 2019; Sedgwick, 1990). When LGBTQ+ (i.e., Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer, and other) individuals pass, they keep parts of themselves, that is, their sexual orientation and gender identity, private for protection, privacy, and survival (Gupta, 2020; Seidman, 2004).…”