Last week, Boston Herald sports columnist Steve Buckley wrote a touching column in which he announced he was gay. He tied his coming-out story to his mother, who initially discouraged him from annoucning his sexuality in his column, but who later encouraged him to write the column. She has since passed away, but Buckley said that he has had recent reasons to want to write the column.
He wrote:
I have read sobering stories about people who came undone, killing themselves after being outed. These tragic events helped guide me to the belief that if more people are able to be honest about who they are, ultimately fewer people will feel such devastating pressure.
It’s my hope that from now on I’ll be more involved. I’m not really sure what I mean by being “involved,” but this is a start: I’m gay.
As Newsday’s Neil Best pointed out, it the sports world more or less “shrugged,” though this is not to say there was no reaction. In a post for The Angle, Rob Anderson of The Boston Globe writes:
While the Herald has deleted some comments on Buckley’s coming-out column (presumably because they were offensive and/or antigay), there are still hundreds of positive notes. And on Twitter, where no one is moderating the comments, I can’t find even one negative reaction.
But there’s an even bigger announcement that has yet to come, Best says:
[T]here remains one barrier no one has yet been brave enough to cross: There has not been an active, male pro in a major American team sport to come out. That day surely is nearer than ever.
When that day happens, Buckley will be probably be pointed to as someone whose coming-out story allowed that to happen. Especially because Buckley’s been a journalist long enough to remember times when it might not have been wise to come out in the newsroom. Steve Almond wrote that Buckley’s announcement reminded him of a time when he worked with a transsexual in a newsroom that made jokes about her behind her back. Almond writes that the praise will continue for Buckley, but the Herald columnist will not be unscathed:
[T]he bottom line is that sports fans (and I count myself as one) are more homophobic than the population at large. In a sense, we have to be.
After all, we spend much of our lives watching the acrobatic heroics of other men — sweaty, outfitted in tight uniforms, sometimes even half-naked — and investing our sense of identity in their deeds.
This is the great unspoken truth of the modern sports industry: it’s predicated not only on allowing men to watch other men leap and grapple and pound into one another, but on making this voyeurism seem unassailably macho.
Thus, Almond says, sports fans might see Buckley “as a traitor to the fragile cause of American masculinity.” Hopefully, this won’t be the case.
