"External html imported from the Toronto Star for the convenience of our website visitors. 23 August 2005. Copyright 2005 by NICHOLAS KEUNG. All rights reserved."
Texan Andre Espaillat, who is openly gay,
got into the macho sport of motorcycle road
racing, a circuit known for beer, bikinis and hot
sweaty men in
leather.
Notable
gay athletes
Glenn Burke, Major League Baseball. Played
for the Dodgers and Athletics. Announced he was
gay after he retired. He died in 1995.
Martina Navratilova, tennis player.
Announced she was gay during her career.
Mark Tewksbury, swimmer. Won a gold medal
for Canada at 1992 Olympics in Barcelona. Came
out in 1998.
Esera Tuaolo, NFL player. Played nine years
in the NFL, mostly with Minnesota. Told his
story in 2002, after retirement.
Rosie Jones, golfer. Told her family she was
gay at age 19, but didn't go public until age
44.
Greg Louganis, diver. Won four gold medals
at the 1984 and 1988 Olympics. Came out in 1994
at the Gay Games.
Billy Bean, Major League Baseball. Played
with the Dodgers, Padres and Tigers. Announced
he was gay after finishing his career.
Rainbow warriors Pro baseball umpire Tyler Hoffman felt compelled to
hide the fact that he was homosexual Fear of athletes being
ostracized leads to launch of mentoring program
NICHOLAS
KEUNG IMMIGRATION/DIVERSITY REPORTER
Growing up in Qualicum Beach, a town of 5,000 on
Vancouver Island, Tyler Hoffman got hooked on baseball at 5
and was umpiring games by age 12.
After graduating from "umpire boot camp," the Academy
of Professional Umpiring in Florida, Hoffman launched his pro
career in the minor leagues.
Working games across the United States 200 days a year,
he ate, worked, played, lived and breathed baseball truly
"one of the boys." But Hoffman, now 29, kept a crucial part of
himself out of the locker room.
"You just learn to bottle it up and deny that you're
gay when you are in professional sports," says Hoffman, who
quit the circuit in 2000 and now works as a recruiting manager
in the financial sector in British Columbia.
"You have to play the game so others get a sense that
you are one of the boys. You don't want to do anything that
would wreck your professional career."
For years, homosexuality was the "H-word" in the world
of sport, bringing with it the fear of being ostracized.
But this summer, a group of gay and lesbian athletes,
coaches and sports officials is hoping to change that
mentality of fear and denial with the launch of a mentoring
program by the Richmond Hill-based Gay and Lesbian Athletes
Association.
Funded by the Ontario Trillium Foundation and the
Toronto Lesbian and Gay Community Appeal Foundation, the
peer-support program believed to be the first of its kind in
the world for athletes matches gay and lesbian sports
figures (some still closeted) at the professional and
collegiate levels. The idea is to share experiences and build
a support network.
The program quietly kicked off in June and has been
receiving about 20 calls a month.
"Our goal is to make competitive sport more inclusive,
so people can feel comfortable being gays and athletes. This
program is one of the tools to help gay, lesbian, bisexual and
transgendered athletes overcome their sense of isolation,"
explains Brian Osler, a spokesperson for the association.
Osler, a Toronto lawyer, is straight but joined the
association after a friend, an elite professional Canadian
athlete he declined to name, confided to him several years ago
about his struggles living a double life.
"He has a great career but has to live a secret life,
to pretend to be straight, to survive that environment. He
really deserves better than that," Osler says.
It's impossible to say how many gay and lesbians are
involved in professional leagues. But an estimate that 2 per
cent of the total population is gay would translate to seven
gay players in the NBA, 12 in the NHL, 15 in major league
baseball, 28 in the NFL and eight in the CFL.
The pro sport circle may be a reflection of mainstream
society in some ways, but the issues facing athletes often go
beyond generalized homophobia and the threat of violence.
Hoffman, a director with the association, says athletes
worry about losing sponsorships and scholarships, being
ostracized in locker rooms, being given less playing time by
coaches, or missing a chance to be drafted by a professional
league.
"You never know how others are going to respond to it
are you going to take that risk?"
Catherine Meade, who competed as a university-level
sprinter and has worked at international competitions,
including the 1996 Summer Olympics, says sport is a very
"intimate" activity.
"You train together and sweat together, spending two,
three hours a day, five days a week, together. That's an awful
lot of closeness and intimacy with one another," notes the
labour lawyer, a co-president of the St. Catharines-based Gay
and Lesbian International Sport Association who came out only
after ending her university track career.
"It's a double-edged sword. On one level, you want to
open up to (other athletes) because you are so close. But at
the same time, you are afraid that you'd get a homophobic
response if you come out. Then you have to worry about if
they'll tell other people and the coach would have issues with
you."
Rene Monteagudo, a clinical psychologist with the
University of Illinois, says such fears, whether perceived or
real, have a lot to do with the importance in competitive
sports of a macho image.
"It adds pressure on athletes to exude
hyper-masculinity in front of others in locker rooms or fans
in the field. There is always tremendous pressure for them to
assert that they are heterosexual even though they are not,"
says Monteagudo, who helped develop the mentoring program.
"You have to prove that you are tough. If you think
about it, one way to denigrate your opposing team is to make
fun of them by calling them fags. It's a tool athletes have
used to demonize their opponents."
Often, he says, closeted athletes become depressed and
anxious, preventing them from reaching their full potential.
Some may even quit before they make it to the pros.
"We are not trying to `out' gay and lesbian athletes,
but help destigmatize the feeling of shame among them, and
provide the support and resources to address these issues."
In his recently published In the Game: Gay Athletes
and the Cult of Masculinity, researcher Eric Anderson
investigates the links between sports, men, masculinity and
homophobia.
"The answer lies not in homophobia, but in
masculinity," says Anderson, a sports sociologist at the
University of Bath in England.
Athletes must meet certain masculine expectations in
sports and the higher an athlete rises, the more isolated he
becomes from the non-athletic world.
For his book, Anderson interviewed dozens of gay high
school, collegiate and professional athletes, including a
Canadian NHL player he dubbed "Aaron."
"The longer they are in sport, the more they fear being
perceived as anything but an athlete anything but masculine.
It's more than just about homophobia in sport, but the idea of
masculinity in sport."
Texan native Andre Espaillat couldn't have picked a
more macho sport. In 1983, he joined the motorcycle road
racing circuit, a pursuit typically accompanied by lots of
beer, bikini-clad women and "testosterone-charged hot sweaty
men in leather." He started competing internationally in 1996.
Espaillat's story is exceptional because he was already
"out" when he began competing something that helped "prove
to others that we're normal people in everyday life."
Espaillat, who retired in 2002 at 47, competed with a
rainbow gay-pride flag on his bike and has a personalized
licence plate that reads "WFF" an unabashed nod to the
moniker bestowed on him by fellow racers: "World's Fastest
Faggot."
"On my way up the racing ladder, I tried to disprove
the common misconception that gay men are sibilant, passive,
effeminate people who'd never get involved in a dangerous and
aggressive sport," says Espaillat, who now lives with his
partner in Dallas.
Was he successful?
Earlier this year, when Espaillat posted on a local
Internet message board asking for others' views on gays in
sports, he got a pleasant surprise.
A former motorbike buddy, a straight man who never made
a secret of his politically and socially conservative views,
wrote back: "I am glad you are involved in our sport, not
because you are gay or straight but because you are a good
man, honest and trustworthy, and our sport needs that. I will
ride with you anytime."
Prospective mentorscan call a toll-free confidential
hot line (1-866-409-4522) to join the program, which also
offers an online newsletter at http://glpaa.org/. (Mentors are required to
pass police and background checks).
Nicholas Keung is the Star's
Immigration/Diversity reporter.
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