DOYLESTOWN - The teenagers, about 40 of them, sat in a semicircle in the Lenape Valley Middle School Library on Wednesday night, listening to Dan Woog talk about homosexuality and athletics.

Most, if not all, of the teenagers were gay. At least three are or were varsity athletes at their respective high schools. This was not surprising. This is how it is in sports, and how it will be.

Woog is a high school soccer coach in Connecticut, and he is an author. He has written two books about gay athletes; each of the books is composed of interviews and anecdotes describing how and why the athletes made their homosexuality public. He spoke here Wednesday as part of a symposium called "The Locker Room: The Last Closet," and the content of his talk and the demographic of his audience illustrated why this subject will only grow more relevant in the years to come.

Whenever the issue of homosexuality in sports is broached, there is always a feeling that, in one way or another, it is being thrust upon us. So many of us just want to watch the games and cheer for our teams, and why does anyone have to bring this up? It is still the touchiest of topics.

Yet, up it comes. Last year, Terrell Owens needlessly dropped Jeff Garcia's name into a magazine interview, hinting that Garcia is gay and backhandedly referring to him as a "rat." Last month, Sports Illustrated commissioned a poll to examine the public's attitudes toward gays in sports and published a 6,100-word article on former welterweight champion Emile Griffith, who in 1962 beat Benny "Kid" Paret to death in the ring after Paret taunted him with a sexually charged epithet.

Back then, rumors that Griffith was gay swirled. To this day, 43 years later, he has never confirmed them.

"The weakness of the one who submits," SI's Gary Smith wrote. "That's every boxer's, every athlete's, deepest fear. That's what must be kept locked in the closet. ... That's why it's still 1962, when it comes to sports and male sexuality, while the rest of the country moves ahead."

To a degree, Smith is correct. No pro athlete in any of the nation's three major sports leagues - the NFL, Major League Baseball and the NBA - has come out while he was still playing. And Woog doesn't expect one soon will, at least not by calling a press conference and making some sort of grand announcement. There would be too much at stake for such a stunning revelation, he said.

"You've got a big contract," Woog said. "You've got endorsements. You've got newspaper people writing about you all the time. If you're standing out in center field at a Phillies game and you're on the opposite team and you've got big ears, people are going to taunt you. If you were a gay center fielder, the stuff would be brutal."

Yes, some stuff would be brutal, and such an announcement also would bother those who regard sexual orientation as a private, sensitive matter that really has no place in a public discussion of sports. There would be media members, sports fans and other athletes who would say: I'm not interested in whether the center fielder is gay. It's his business, not mine. And they would be neither disrespectful nor bigoted in saying it. There's nothing wrong in simply preferring to watch the games.

Here is the rub, however: No matter which side you come down on in today's "culture wars" - and as a heterosexual conservative, I generally come down on the right side, politically speaking - it cannot be denied that homosexuality is gaining greater public acceptance. We are slowly, perhaps inexorably, moving in that direction, and one doesn't need to peruse the results of SI's survey to acknowledge as much. Those omnipresent reruns of "Will & Grace" and "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" provide all the evidence one needs.

So, as that societal tolerance grows, more young athletes will feel comfortable in coming out to their family members, friends and coaches - as those teens in Wednesday's audience already have. Sooner or later, then, a teenager who is already openly gay will earn an NCAA Division I football scholarship, develop into an All-America candidate, and play his way into the NFL Draft.

It will not remain 1962 in the locker room forever.

"It's not going to be some Super Bowl-winning quarterback who says, 'I'm here. I'm queer. I'm going to Disney World,' " Woog said. "It's going to be a kid who's out now, and he's going to come up through the ranks."

He's going to be a kid just like those three athletes who attended Woog's lecture. Each had made the decision to come out to those close to him, but none was ready to see his name in a newspaper column just yet. Still, they know what everyone involved with athletics, from the high school level on up, will learn soon enough: In this changing time, this complex time, it will be impossible to avoid these difficult questions.

This is how it is in sports, and in life, and this is how it will be.