Joe Clark wrote an excellent essay on how it’s silly that sportswriters seem to push obviously homosexual athletes into the closet, playing the don’t-ask, don’t-tell game:

Straight sports reporters telling everybody to keep quiet about gays in sports is the problem. These are mostly guys; even the leading Canadian women in sportswriting, of the Rosie DiManno/Crusty Blatchford ilk, are flat-out male apologists. Sportswriter guys are, on the whole, dumpy or aging and look with great fondness at the physical capabilities and the actual bodies of the male athletes they cover.

When sportswriters talk about the fact that the locker room culture makes it awfully difficult for an athlete to be open about his sexual orientation—which is to say, to publicly admit that he’s homosexual and not part of the mainstream macho stereotype, which is overtly [and sometimes borderline predatory] heterosexual—they are, in fact, highlighting a cultural problem that they themselves buttress. Consider all of Joe’s examples, then add the salacious reporting of marital infidelity and sexual misconduct allegations—Kobe Bryant, Shawn Kemp, Isiah Thomas, et al—and realize that all this reporting simply amplifies the false expectation that all our athletes are heterosexual.

Of course, then there’s the whole Out magazine controversy from a few years ago that had everyone speculating as to Mike Piazza’s orientation.

Now, some of my friends argue that this doesn’t matter, and they look at me disdainfully when I broach the subject. But I think Joe nails it here:

Sexual behaviour can be private but sexual orientation isn’t and can’t. If you think that’s too broad, apply it solely to public figures, which Olympic athletes surely are. In the 21st century, they don’t get to hide in the closet or be coy. What you call outing we call reporting. When do journalists report that straight athletes are straight? All the time.

In an era where athletes are celebrities, subject to all the privacy invasions that celebrity brings, it’s interesting to note how the coverage of the celebrity nature reinforce the very stereotypes that the more editorially-minded commentators among us seem willing to decry. It’s frustrating to me, since we’re just delaying the inevitable … I’m ready for this to just not be a problem anymore.