Ladies and gentlemen, it's come to my attention that we homosexuals have finally broken into the hitherto exclusively straight "wide world of sports." Oh what an honor, and a privilege, to know that one openly gay man is possibly entering the locker room as I write, to observe in all candidness the cornucopia of well-sculpted bodies in the nude! It all seems so fresh, so new, like the scent of Irish Spring being wafted on a cloud of steam - it's almost too perfect to be true. And so the Internet tells me today that it is: our breach of the arena walls has not come without its consequences. Haters have arisen on all fronts to throw in their two cents and possibly reverse the coin toss. But let's drop the metaphors for a moment and look hard at what I'm referring to - if you know me at all, it probably isn't what you were thinking.
First, the source: from the Huffington Post. There are many others besides, which can be obtained by a quick Google search. For the most part, they read the same.
In the days after NFL defensive end Michael Sam went public with his predilection for the male physique, a 20-year-old Kent State sophomore was suspended indefinitely from the school's wrestling team for referring to Sam as a "fag" via Twitter. The boy's name, incidentally, is Sam Wheeler (I'll refer to them both by their last names from here on out, to avoid confusion); he made a name for himself at Copley High School, where he won a Division 1 state title his senior year and was also a "first-state all-Ohio" linebacker in football (whatever that means). This is all I was able to find regarding his athletic accomplishments. His crimes against humanity, however, include three tweets subsequent to the first, in which he addresses some unnamed fellow tweeters as "queer" and finally, with an elegant variation on his first slur, seals his fate by referring to them collectively as "fag boys." Having never heard or used this term myself, I have to give Wheeler points there for originality.
Now let's pause a moment for a look at the scoreboard. In the course of this "event," the gay community has suffered - well, to be quite frank, negligable losses at the most. A couple of its members were called "queers" by an athlete via Twitter. Nothing new here. Wheeler, on the other hand, has taken a real beating: his career as a wrestler is very potentially over (and we all know how limited the career possibilities of high-school athletes can be), but to add insult to injury, his name has now been dragged through the public mire for the sake of enciting public outrage (Outrage DC, incidentally, is the monicker of the gay publication that published Wheeler's comments). I'll come back to that point here in a bit, my fellow fag boys.
Back on the playing field, aforementioned Outrage DC brought pressure against Kent State to do something about the "problem." The school's head wrestling coach tapped in to defend the great university against the potential public smears: he claims to have been "surprised [...] by what he read on Twitter." Really, Mr. Andrassy? (if that really is your name...) You were "surprised" to hear the words "queer" and "fag" come from the mouth of a male college athlete? If this kind of language is truly shocking to you, you probably haven't been in the coaching business long enough to deserve your position. But the athletic director Joel Nielsen also stepped up to the plate, claiming that the university considers the comments to be "ignorant" (as though we needed confirmation of the fact), and that Wheeler's suspension "is an educational opportunity for all of our student-athletes." I'm sorry, what? An educational opportunity, you say? I thought you and Mr. Andrassy were just giving lip-service to the LGBTQs. But since you've made the matter an "educational opportunity," I'd like to know what lesson this opportunity is to teach them. As far as I can tell, it's teaching everyone to keep their opinions to themselves; because if they speak them, the consequences will be grave.
Now obviously this is a good lesson to learn: people must be willing to bear the consequences of speaking their mind. I will personally receive a lot of heated Facebook posts as a result of this article (if anyone actually bothers to read it), but I know this and am prepared to endure them for the sake of voicing my opinions. But the more important matter, i.e. the practical consequences of Wheeler's suspension, is as follows: 1.) this will not stop people from disliking gays, and 2.) it will encourage those who do to keep quiet about it.
As regards the first point, it's elementary: you can't change people's tastes by chastising them. Gay-haters exist, and will continue to exist as long as they keep breeding and bringing up their children in that tradition. The majority of the last century showed the rise and widespread implimentation of aversion therapy for the cure of homosexuality; it didn't work, and we gays are fortunately (for me at least) more widespread than ever before. What it did do was teach us to keep our sexuality to ourselves, with devastating psychological consequences - and this is precisely what punishing homophobia will accomplish. I personally do not want to live in a world full of closeted gay-haters. I want to know they hate me before I get back to their apartment, where they keep their hammers, baseball bats and guns.
I seem to be diverging here, so I'll get us back on track by conceding that Wheeler's suspension doesn't in any way represent a legal enfringement of his First Amendment rights. The boy was not emprisoned for his comments, nor was he fined by the state; he was simply dismissed from an athletic institution of which he was necessarily a representative. As a server, I should hope my boss would fire me if I called one of my customers a nigger: bigotry is not the kind of image that anyone wants to promote for their organization.
What is truly upsetting, however, is the manner in which the "progressive" media is gloating over the boy's predicament. The two heads in the Huffington Post video (whose accents and mannerisms betray, if not an outright Uranian disposition, at least a latent inclination to fraternal frotting) are quite unabashedly kicking the man when he's down. Look at yourselves, fag boys. You're self-righteously justifying another person's misery by attributing it to their beliefs. I'd ask you to put yourselves in his shoes - or better yet, try on those of Oscar Wilde, whose exile and ultimate demise was accompanied by no shortage of self-justifying literature commending that very exile and demise. And just as Wilde's detractors before you, you seem to think that these justifications will stop the ideas and dispositions you hate from spreading - and I pause here, to pick up an Oxford edition of Wilde's collected works and rejoice for a moment in his brazen appreciation for nimble-lipped, golden-thighed boys.
As a fag boy myself (I have a feeling I won't tire of using this expression for a good while), I hate to be the one who stands to defend a bigot who probably hates me; but the hypocracy of this "intolerance for intolerance" obliges me to do so. Remember where you come from, fellow man-lovers. Remember the intolerance from which you so recently escaped, and the shame that has only recently been shrugged off your shoulders. Now that you have a voice, a voice specifically gay and specifically tolerated as such, it would be wise not to use it to admonish and condemn others; the public outrage you incite today may very well be incited against you in the months and years to come. And remember, at least, that Sam is the first openly-gay member of the NFL - and that our community has used this occasion to kick a straight man out of sports.
For the moment, it seems that the political pendulum has swung in our favor - we are tolerated more and more every day, and have just been granted access to the locker room - but that does not mean that society will stay on our side. While it is, I suggest you work to build a positive and lasting contribution to the world - because your hate and intolerance will only come back around against you in the next season.
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