Like it or not, lesbians still a big deal in sports
'There is this fascination with the sexuality of women athletes,' doctor says
 David J. Phillip / AP file The fascination of lesbians in women's sports was fueled in recent weeks when Sheryl Swoopes came out of the closet, writes the AP's Tim Dahlberg. |
It really shouldn’t matter by now, but apparently it still does. For two very different reasons it matters greatly to Sheryl Swoopes and Laila Ali.
And, even though we live in politically correct times, it seems to matter to a lot of America’s sports fans, too.
Lesbians play sports, which by itself is no big surprise. The L word has hovered around women’s sports since the days when players in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League wore long skirts to make them look more feminine.
The bigger surprise is how often the issue keeps coming up. And, for this discussion, we won’t even count the two Carolina Panthers cheerleaders recently caught in a bathroom stall.
“There is this fascination with the sexuality of women athletes,” said Todd Crosset, an associate professor of sports management at the University of Massachusetts. “If a woman is really good at her sport, people will question her sexuality.”
That fascination has been fueled in recent weeks, most notably by Swoopes when she came out of the closet and announced not only that she was a lesbian but also that she was involved with one of her now former coaches.
“I feel like I’ve been living a lie,” the WNBA’s best player said. “I’m finally OK with the idea of who I love, who I want to be with.”
Ali had an announcement to make last week, too. She announced that she wasn’t a lesbian, debunking Internet rumors to the contrary.
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That Ali had to come out and make such a statement reflects as much on the sport she’s in as it does the fact that people who cruise the Internet often aren’t able to distinguish truth from the blogging rumor mills.
She’s a boxer. Gay boxers, even if they’re women, don’t sell. So she took it upon herself to say something, even though she should have had no reason to say it.
Mike Piazza faced the same issue a few years ago when he held a press conference to announce he dated women, not men. Michael Vick found himself forced to do the same thing.
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