Will Leitch has a great piece on the sudden sea change in professional sports towards treating anti-gay sentiment as unprofessional and unacceptable. And he points to Charles Barkley as the man helping knock down the closet door in preparation for the first professional athlete to come out into the light:

As usual, at the center of the story was TNT analyst Charles Barkley, the iconoclast chatterbox. When asked about the fines, Barkley went off. “I’d rather have a gay guy who can play than a straight guy who can’t play,” he told the Washington Post. “Any professional athlete who gets on TV or radio and says he never played with a gay guy is a stone-freakin’ idiot. I would even say the same thing in college. Every college player, every pro player in any sport has probably played with a gay person … I’ve been a big proponent of gay marriage for a long time, because as a black person, I can’t be in for any form of discrimination at all.” It was a cannon shot: It was one thing for Vogue intern Sean Avery to come out in favor of gay marriage. It was quite another for Charles Barkley, an NBA icon, to do so.

Barkley’s comments seemed to open a door. “You sensed a change in the atmosphere, and that often sort of presages something greater happening in the culture,” Buzinski says. “That is the kind of stuff we have not heard voiced before that publicly.” Next thing you knew, former Cowboys receiver Michael Irvin was on the cover of Out magazine, declaring his love for his gay older brother and saying, “If anyone comes out in those top four major sports … I guarantee you I’ll give him 100 percent support.” It became fashionable for sports franchises to do public-service announcements, like support for marriage equality (the Phoenix Suns, whose team president, Rick Welts, is gay) and “It Gets Better” (seven Major League Baseball franchises, most recently the Tampa Bay Rays). In a video released by the Baltimore Orioles, players declare, “You should never feel like you have to hide who you truly are.” The PSAs were greeted by the sports world with a surprising yawn.

Obviously it would be wonderful if pro sports had started fining and suspending people for using terms like “faggot” during play and employing homophobic slurs as motivational speech a long time ago. But I do wonder if the various leagues’ arrival at enlightenment at the same moment that homophobia’s becoming increasingly radioactive in all parts of the public sphere is the only way such fines ever would have worked with fans and with players. There don’t seem to have been players who have become martyrs after being fined for using anti-gay slurs during games — instead, Joakim Noah and Kobe Bryant were immediately and publicly contrite. Tim Hardaway’s repented of his anti-gay remarks and is now fighting religious conservatives who are trying to recall El Paso officials who have supported extending health care benefits to the partners of gay city employees. It would have been wonderful for sports to lead the fight for gay rights, but there’s no reason to expect they would have, not their history, not their conservative fan bases. Instead, I’ll take the leagues using their economic power to enforce societal standards. Athletes were never going to start this fight, but it would be great if they and sports executives could help end it.

There will be a lot of new television shows competing for your attention over the next couple of weeks, but there’s only one that will only take a couple minutes of your time each week and is pushing forward the pop culture conversation about marriage equality, sexual orientation in sports, and the relationships between gay men and straight women. That’s Husbands, a new web series from Jane Espenson, of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Battlestar Galactica and director Jeff Greenstein, a veteran of Friends, Will & Grace, Parenthood , and Desperate Housewives . I spoke with them and the rest of the show’s cast and crew for a two-part series about the state of web television, and the state of gay relationships in popular culture:

“When we did Will & Grace, we were attempting to extend the recent gains Ellen had made when it revealed to America that the spunky gal they were already in love with happened to be gay,” says Husbands director Jeff Greenstein, who won an Emmy in 2000 for his work on Will & Grace, and is a writer and executive producer on Desperate Housewives and State of Georgia, which premiered this summer. “Over the course of eight seasons, we were able to gently move both these men into mature relationships. And by that I don’t just mean two guys lounging on the sofa watching Funny Girl, but falling in love, planning a life, kissing on the lips and sleeping together. Which for the time was kind of a big deal. It’s been six years since Will & Grace, and gay guys on network TV are still lounging on the sofa watching Funny Girl.”

Rather than emulating dramas like The Kids Are All Right or comedies like Modern Family as a way to explore the realities of marriage, the creators of Husbands looked to stories about young married couples no matter their gender. Jane Espenson, the show’s co-creator and a veteran of shows ranging from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Battlestar Galactica, took television shows Mad About You and Dharma & Greg as inspiration, while Greenstein looked to Barefoot in the Park. While most looks at gay couples tend to treat them as if they’re established, Cheeks, the show’s co-creator, says he and Espenson stumbled on the idea of looking at the beginning of a marriage. “It seemed like such a classic, yet timely, premise,” he says, as couples line up to marry in New York.

“Yes, the issue is serious, but every individual marriage is funny,” says Espenson. “And just making that point is making a point about marriage equality—look how this is just a normal marriage in every way, including all of its own personal craziness.”

The show premieres at 9:30 EST/6:30 PST tonight on its website. I’ve read through the first season’s worth of scripts, and it’s a fresh, funny show, a genuine bridge to something new and different. And more to the point, Husbands is effectively a pitch to a network. This first season is really a first-episode pilot. If an audience comes together around the web series, a network won’t have to speculate about whether there’s an viewership for an irreverent equal marriage comedy — they’ll know for sure that audience exists. Tuning in is mostly an abstract way to show support for something fresh and different unless you’re a Nielsen viewer. This is a time when we can actually cast countable votes with our mouses.

As an aside in a Deadline piece about the deals coming out of the Toronto Film Festival, Pete Hammond notes something interesting about the difference between how studios planned to get Colin Firth and Michael Fassbender Academy Awards:

Most buyers I talk to are irritated by some sellers’ insistence that their film be released this year in time for Oscar consideration. That’s a tall order and leaves little time for creating a marketing campaign, much less an awards strategy. Nevertheless, that was one of the demands made by the sellers of the controversial Shame during negotiations. Fox Searchlight agreed, others didn’t. In fact I was told that Sony Pictures Classics, which wanted the picture, came up with a smart strategy they compared to The Weinstein Company’s for Colin Firth. That consisted of Firth doing a lot of campaigning and earning a nomination for A Single Man in 2010, thus laying the groundwork for his The King’s Speech win the next year. SPC was going to put Fassbender out there and get him recognition for their November release of David Cronenberg’s Dangerous Method and then release Shame later in 2012 for a one-two punch that the Academy would notice. No go. The sales people behind Shame insisted it be released this year, thereby throwing the Venice Film Festival’s Best Actor winner into an already overcrowded awards race that among others includes Clooney, Pitt, Oldman, and DiCaprio who are better known – at least at this point.

The approach to Firth was clearly conservative: he established credibility for playing gay, but the role everyone knew he was going to win for was much more conventional, a heterosexual monarch gearing up to fight Hitler with words. I would have liked to see a campaign for Fassbender go in the opposite direction, from a great man who crosses the line in service of what he sees as a higher good to what sounds like a lacerating deconstruction of what society sells as a heterosexual male fantasy, as much sex as you want and more.