ESPN The Magazine’s “Taboo Issue” centers on Kate Fagan’s excellent profile of Brittney Griner, which follows Griner’s growth from a girl experimenting with her identity, to a teenager at a university eager for her basketball skills but uncomfortable with her sexual orientation, to a woman who is singlehandedly upending gender expectations for athletic women.

The WNBA, like many women’s sports has, either consciously or subconsciously, pushed sexuality to the backburner in an effort to appeal to straight fans they fear may be turned off by an open embrace of a lesbian-friendly brand. But as Fagan’s profile makes clear, the league is now planning to use Griner, who came out just before the Phoenix Mercury made her the top overall pick in the league’s draft in May, to change that:

Griner happily embraces what the WNBA has long shied away from: controversy. “It’s always been, ‘Oh, it’s just so nice the girls can play,’” says Mercury president Amber Cox. “We want role models, but we need lightning rods to balance things out. In that sense, Brittney has taken us to the next level. If someone is invoking emotion in people, they care. And apathy has been our biggest enemy.”

Griner’s arrival coincides with intriguing new research about WNBA fans. League executives admit that their marketing efforts have been schizophrenic at times as they’ve searched for a common thread among their eclectic audience. Now the research shows a theme: People who support the WNBA have progressive views on gender. “They share the ultimate goal of living in a world where gender equality exists in all its forms,” says league president Laurel Richie.

The WNBA has been building toward the emergence of a player who can embody this philosophy, and now here she is with her size 17 sneakers and 88-inch wingspan. “This feels like a magical moment,” Richie says. “I think years from now, we’ll look back on 2013 as the pivotal year for this league.”

And the WNBA isn’t the only organization that’s ready to embrace–and market–Griner for who she is. Nike’s also signed Griner to an endorsement deal in which she’ll wear both men’s and women’s clothing. “We can’t get into specifics,” Nike spokesman Brian Strong told Fagan, “but it’s safe to say we jumped at the opportunity to work with her because she breaks the mold.” It’s entirely possible that before the end of her career, athletes of both genders could be rocking Air Griners like the Air Jordans of a generation ago.

All this, it seems, is evidence of what Grantland’s Wesley Morris calls the “quiet queering of professional sports,” where the culture has made it apparent that it is ready to be more open about sexuality and gender even without a wave of athletes rushing to come out (though the recent high-profile coming outs have only helped). It’s a world where women like Griner and her fellow draftees are wearing men’s suits, jeans, t-shirts, and sneakers and men like Dwyane Wade are wearing capri pants, tight jeans, and lens-less glasses. A fashion culture that might have caused derogatory inquisitions about sexuality among media and fans several years ago — from Paul George’s outlandish green pants and paisley top, Russell Westbrook’s frames and patterned shirts (which have spawned blogs of their own), or Griner’s suits and bowties — may still be fodder for intrigue and amusement, but there’s a fair bit of stylistic admiration in the mix,, too. Male athletes are paying attention to fashion, and often times dressing, more like we think women should. Women athletes are dressing more and more like we think men are supposed to. And few of them — and fewer of us — see anything wrong with it. Instead, we seem to be enjoying it.
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Indiana Pacers center Roy Hibbert has made headlines with his play on the court during the NBA playoffs’ Eastern Conference Finals, during which he has manhandled the Miami Heat both offensively and defensively. Saturday night, after the Pacers punished the defending champions and stretched the series to a deciding Game 7, Hibbert made headlines off the court.

Hibbert’s first headline was provocative enough — he called the media a bunch of “motherf—–s” who hadn’t paid enough attention to his play throughout the season. His second veered off the deep end, when he used homophobic slang while describing his defensive play during Game 6. “I really felt that I let [Pacers forward Paul George] down in terms of having his back when LeBron was scoring in the post or getting to the paint, because they stretched me out so much,” Hibbert said. “No homo.”

What had started as a laughable press conference — his assessment of the media, if vulgar, was largely true — turned offensive, and the media reaction on Twitter and television was swift. Hibbert himself wasted little time apologizing. Within hours, he had reached out to Jason Collins, who just a month ago became the first active openly gay NBA player, on Twitter:

@jasoncollins34 hey can I get a follow. Would like to discuss something’s with you.

— Roy Hibbert (@Hoya2aPacer) June 2, 2013

If Collins responded to Hibbert, he did so privately, as he hasn’t made a public comment about the enigmatic center’s comments. Still, the presence of an openly gay NBA player seems already to have started changing the league and the way the media, fans, and even players themselves react to the use of slurs, even if Collins hasn’t yet found a team for the 2013-14 season.

Jason Collins was in the NBA when Kobe Bryant called an official a “fag,” he was there when Tim Hardaway said, “I hate gay people” and proclaimed himself a proud homophobe. In both instances, the reaction was negative: the NBA fined Bryant, while the retired Hardaway was on the wrong end of a media feeding frenzy. Still, the reaction is different: before Jason Collins, the party offended by those slurs was abstract, a player everyone (almost everyone, anyway) knew existed but that was merely a hypothetical. Now, players, fans, and the media have human face that is victimized, a man who has served as a teammate and friend and shattered the idea that homosexuality is a distant idea truly unknown by the stars of our sports.

Both Bryant, who chided Twitter followers using gay slurs earlier this year, and Hardaway, who stood up for Collins when he came out, learned from their mistakes and changed their attitudes. Neither did so as fast as Hibbert, and it seems likely that Collins is the reason why. Collins has put a face to the hurt, one that both represents other players who haven’t yet opened up and makes it evident that words like “no homo” aren’t offensive to a distant, disconnected minority but to friends, teammates, bosses, fans, and colleagues who prove that being “homo” isn’t a disqualifier for being a basketball player or anything else. Jason Collins might not yet have a place to play, but by being open, he’s already making the NBA a better place.

Brittney Griner, the Baylor University basketball star who made headlines this spring both when Dallas Mavericks Mark Cuban offered her a tryout to see if she’d be able to play competitively in the National Basketball Association rather than the WNBA—she ultimately signed with the Phoenix Mercury, a women’s team—and then when she confirmed that she’d always been open about her sexual orientation—she is gay—with people who knew her in person, even in Baylor’s observantly Christian environment. Now, in an a pair of interviews with ESPN, Griner explains that even though she was able to be personally out of the closet, the women’s basketball team encouraged her to keep the story from going national during her career:

In a series of interviews — including one on camera Friday — for an ESPN The Magazine and espnW.com story set to hit newsstands later this month, Griner said her silence during college was because Mulkey and her staff were concerned about the program’s image.

“It was more of a unwritten law [to not discuss your sexuality] … it was just kind of, like, one of those things, you know, just don’t do it,” Griner said Friday. “They kind of tried to make it, like, ‘Why put your business out on the street like that?’”

But Griner reiterated on Friday that her sexuality was an open secret at Baylor.

“I told Coach [Mulkey] when she was recruiting me. I was like, ‘I’m gay. I hope that’s not a problem,’ and she told me that it wasn’t,” Griner said. “I mean, my teammates knew, obviously they all knew. Everybody knew about it.”

It’s unfortunate that Baylor basically told Griner that her sexual orientation was no big deal—as long as, by their definition, she didn’t make it that way. And her experience raises interesting questions about what it means for a person to be out of the closet, particularly if their lives are bifurcated between their personal social experiences and a national role.

Baylor’s question, as Griner phrased it, “Why put your business out on the street like that?” speaks to the difference beween so-called tolerance and actual acceptance of LGBTQ people. In the absence of confirmation that someone is gay, they’re assumed to be straight, in part because that’s an assumption that makes people who have little experience with gay people more comfortable. Heterosexuality isn’t “business” that makes anti-gay people uncomfortable to encounter. It’s a neutral default. And because of that assumed neutrality, heterosexuality isn’t something that it’s possible to be “out” about. It’s presumed to be visible even if a theoretically heterosexual person isn’t actually dating someone in a way that publicly confirms their sexual orientation. Heterosexuality can only be disproved. Homosexuality or bisexuality, by contrast, aren’t necessarily visible to a casual observer who chooses not to see the possibility that a figure like Griner could be gay. But that LGBTQ people have to confirm their sexual orientations, at this point, says as much about outsiders who assume they must be straight as it does about LGBTQ people themselves.

And it’s that dynamic that upsets the long-established narrative of coming out particularly for public figures. If Griner was out to her friends, family, and potential partners at Baylor, is the fact that a national audience didn’t know or think that she might be gay on her, or on that audience? Coming out has been framed as a triumphal process, both for the person who finally gets to acknowledge their true identity in public after suffering under pressure to hide, and for people who benefit from the knowledge that there are happy gay people in, say, college sports. But conversely, there’s something frustrating about the idea that Griner, who was out to people who know her in real life already, has to inform a national audience who assumed she was straight by lazy default that, no, actually, she’s gay. It’s great that Griner’s willing to use her experience to educate a national audience about what it’s like for a talented gay woman to coexist with an institution that has openly homophobic statements of principals on its books. But that her experience still seems novel enough to merit news coverage says less about her courage, and more about the lack of imagination of viewers at home who hadn’t bothered to think about Baylor’s treatment of gay and potentially gay players until Griner stepped forward.

Considering the playoffs just started, there has been an awful lot of off-the-court news in the National Basketball Association this week. Buried beneath stories that Jason Collins came out as gay — the first man in the four major team sports to do so publicly while still playing — was the news that the Sacramento Kings won’t be moving to Seattle, which had seemed like a done deal just a month ago.

But the Kings are now almost assuredly staying put, thanks to a last-minute plan secured by Mayor Kevin Johnson that will put $250 million in taxpayer financing toward a new arena that helped the NBA’s Relocation Committee decide to reject a potential sale to a group of Seattle investors. The arena is the key piece of a deal that played everyone, as Deadspin’s Barry Petchesky summed up nicely:

Arenas are the endgame. They multiply the value of a franchise, provide outside revenue streams, and send the potential future sale price of a team through the roof. It’s not cynical to assume that these past three years of pitting city vs. city, with heartbreak the consolation prize, was done solely to pressure Sacramento into propping up the value of the Kings with a new arena.

So what of Seattle, where a new arena—with $200 million from bonds—is almost a done deal? The league may have decided that the threat of relocation is, in the short-term, more useful than following through. Much like the NFL with Los Angeles, Seattle can serve as the NBA’s bogeyman, to be trotted out any time a city needs a scare to keep its NBA owner happy.

That’s pretty much it. The Kings wanted a new arena and it didn’t really matter whether it was financed by taxpayers in Sacramento, Seattle, or Virginia Beach. Not only did they get that new arena, they got it in a way that will only make it easier for other teams to wrangle new arenas out of taxpayers in the future, since Seattle will remain a point of leverage for any owner who wants taxpayers to foot the bill for new digs that will only enhance the value of the team he owns. Give the owner a new arena, or he’ll pick up and move to a city that will.

The NBA wants to go back to Seattle, but what it wants more is to use the city as a bargaining chip in future arena negotiations. Seattle remains its most viable market opportunity, and since it’s running out of attractive markets owners can pit against their current cities, it doesn’t want to add another franchise to get there or anywhere else. But when a team does end up in the Emerald City, another city — Louisville, Virginia Beach, Kansas City, or somewhere else — with a shiny new arena or plans to build one will become the destination du jour of every owner who needs a little leverage. And until owners run out of cities to pit against each other (they won’t any time soon precisely because they refuse to expand), or until taxpayers and elected officials realize that they’re only getting played by handing over huge sums of money to subsidize and enrich a handful of wealthy people, this endless game of arena chicken will continue on. Taxpayers are guaranteed losers every time.

Jason Collins, a 12-year National Basketball Association veteran who played the 2013 season for the Boston Celtics and Washington Wizards, became the first active openly gay male in the four major American professional sports today, when he came out in a self-written article that will appear in the May 6 issue of Sports Illustrated.

“I’m a 34-year-old NBA center. I’m black. And I’m gay,” the first sentence, one that may go down as momentous as any written about sports before, reads. It is triumphant, a declaration the world of sports has been anticipating from someone — anyone — for months if not years. There have been gay pioneers in sports before — Billie Jean King was outed in 1981 and Martina Navritilova came out that same year — but in men’s sports, the only open athletes were those who had already finished their careers.

But behind the simple declaration that began the piece is a more telling story about where that movement still stands. Jason Collins was not open to any of the hundreds of men he’s called teammates, and he spent months debating the decision. In Washington, he wrote, he watched the Supreme Court debate the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act, pained that he couldn’t speak openly about who he really was. By then he had determined he needed to be open, but he waited until after the season so as to keep his personal life from becoming a “distraction” for his team and his colleagues:

Loyalty to my team is the real reason I didn’t come out sooner. When I signed a free-agent contract with Boston last July, I decided to commit myself to the Celtics and not let my personal life become a distraction. When I was traded to the Wizards, the political significance of coming out sunk in. I was ready to open up to the press, but I had to wait until the season was over.

A free agent who has become a journeyman in recent years, Collins played just nine minutes per game in six appearances after being traded to the Wizards. Now in search of a new team, Collins used the piece not just to describe why he came out now — “I want to do the right thing and not hide anymore. I want to march for tolerance, acceptance and understanding. I want to take a stand and say, ‘Me, too,’” he wrote — but also to let future teammates and perhaps executives know that he wouldn’t be gawking at them in the showers either:

I’ve been asked how other players will respond to my announcement. The simple answer is, I have no idea. I’m a pragmatist. I hope for the best, but plan for the worst. The biggest concern seems to be that gay players will behave unprofessionally in the locker room. Believe me, I’ve taken plenty of showers in 12 seasons. My behavior wasn’t an issue before, and it won’t be one now. My conduct won’t change. I still abide by the adage, “What happens in the locker room stays in the locker room.” I’m still a model of discretion.

This is the true shame of the in-the-closet culture of sexuality in sports, where athletes like Collins and Robbie Rogers, the soccer player who came out as gay and promptly retired in February, feel a tinge of selfishness and guilt when they finally open up about who they really are. In March, Rogers told the Guardian and the New York Times that he felt healthier since coming out; friends and former teammates told reporters that they had never seen him “more at ease.” Collins is no different: “I’m much happier since coming out to my friends and family. Being genuine and honest makes me happy,” he wrote.

Minutes after the story went live on Sports Illustrated’s site, Knicks guard Baron Davis — who never played with Collins but has played against him both in college and the NBA — tweeted that he was “so proud of my bro (Jason Collins) for being real. #FTheHaters.” The Wizards took the same view. “We are extremely proud of Jason and support his decision to live his life proudly and openly,” team president Ernie Grunfeld said in a statement. The hope is that the rest of the NBA, including the executives and coaches who Collins will meet with to find a team and continue his NBA career this offseason, will see it the same way. Reality tells us that not all them will share Davis’ view, and that’s why athletes like Collins and Rogers have to spend so much time convincing themselves that being a gay player is something they not only are but that they deserve to be.

Perhaps that isn’t shocking. In team sports, the “distraction” label can be a career-killer for anyone, much less a 34-year-old center whose value has never shown up on a stat sheet. It’s only natural to avoid anything that could lead to that diagnosis, especially since Collins is still looking for a job. But sexuality isn’t a poor attitude, an outsized ego, or a flawed character trait that makes somebody like Jason Collins a bad teammate, a locker room cancer, or a distraction. It is a part of who Jason Collins is — part of who an untold number of American athletes, both male and female, are, and being open about it can only make them healthier and more focused on doing the job they are in sports to do. When those athletes no longer have to hide that, when they no longer feel the need to preemptively convince teammates that they won’t stare or coaches that they won’t distract, sports will have truly changed. We haven’t reached that point, but thanks to Jason Collins, we’re one major step closer.

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban told ESPN this morning that his team would consider drafting Brittney Griner, the 6-foot-8 standout for Baylor University’s women’s basketball team, in the second round of June’s NBA Draft.

“If she is the best on the board, I will take her,” Cuban told ESPN’s Tim McMahon Tuesday night. “I’ve thought about it. I’ve thought about it already. Would I do it? Right now, I’d lean toward yes, just to see if she can do it. You never know unless you give somebody a chance, and it’s not like the likelihood of any late-50s draft pick has a good chance of making it.”

At 6-foot-8, 208 pounds, Griner would be undersized at both center and power forward in a league where the average front court player weighs in around 235 pounds (based on my own quick calculations), and while she’s sized more closely to the typical NBA small forward, that’s a position I can’t recall her playing in college or international ball. But that doesn’t mean she couldn’t fit in somewhere, and she was a three-time All-American at Baylor, where she scored 3,283 points and blocked 748 shots. She also wouldn’t be the first woman to get drafted or try out for the NBA. In 1979, the Utah Jazz drafted Delta State star Lusia Harris in the seventh round; the same year, UCLA star Ann Meyers tried out for the Indiana Pacers. So if Griner wants that chance and an NBA team is willing to give it to her, it is a chance she deserves and one she should take.

That chance, however, should be a real one, not a publicity stunt aimed at selling tickets, as the Jazz selection of Harris admittedly was. The perception of female athletes is already too skewed by an inherently sexist world of sports to give Griner a cynical shot — or worse yet — a cynical spot on the team. Take, for instance, the immediate reaction ESPN received when it promoted Cuban’s comments on Twitter with the hashtag #GrinerNBA. The responses were overwhelmingly negative, ranging from people wanting to see her get dunked on by LeBron James and other male superstars to those saying she belonged in the NBA because that’s where “men” play or demeaned not only her skill but her size, her appearance, and her voice.

The disgusting responses #GrinerNBA received aren’t just aimed at Brittney Griner, though. They’re emblematic of a sports culture, particularly among fans, that simultaneously objectifies the appearances of female athletes and rejects them as incapable athletes. It’s no secret that the bodies of female athletes (and women in general) are objectified in ways that men’s bodies rarely, if ever, are. And women like Griner who don’t fit the “sexy” model are instantly judged as not sufficiently feminine. That helps foster stereotypes of female athletes that create problems in their own sports and drive women and girls not to sports but away from them. It also prevents us from seeing women like Griner as the phenomenal athletes they are, from appreciating their skills and accomplishments as athletic triumphs and not as diminished products because of how they look or because they aren’t playing the men’s game.

That we have so far to go in viewing Griner and other female athletes on their own merits, both as sportswomen and as people, is precisely why her NBA tryout, if it happens, can’t be a cynical stunt. Her success or failure should be based on her merits alone, and if it is, neither Griner nor the NBA will be any worse because of it. Cuban seems sincere. That’s good, because a real chance, no matter success or failure, will continue the fight to slowly break down the barriers and perceptions that face female athletes. A publicity stunt will only reinforce them.