LGBT issues have played a prominent role in sports news over the last few months, with Jason Collins, Brittney Griner, and Robbie Rogers all coming out. Their bravery has given everyone who covers and cares about progress on those issues in the sporting world a reason to celebrate. Lost in those stories, though, was one about Kerry Rhodes, a defensive back for the Arizona Cardinals who was “outed” by a former manager who claims to also be Rhodes’ former lover.

The story, in fact, wasn’t really “lost.” Instead, it was “purposely underreported,” according to ESPN’s LZ Granderson, because Rhodes denied it immediately and discomfort about the prospect of outing Rhodes without his consent prevented other outlets from reporting it out. That may seem appropriate — who, after all, wants to out someone? — but in reality, it may be a form of soft bigotry that keeps sports reporters from pursuing stories we’d consider fair game and relevant news if the athletes in question were straight, Granderson argued:

The unintended byproduct of respecting a player’s privacy is rendering him invisible, and that invisibility allows prejudice to fester. In the case of gay athletes, the unspoken truth provides cover for our latent homophobia in the mainstream media. While we don’t mind chasing down and reporting every detail of presumed heterosexual athletes’ lives, we work particularly hard to avoid rumors of homosexuality. What weighs heaviest on me about this code is that it inadvertently endorses shame. It grants permission for bigotry. And it perpetuates the assumption that gay male professional athletes are a rarity. The media — more to the point, I — haven’t shown the courage to delve into whether or not that is true.

It’s time the charade ends. It’s time the media start covering gay athletes’ off-field lives with the same intensity and integrity with which we cover straight athletes. [...]

We need to move forward as the celebration over Jason Collins’ coming out ebbs. We need to reach the point where we are as comfortable with showing a male athlete’s male partner in the stands as we are with showing Katherine Webb, the girlfriend of Alabama quarterback AJ McCarron. When reporting a profile, sports writers need to become willing to ask a male player if he has a girlfriend or boyfriend

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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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“It’s funny that this crowd would like something this gay,” Scott Thorson (Matt Damon), tells his date, Bob Black (Scott Bakula) at a Liberace concert in Las Vegas at the beginning of Steven Soderbergh’s HBO movieBehind The Candelabra. “Oh, they have no idea he’s gay,” Bob tells him. That willingness to see what you want to see, and the question of who can hide in plain sight, and under what circumstances, is at the heart of this biopic of the musician, and Scott, who would become his lover. Behind The Candelabra is campy, blunt, and strange, but most of all, it’s an enormously perceptive movie about how the closet works, and how the lack of legal recognition for relationships can become not just a weapon the state uses to distinguish between its citizens, but a void that the people in those relationships can use to hurt and degrade each other.

The New Yorker television critic Emily Nussbaum wrote in her review of the movie that for Liberace, “His was a closet that had its own pleasures, particularly since he had the resources to decorate it to his specifications.” That is undeniably, tackily true, but there’s a larger point there. Liberace had the resources to design a closet that would be largely impregnable to the outside world, including the ability to get rumors about which woman he might be dating, and what kinds of women he liked, into the press, and the lawyers who could successfully mount libel suits in countries like Britain, discouraging other press outlets from pursuing the suggestion that he might be gay. But because Liberace had to construct that closet so carefully, and to consider the consequences were he to be outed, he also had confronted his sexuality fully. If Liberace was going to go to the effort of closeting himself, he was going to make sure he had a dandy time while ensconced in it, whether explaining to Scott that “I’ve had implants,” asking the younger man to use poppers during sex, or consuming pornography and visiting sex shops.

Scott, by contrast, has neither Liberace’s need nor resources to hide his sexuality from the outside world. His foster parents seem relatively understanding about his sexuality—though not his decision to take up with the older musician—and before he meets Liberace, he’s obviously got a social life, meeting Bob at a Los Angeles bar. But Scott also seems to have a more ill-defined relationship to his sexuality, and to the very act of sex with men, than his more formally closeted lover. He maintains that he’s bisexual, a sexual identity regarded with contempt by Liberace’s houseboy Carlucci (Bruce Ramsay), who witheringly tells Scott that he’s replaceable, and later by Liberace himself, who says he sees no evidence that Scott likes women at all, suggesting that bisexuality is a sort of waystation Scott’s stuck at because he can’t admit that he’s gay. And it’s not just the label he uses that comes under criticism from Liberace. “I don’t know how you can be gay and be such a prude,” the older man asks Scott when the younger man objects to some of the pornography Liberace is watching. “Disgusting is all in the eye of the disgustee.” And when Liberace wants to switch up their customary sexual positions, Scott expresses discomfort, telling his lover no “Because I don’t like it…Because it’s kind of repugnant.” “Only when it’s done to you,” Liberace deftly diagnoses him.
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(Credit: Getty Images)

For 76 minutes and 35 seconds, Sunday night’s contest between the Los Angeles Galaxy and Seattle Sounders was nothing if not normal, a mid-season clash between two teams vying for a playoff spot in Major League Soccer’s Western Conference. The Galaxy by that point had secured the win, thanks to three goals and an assist from forward Robbie Keane, whose 44th minute penalty kick put Los Angeles ahead 4-0. The last 15 minutes seemed to promise little more than a slog across the 90 minute finish line.

That’s when Robbie Rogers rose to the sideline, and when an early summer match turned into a historic moment in American sports.

When Rogers took the pitch, replacing midfielder Juninho, he became the first openly gay male to ever appear in a game in one of America’s major sports—and for those doubting soccer’s status as a major American sport, the average crowd for an MLS match is larger than those in both the National Hockey League and National Basketball Association.

The moment couldn’t be overstated. Not for Rogers, a man who spent his closeted years “living all that time with just a cramp in your stomach,” hoping he didn’t “do something that makes people wonder, is Robbie gay?” Not for Rogers, a man who retired when he finally came out in February, at age 25, in a blog post on his personal web site because didn’t “want to deal with the circus” of being the first openly gay player, because he didn’t want to face questions from the media or taunts from the fans. Neither could it be overstated for a gay community that has waited for this moment for so long, for a sports world that has moved, if belatedly, to make itself a more open and tolerant place for LGBT players and fans. But he unretired and announced that he’d signed with the Galaxy on Saturday, and made history just a day later.

“What a moment for number 14,” ESPN’s announcer proclaimed as Rogers entered the pitch to a standing ovation from the 24,811 Galaxy faithful, a smile plastered across his face.
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Over the past several days, we’ve heard a great deal, about the happy (if you can call the tend of ten years of torment straightforwardly happy) ending to a horrific triple—or maybe quadruple—kidnapping in Cleveland, and the man who brought it about. Charles Ramsey, who lived near the house in which Amanda Berry, Michelle Knight, and Gina DeJesus were held, raped, and tortured for a decade, became a hero when he responded to Berry’s calls for help, thinking he was intervening in a simple domestic violence incident. And he has become an internet celebrity thanks to an interview he gave about the case afterwards. The speed with which the latter status has eclipsed the former has been striking, and raised interesting and important questions about our willingness to turn people of color into memes rather than heroes.

At NPR, Gene Demby points out that the ways in which men like Ramsey become memes, and the grounds on which they’re treated as if they’re likable, are reductive rather than respectful, cute rather than heroic—and when those images crumble, the credit we extend to them and the rewards that follow tend to disappear:

But race and class seemed to be central to the celebrity of all these people. They were poor. They were black. Their hair was kind of a mess. And they were unashamed. That’s still weird and chuckle-worthy.

On the face of it, the memes, the Auto-Tune remixes and the laughing seem purely celebratory. But what feels like celebration can also carry with it the undertone of condescension. Amid the hood backdrop — the gnarled teeth, the dirty white tee, the slang, the shout-out to McDonald’s — we miss the fact that Charles Ramsey is perfectly lucid and intelligent.

And at Slate, Aisha Harris breaks down the ways in which the “memorable soundbites” uttered by people like Ramsey or Antoine Dodson becomes the most memorable thing about them, rather than the acts that brought them to public attention in the first place. She writes:

It’s difficult to watch these videos and not sense that their popularity has something to do with a persistent, if unconscious, desire to see black people perform. Even before the genuinely heroic Ramsey came along, some viewers had expressed concern that the laughter directed at people like Sweet Brown plays into the most basic stereotyping of blacks as simple-minded ramblers living in the “ghetto,” socially out of step with the rest of educated America. Black or white, seeing Clark and Dodson merely as funny instances of random poor people talking nonsense is disrespectful at best. And shushing away the question of race seems like wishful thinking.

I think both Harris and Demby are correct, and that it’s worth sorting out both a conscious and unconscious set of impulses that are at work in meme-ifying people in these particular circumstances.
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