South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Breaking barriers
Nassib coming out barely a blip for unbeaten Raiders
There are all sorts of storylines swirling around the Raiders.
They go into Sunday’s game against Miami looking for their first 3-0 start in almost two decades. Quarterback Derek Carr is playing like an MVP. The defense is much improved.
Know something you don’t hear much about?
Carl Nassib coming out. Turns out, it didn’t cause a major uproar or tear up the locker room when the Raiders defensive end became the first prominent male athlete playing in a major U.S. team sport — the NFL, no less — to reveal he is gay.
After decades of hand-wringing over the supposed negative impact a homosexual player would have on a team’s chemistry, Nassib’s brave announcement this past summer seems to have largely faded into the background.
“It’s a big story, but it’s not a story at all,” said Eric Anderson, a professor of sport masculinity and health at the University of Winchester in England.
Indeed, Nassib is just another valued player on a team that has big-time aspirations for 2021.
“Not one person, from my point of view, has treated him any different,” Carr said. “His locker is just a few down from mine, and I want to make sure that he knows that we just want him to play as hard as he can so we can win a Super Bowl.”
So, was Nassib’s coming-out no big deal?
Of course not.
There’s still plenty of homophobia in this world — and especially in men’s team sports, where all sorts of nasty prejudices linger just beneath the surface.
Nassib and the Raiders are, hopefully, leading us toward a more tolerant locker room in all sports.
“He’s challenging this idea that the identity of an athlete and the identity of an LGBTQ person do not mix and match,” said Yannick Kluch, director of outreach & inclusive excellence at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Center for Sport Leadership.
Certainly, things have changed for the better.
When I delved into this very issue for a story in 2004, it quickly became clear that many male pro athletes were not the least bit prepared to accept a gay teammate. They openly delivered their hostility.
In the Braves clubhouse, I encountered ugly resistance to homosexual rights from future Hall of Famer John Smoltz, who said, “What’s next? Marrying an animal?”
Catcher Eddie Perez took a less-abrasive but similar line, saying he would like to know in advance that he was playing with a gay teammate.
“If I knew a guy was gay, then I could work it out,” Perez said at the time. “I could hide when I’m getting disrobed.”
With gay marriage now legal and LBGTQ rights gaining widespread acceptance, Smoltz and Perez sound like relics from a far more ignorant time.
Still, it took 17 more years before someone of Nassib’s stature — not an
All-Pro, mind you, but a solid player still in his 20s, with 37 starts over his six-year career — to shatter one of the last great barriers in sports.
“It shows how homophobic U.S. men’s team sports still is,” Kluch said. “There’s still homophobic barriers in place that make the athlete feel they are not safe to show who they really are.”
Before Nassib, there were smattering of less-influential breakthroughs.
Michael Sam came out after playing college football, but never made it onto an NFL regular-season roster. Longtime NBA player Jason Collins waited until late in his career to reveal he is gay, playing only played a handful of games before his retirement.
Kluch is hopeful that Nassib is just the beginning of a far more substantial wave of gay players coming out in the NFL, NBA, Major League Baseball and NHL.
Anderson challenges the notion that there are a plethora of male athletes hiding their sexuality. He said changing norms have steered many young gay males away from the so-called traditional sports — especially football.
“Young boys used to partake in these competitive, organized, macho team sports in order to raise their social capital, in order to raise their heterosexual capital,” said Anderson, who in 1993 became the first openly gay high school coach in the United States.
“What we’ve seen is not only the rapid decline of cultural homophobia, but a rapid decline of young men wanting to be associated with that type of masculinity,” he continued. “Young gay boys don’t have to play football now because no one cares if they are gay.”