They may slap each other's butts, but are they gay?

[kweerwolf]

(I just love Mark Morford's columns in the San Francisco Chronicle!)

You know they're out there. The gay male pro athletes, grunting and sweating and spitting and running and crashing and hurling, right now, acting all manly and tough and rugged and heroic on the field or on the court.

And they're signing autographs and getting themselves all beloved by largely homophobic 'Murkin men and swooning 'Murkin boys and even handfuls of women as they jam the secret of their sexuality way, way down and go on raking in their millions, leading their lives of quiet, albeit loaded, desperation.

Do the math, baby: There are 25 players on a Major League Baseball team roster, and there are 30 teams. That's a total of 750 spittin', groin-scratchin' men. For the NBA, it's 12 players and 30 teams, totaling 360 really tall dudes who can no longer wear excess bling. For the NFL, the numbers shoot way up: about 45 players each, across 32 teams, totaling nearly 1,440 hulking hunks of pummeled meat.

So then, for the big three 'Murkin sports alone, not including hockey or soccer or water sports and not including minor league baseball or college hoops or college football (all of which are also, of course, enormous hotbeds of homoerotic heat, which would add another few thousand to the total, but let's stay national here), we're looking at a grand total of well over 2,500 male pro athletes, all sharing locker rooms and showers and sweat and intimate moments and you really want to sit there and tell me at least a dozen of these guys aren't right now closeted homosexuals? Bisexual? Something? Please. Get over it.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/11/02/DDGABFGVKQ1.DTL

[swimboy]

1. Well, I just don't see how they could be. They're athletes, right?

:sarcasm: (as if this clue is necessary) B-)

Are any of our smilies gay?

[sui generis]

2. funny -

well I guess just standing in the garage doesn't mean you're a car, even if you did walk in and out through the garage door.

Slapping butts, getting one's rocks off with the occasional guy even when one has a "straight" relationship - these things don't make someone gay.

That's so polar but it's black or white mostly to people who really are all the way on one pole or the other already and can't imagine that everyone else isn't exactly like them or exactly the opposite of them.

But the only people who REALLY give a damn in sports are the advertisers, because they're afraid that a superstar just won't have endorsement draw or that his team will be perceived as weak or a liability to their products because of stereotypes that most people have about gay athletes.

Isn't it funny, the inside secret that everyone mostly already knows? Kind of like don't ask don't tell in the military. There's a club. Some people are in it. They all know who they are. So does everyone else, but they mostly can't say anything without making themselves look bad.

Ironic.