“If you
can’t fix it, you gotta stand it.”
Those words were spoken by Heath Ledger’s closeted character
Ennis Del Mar in “Brokeback Mountain.” They also could be
spoken by closeted athletes everywhere.
“Brokeback
Mountain,” the movie that it seems everyone is talking
about, is first set in 1963 when Ennis meets Jack Twist
(played by Jake Gyllenhaal). The two Wyoming cowboys fall in
love, but it’s a love that can never be fully realized. It
ends in 1983. But as far as sports go, the movie could be
set in 2006 and be just as relevant.
When it comes to sports, especially for elite male athletes
in bigtime sports who happen to be gay, Brokeback’s themes
of yearning, fear and forbidden love resonate strongly. We
have come a long way in the acceptance of gays in society,
but sports still remain the final closet and the door is
still firmly shut.
As I watched “Brokeback Mountain,” much of the time with a
lump in my throat, I flashed to contemporary sports and
wondered how many closeted jocks were living their own
version of Ennis and Jack.
It is still an amazing statistic -- There has never been a
male athlete from a major pro team sport (NFL, NBA, NHL or
Major League Baseball) who has come out while playing. The
same is true of elite jocks at major college programs. We
know they’re out there (no one disputes this), but they
remain as closeted as Ennis.
'I Cried'
“I am 29 years old and still in the closet and hiding who I
truly am,”
read one post on the Internet Movie Database, a
major resource for film lovers. “I grew up in a small town
where I was a star athlete, prom king in high school -- the
All-American boy so to speak. I cannot come out to my family
or friends for reasons of maybe losing all of them as well
as my job.
“I once had a very special love in my life; he is dead now.
He took his own life when he was only 23. He could not
accept himself or could not trust others to accept who he
was. I don't blame him for killing himself, I blame society!
I miss him and there is not a day that goes by that I do not
think of him. I am trying to hold back the tears as I write
this. We met in college and our story is very similar to the
one in this movie as well.
“…When this movie finished, I walked to my car, drove down a
dark alleyway, locked the doors and did what any other tough
young cowboy did -- I cried. Some days I'm just barely
hanging on but movies like this want to make me keep
fighting. Thank you, “Brokeback Mountain.”
Athletes who have come out after their careers have ended
have stories that are universal. The paranoia and fear of
being discovered while competing. The ruses to convince
teammates, coaches and family that they’re 100%
heterosexual. The feeling that their performance on the
field suffered because of the great psychic strain of being
found out. It’s similar to when Ennis tells Jack a harrowing
story of witnessing the aftermath of a gay rancher being
killed when he was a young boy.
To Ennis, the stakes are too great to be open about who he
is and who he loves, and gay athletes feel those same
strains. They may not fear being lynched, but there is still
physical fear nonetheless.
The Locker Room
Esera
Tuaolo played nine years in the NFL as a defensive tackle, a
tough position in a brutal game. He told me that when he saw
"Brokeback Mountain," "I started bawling my eyes out because
I saw so many similarities to my life. I just started
feeling everything again and at some parts I just had to
close my eyes. It's a very touching movie."
Tuaolo was in the closet the
whole time as a player and in his searing, moving and honest upcoming book, “Alone in the
Trenches,” (I have read an advance copy) he eloquently describes the trauma he endured
trying to keep his secret.
“While I was with the [Minnesota] Vikings,” Tuaolo writes,
“a rumor broke out that the Dallas Cowboys’ superstar
quarterback Troy Aikman was gay. He’s not, but the rumor
spread. The day I heard that, I walked into the locker room,
panicked and afraid. I didn’t know what to expect, wasn’t
sure what I would have to endure.”
Tuaolo was not out, yet he feared every day that someone
might have spotted him in the rare times he frequented a gay
bar, implausible as that might seem. He continues:
“Some of the players started saying nasty, graphic things
about Troy and his sexual habits. I was going along with it,
laughing with the others. The talk turned to speculation
about other players. My stomach knotted. I hoped no one
would point the finger at me.
“One of the tight ends on our team at the time was a cocky
guy that others picked on -- they knew they could get a
reaction out of him. [Defensive lineman] John Randle said to
him, ‘You must be gay.’ The tight end freaked out. He
attacked Randle. A brawl broke out in the locker room.
“These two big guys threw blows at one another. Everybody
else tried to break it up, including me. … I felt the
adrenaline surge of the fight. I also felt tremendous pain.
That could have been me getting teased and in a fight. I was
thinking, I am in such a fucked-up nightmare. I wish I could
wake up.”
Countering the Rumors
Aikman’s
story is illuminating. Rumors that he was gay surfaced in
1990s as he was leading the Dallas Cowboys to three Super
Bowl titles. They spread wide, even in the days before the
Internet, and one account had his coach Barry Switzer making
the allegation.
Aikman denied he was gay, but his PR team at the time went
through some elaborate lengths to prove his heterosexual
bona fides. It seems that every few months Aikman was linked
to some actress or another. And in the strangest story I
ever read in Sports Illustrated, the author detailed
Aikman’s quest for love and how he just couldn’t find the
right woman.
Titled “Mr. Lonelyhearts” (Jan. 15, 1996), the story was a
5,417-word personal ad, with a sub-headline that read: “SWM,
TALL, HANDSOME, 29, PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL PLAYER, SEEKS
BEAUTIFUL, INTELLIGENT YOUNG WOMAN TO HELP DESIGN DREAM
HOUSE AND CREATE FAMILY EQUIVALENT OF AMERICA'S TEAM. MUST
LIKE QUIET EVENINGS AT HOME, EITHER CRUISING AMERICA ONLINE
OR ADMIRING TROPICAL FISH TANK. MUST SPEND SUNDAYS IN
CROWDED STADIUMS ROOTING FOR DALLAS COWBOYS. DISLIKE OF
49ERS AND REDSKINS A PLUS, BUT NOT REQUIRED.”
Aikman, we were told, would spend hours in AOL chat rooms,
though it never specified if they were M for W (which was
implied) or M for M (which is what I, and many other guys,
hoped).
Aikman went on to a successful career in broadcasting,
married and has two children. If there was ever any truth to
the rumors, I doubt we’ll ever find out. Similarly, in
“Brokeback Mountain,” both Jack and Ennis marry and raise
kids, this in a time when two men living together simply was
not done, especially in Wyoming. Despite Jack’s pleading,
Ennis can’t break the grip of the culture of homophobia in
which he was raised.
In sports, being labeled gay is perceived as tantamount to
career suicide and athletes have gone out of their way to
quash any rumor, as the Aikman case illustrates to the
extreme. In 2002, New York Mets catcher Mike Piazza took the
unusual step of declaring his heterosexuality after a blind
item appeared in a gossip column saying one of the Mets was
gay. Piazza then became linked to beautiful women and got
married in 2005 to an actress and former Playmate.
In 2004, former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Jeff Garcia
announced he was not gay after being fingered as
such by then teammate Terrell Owens. Garcia then dated two
Playboy playmates back-to-back, further enhancing his
straight credentials; the fact that Playmate 1
duked it out with Playmate 2 in a bar only got
Garcia more attention to the type of relationship he was
having.
Love and Death
In
“Brokeback Mountain,” the idea of a savage death for men
loving men hovers over the film, including a key scene near
the end. The sports world is not immune to similar savagery.
In 1962, boxer Emile Griffith beat his opponent Benny Paret
to death in the ring in Madison Square Garden before a
national TV audience. Paret had taunted Griffith for being a
“maricon,” Spanish slang for faggot. "He called me a maricon.
I knew maricon meant faggot. I wasn’t nobody’s faggot,”
Griffith said. The slurs drove Griffith to a fury in
the ring that ended with Paret slumped over the ropes and
lapsing into a coma from which he never recovered.
There is no doubt that Griffith is a homosexual, though he
steadfastly denied it for years; he developed a reputation
as a lady’s man and once briefly married. A documentary last
year about the Paret fight brought Griffith some attention
and he offered to ride in New York’s gay pride parade.
Griffith was in his prime in the same era when Jack and
Ennis first meet in the movie, and Paret and Jack are both
killed, in a universal sense, by homophobia.
David Kopay is a sports pioneer, the first NFL player to
come out, a year after retiring. He saw “Brokeback Mountain”
its first weekend in Los Angeles and told me how blown away
and emotionally affected he was, and how the story resonated
for him. As he watched Jack and Ennis deal with their love
for each other on the screen, Kopay said he thought about
his relationship with Jerry Smith, with whom he played with
on the Washington Redskins in the early 1970s.
Smith died of AIDS in 1987 while never publicly admitting
his homosexuality. To honor Smith’s desire for privacy,
Kopay never mentioned him by name in his book, though he was
a catalyst in Kopay’s coming out. Smith “was my first major
[gay] experience and the first person I thought I could
love,”
Kopay said. Like Ennis and Jack, but for differing
reasons, Dave and Jerry’s relationship was stillborn and
Kopay sounds wistful when he recalls those days.
At the end of the film, after Jack has died, Ennis is alone
with Jack’s shirt and his grief, with no one to share his
loss with. It reminded me of a moving passage in Billy
Bean’s book “Going
the Other Way.”
Bean played Major League
Baseball for nine years and came out after retiring in 1999.
While in San Diego, Bean was living with another man, in a
relationship that was clandestine and which Bean strove
mightily to keep that way. His lover became ill and
eventually died.
Numb with grief, but still hiding his private life, Bean
honored a team commitment on the day of his lover’s death,
something inconceivable for a straight athlete who just lost
a spouse. “Once in a while, the team issues a statement that
a player is excused … to attend to family matters,” Bean
recounts in his book. “This had to be one of those
situations. There was only one problem: How could I explain
that my ‘family matter’ was the AIDS-related death of my
male lover with whom I’d been living secretly?”
“If you can’t fix it, you gotta stand it” was Bean’s mantra
and Tuaolo’s and that of any closeted athlete. Bean and
Tuaolo finally had enough of the hiding and neither has ever
regretted coming out. I hope that the movie inspires another
mantra for anyone closeted, jock or not. It comes from
someone who
posted on the official "Brokeback" website: "I
have been denying my sexuality for a long time. The movie
has inspired me to face my true nature."
E-mail Jim
Check
out the
Brokeback discussion on our message board.
Jan. 18,
2006
