With 87% of the vote counted, Sims had 51.6% (3,661 votes) to 48.4% (3,428 votes) for Josephs, a margin of 233 votes. The Associated Press declared Sims the winner and Sims claimed victory, though Josephs had not yet conceded by midnight; the final votes will be counted Wednesday. The district is very Democratic, so if Sims’ lead holds, he will be heavily favored to win election this fall and take his seat early next year.

“We were the second largest state to never elect an openly gay legislator,” Sims, a lawyer active in gay-rights issues, said at the party celebrating his apparent victory at Woody’s bar in Center City. “I’m excited to get to work.”

Sims first achieved national prominence in gay circles in 2009 when he told his story to Outsports about being an openly gay captain of his college football team. He was credited with putting together an amazing organization and working hard to unseat Josephs. Dave Davies of the Newswork blog wrote:

Josephs, who was elected when Ronald Reagan was president, was simply overhelmed by Sims’ direct mail and field effort. A veteran committeeman from the 8th ward told me he’d never seen anything like it: 10 direct mail pieces and two election day door-hangers, with plenty of sneakers on the street.

If you look at Sims’ campaign finance report, you’ll see this is no mystery – scores of contributions, many from out-of-state, reflecting the push to make him the Commonwealth’s first openly-gay legislator.

Assuming his lead holds, this is a fantastic achievement for Sims, 33. You can check into his Facebook page to read or post congratulations.

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Quarterback Cohner Mokry stands up to bullies

For all those people who still think every football player is a bullying thug, check out this fantastic story from Claudia Taylor Johnson High School in San Antonio, Texas. A student there was being bullied last autumn, and the bullies wouldn’t stop. Counselor Carri Elliott asked the football coach to find some footballers to help protect the bullied teen. From the San Antonio Express-News:

Though they didn’t know the freshman, quarterback Cohner Mokry, now 17, right guard Ryder Burke, 18, and right tackle Austin Carson, 18, soon had his schedule memorized. The three seniors would leave class a couple of minutes early to meet the boy outside his classroom and chat with him as he got to his next class.

“He was so by himself,” Burke said. “Us three were already great friends and … he just got tossed into the mix.”

The three football players confronted the bullies…and soon the boy was part of the football players’ group of friends. While the boy has moved away from the school (not because of the bullying), the school has expanded the program to protect more and more bullied students.

By November, the seniors had ended the bullying so effectively that Elliott expanded the Bully Guards to include nine more football players and four other tormented students. Next year, 18 football players will help eight incoming freshmen, she said.

Mokry happens to be a pretty good quarterback. You can see in his recruiting video that he can throw a nice ball and also run 60 yards for a touchdown, pulling away from the safety. We’ll have to keep an eye on this great kid.

Read the full story from the San Antonio Express-News.

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I was an odd creature in high school because I was a target but also I was popular, and that’s because on the sly, I was dating a lot of the football players.

“A lot of the football players?” I’d consider “a lot” to be like six or seven. So Murphy wants us to believe he was dating six or seven football players when he was in high school in the early 1980s? One football player I can believe. But once you get past two he loses all credibility…and “two” is not “a lot.”

In case you hadn’t noticed, guys are pretty territorial when it comes to dating. You look at somebody’s “woman” the wrong way and you’ll get punched in the face. Yet Murphy wants everyone to believe he went from player to player? Or maybe he’s saying the football team passed him around like a peace pipe? It’s just not believable.

Maybe Murphy is confusing reality with fantasy…or wishful thinking.

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Stephen Bowness

American football is far from a popular sport in New Zealand, where rugby is king. But that hasn’t stopped Stephen Bowness, 46, from his love of the game as a referee there for 17 years. He is also openly gay and recently made history by being the first Kiwi to be head referee at an international American football game. He shared his story with Outsports.

By Stephen Bowness

My name is Stephen Bowness and I’m New Zealand’s leading American Football referee. I’m also gay, which I think is a first at this level. And I made a little bit of history recently.

Two weeks ago I had the honor of being the first New Zealander appointed as referee for an international American football game when I worked an IFAF Junior World Cup Qualifier between Australia and American Samoa on Australia’s Gold Coast. This was my sixth international, but this was my first time in charge and we had the extra challenge of a flooded field to deal with. The Gold Coast had experienced constant heavy rain in the days leading up to the match, which meant that any attempts to mark the field met with failure. We had no opportunity to postpone the match, so we ended up marking the sidelines with cones and used the soccer goal lines which are permanently marked on the field, which shortened the field by around 5 feet at each end. The line judge made all calls regarding first downs as we would never have been able to measure. It was a very one-sided game, with American Samoa winning, 93-7, to qualify for the tournament in Austin, Texas, in June.

My being openly gay has not been an issue for me. While I don’t go out of my way to publicize the fact, I don’t make a secret of it either. Anyone who Googles my name will easily discover that I am also the Musical Director of Auckland’s Gay and Lesbian Singers, a fairly prominent position in the gay community here. My colleagues all know that I’m gay and both they and my Australian colleagues were most supportive of my desire to add my name to the other gay and lesbian sportspeople who are making themselves known in the media at the moment.

A number of our players also know. A few years ago I was working a Friday night game on my birthday. As a special treat, some of the players offered me a visit to the locker room after the match. I politely declined their offer and the whole thing was done in good humor. However, it should also be said that the players could make my life difficult if they chose to do so. Many of them are from conservative Pacific Island backgrounds and all of them are significantly bigger than me.

American Football in New Zealand is a minor sport – a very minor sport. We have two competitions, one based in Auckland with five teams from Auckland and one from nearby Hamilton (this year’s champions) and another with three teams from the capital, Wellington. In Auckland we have around 200 players at a senior level with similar numbers at the Colts and Junior levels. The game has been played here since 1983 and we have just completed our 30th season. As we compete for grounds and players with Rugby and Rugby League we play from November to February, our summer. The game is developing slowly, but has seen regular setbacks over the years. In Auckland we have just nine officials to cover the three senior matches each Saturday (we are unable to cover the youth grades at all) and not all of those are available for every game as some of us are also players. This season, most games were covered by the same core crew of four with a fifth official added for many games. We often found ourselves working three matches in a day (our matches run for around two hours and we have about an hour off in between with all games played at the same ground) and we were lucky this season to have cooler weather for most games with the temperature averaging around 65 degrees. We have played games in temperatures close to 90 degrees with the humidity above 90%.

The level of play is around that of high school in the US, which provides a challenge for those of us who want to progress to higher things. We are very isolated here, so we work very closely with our friends in Australia. We have enjoyed clinics with now-retired Big 10 Referee Dick Honig (whose company supplies all of our equipment) and current Big 10 Referee Bill Lemonnier and I also get support and mentorship from NFL Referee Jeff Triplette, whose crew I spent a day with a few years ago. We maintain relationships with colleagues in Britain (where I worked a game between Sweden and Australia two years ago) and Europe in an effort to share knowledge and experience.

What got me interested in refereeing American Football? At school, I was a very reluctant participant in sports. In a last ditch attempt to get me involved, one of my teachers encouraged me to judge for school rugby matches and to umpire cricket. When I moved to New Zealand in 1982 I continued umpiring cricket at a premier club level in Auckland until my 20s, when I developed colitis. This got so bad that I couldn’t continue and eventually I needed surgery to remove my colon. Meanwhile, the TV networks here began to show weekly highlights of the NFL and, when satellite TV came to New Zealand, we got to see full NFL and college matches each week. By the time I was ready to take up my officiating career again I was hooked on the game and decided to give it a go. I have just completed my 17th season.

I love the game because, for the officials in any case, it’s surprisingly cerebral. The rules are intricate and require constant study. You work as a team and we all have our own responsibilities and zones of coverage. We therefore need to trust and rely on each other to do our jobs and there is a great sense of camaraderie among us. You make decisions on every play. If you detect an infraction of the rules you have to consider whether it gained an advantage or breached player safety before throwing a flag. I have tremendous respect for those officials working in the NFL and at the top levels of the NCAA, particularly the head linesmen and line judges. With the amount of information they must process on every play and the speed of the players it is incredible how accurate they are.

In New Zealand, we are desperate for gay and lesbian sporting role models at an elite level. Here, the All Blacks (our world champion national rugby team) are the gods of sport, but there has never been an out gay rugby player here at a provincial or national level, either active or retired. Our only out gay professional sportsman, Olympic Speed Skater Blake Skjellerup, does an amazing job of maintaining visibility and fronted an anti-bullying campaign here during his off-season break. He’s a great role model for young New Zealanders and hopefully will encourage other young sportspeople to be open about their sexuality.

I hope that in years to come in the so-called ‘macho’ sports like rugby, Rugby League, American Football and soccer we will see people coming out. There is the implication that you cannot participate in these sports if you are gay (English soccer has a particular problem with homophobia) but the coming out of Welsh rugby player Gareth Thomas, Welsh Rugby referee Nigel Owens and recently Australian Rugby League referee Matt Cecchin have shown that this is not the case. However, we need more pioneers and a concerted effort from those who run our sports to modify the behavior of the ignorant before we can no longer feel that a gay or lesbian player coming out is a newsworthy event.

Stephen can be reached via email at sbowness@ihug.co.nz.

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Dundes, who died in 2005, was a legend in the field of folklore and explored the hidden meaning in all kinds of jokes. I heard him speak while I was an undergrad at Penn State about his football as a homoerotic rite theory (having read the paper in my sociology class). In the audience were many members of the Penn State football team, many of whom had blood in their eyes as Dundes went on equating football slang with gay sex. The article in Time resulted in Dundes getting death threats. Dundes’ paper is a rollicking look at how closely football and its language and goals mirrors sex. Dundes quotes Dave Kopay (the first openly gay NFL player), who wrote this in his book, “The David Kopay Story.”

The whole language of football is involved in sexual allusions. We were told to go out and “fuck those guys”; to take that ball and stick it up their asses”or “down their throats.”The coaches would yell,”knock their dicks off,” or more often than that,”knock their jocks off.” They’d say,”Go out there and give it all you’ve got,a hundred and ten percent, shoot your wad. You controlled their line and “knocked” ‘em into submission. Over the years I’ve seen many a coach get emotionally aroused while he was diagramming a particular play into an imaginary hole on the blackboard. His face red, his voice rising, he would show the ball carrier how he wanted him to” stick it in the hole.”

Some of my favorites from Dundes’ paper (you can read the whole thing here):

• The object of the game, simply stated, is to  get into the opponent’s end zone while preventing the opponent from getting into one’s own end zone. … We can now better understand the appropriateness of the “bottom patting” so often observed among football players. A good offensive or defensive play deserves a pat on the rear end. The recipient has held up his end and has thereby helped protect the collective “end” of the entire team. One pats one’s teammates’ ends, but one seeks to violate the end zone of one’s opponents! …

• Certainly the terminology used in football is suggestive. One gains yardage,but it is not territory which is kept in the sense of being permanently acquired by the invading team.The territory invaded remains nominally under the proprietorship of the opponent. A sports announcer or fan might say, for example, “This is the deepest penetration into (opponent’s team name) territory so far.”

• The trust one has for one’s own teammates is perhaps signalled by the common postural stance of football players. The so-called three-point stance involves bending over in a distinct stooped position with one’s rear end exposed. It is an unusual position and it does make one especially vulnerable to attack from behind, that is,vulnerable to a homosexual attack. … Since one can trust one’s teammates, one knows that one will be patted, not raped.

• “The end zone is a kind of erogenous zone.”

• “Both tight end and split end could easily be understood as possessing an erotic nuance.”

• The object of the game is to “score,”a term which in standard slang means to engage in sexual intercourse with a member of the opposite sex. One “scores” by going” all the way.” The offensive team may try to mount a drive to penetrate the other team’s territory.

• The sexual connotations of football folk speech apply equally to players on defense. One goal of the defensive line is to penetrate the offensive line to get to the quarterback. Getting to the quarterback and bringing him down to the ground is termed “sacking” the quarterback. The verb “sack” connotes plunder, ravage, and perhaps even rape.

• Thus in the beginning of the football game, we have two sets or teams of males. By the end of the game, one of the teams is “on top,” namely the one which has “scored” most by getting into the other team’s “end zone.” The losing team, if the scoring differential is great, maybe said to have been “creamed.”

• I think it is highly likely that the ritual aspect of football, providing as it does a socially sanctioned framework for male body contact … is a form of homosexual behavior. The unequivocal sexual symbolism of the game, as plainly evidenced in folk speech coupled with the fact that all of the participants are male, make it difficult to draw any other conclusion. Sexual acts carried out in thinly disguised symbolic form by,and directed towards, males and males only,would seem to constitute ritual homosexuality.

After reading Dundes, you might never watch football the same way. Enjoy the game!

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Now calling himself ‘gay,’ Goddard ventured to the NOH8 campaign’s third anniversary party last week at the House of Blues on Sunset Blvd., where he was inspired to “activism of my own.” The result was this slam poem, titled ‘Yes we can but no we haven’t,‘ written by Goddard for a class project on marriage equality. He performed the poem at a Long Beach coffee house.

The kid’s got a fantastic message and some mega skeelz…

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Interestingly, Paris Jackson is also the name of a slotback for the BC Lions of the Canadian Football League.

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Alex Botina-Roehm, 18, was arrested Monday and is charged with hazing two students. His bail was set at just more than $100,000.

Court records say the hazing involved coming up from behind an intended target and placing one arm between the legs, wrapping the other arm around the body and lifting the victim off the ground.

The alleged incident happened in September Sept. 14 and was reported to school authorities, but a grandmother of one of the victims went to police last week after she learned nothing had been done to Roehm and similar hazing continued.

Detective Bruce McDermott said Wednesday police believe other football players likely participated in the same activity, called “power gobbling,” but in those cases it was done among friends and considered consensual.

This case was different because the alleged victim didn’t know the offender, McDermott told the Great Falls Tribune. “I guess that’s where it departed from fun among friends,” he said.

It sounds like the school basically did nothing to stop any of this despite serious charges being leveled against an athlete two months ago. The grandmother who called police has an email exchange where the coach promised a “come to Jesus talk” with the team. But the police report states that, “this has reportedly been going on for some time in the locker room, and Roehm and others seem to act freely without consequences.”

Hazing is dangerous and demeaning and needs to be stopped. There is never a justification for it since it involves the powerful preying on the weak; it’s not a harmless ritual or rite of passage and differs in degree and intent from practical jokes or teasing among teammates. A “boys will be boys” defense doesn’t cut it.

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It provided boxes for players to check next to wording such as “I am a cry baby,” “I am a queer,” “I have woman like hormones.”

At the bottom it had lines reading “Name little sissy filing report” and “Girly-man signature.”

Lynch apologized and the school board accepted his resignation as head coach, a job he held for 13 years. He will stay on as the school’s guidance counselor. Said Superintendent Rod Kessler:

“[Lynch] screwed up, he screwed up big time,” Kessler said. “The coaching, we didn’t want that to be the issue anymore. We wanted him to have his priority back where it was as a counselor. None of us are happy that it happened. It’s a black eye to the district. And it’s a black eye to Pat.”

The parent of one player was upset that Lynch apologized to the school board but not the players.  And some are upset that he stays on as guidance counselor, though the last thing I would want from someone with his views is guidance. His actions typify the stereotypes that are still perpetrated about what is means to be an athlete and masculine. They should have fired his ass.

Thanks to K2Radio.com (via a comment by reader Jason), here is the survey:

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My life has been told in a nutshell numerous times through various articles. But I never actually sat down and told my life in its entirety. Growing up in small town America is not an easy task. We’re always the last to get the new inventions like the internet, HDTV, and all of the other things.

Growing up in small town America we had backyard football, wiffle ball and baseball. I can’t recall a day we spent inside. When those sports got old, we re-invented new ones like backyard basketball where tackling was allowed, and BB gun wars. Granted, as I think back, BB gun wars was not a bright idea.

I remember it plain as day back in firth grade when he moved into my class. A new boy from Norristown PA, which is right outside of Philly. Mike and I hit it off right off the bat. Come to find out his future step mom and my mom worked together, so our families ended up becoming best of friends as well. Mike and I grew up as close as brothers can be. Where one was, the other was. We hunted, fished, played football and wrestled together.

I will never ever forget when we were both 13, up in his room playing bases loaded on SNEs when our cocky talk turned sexual. We both lost our virginity that day. Mike and I continued our love/brother relationship for over two years until he decided he was going to started doing the straight lifestyle and end all sexual relations between us. Naturally, once that was gone the brother relationship we once had started falling apart. The only time I ever slept with a girl was when Mike’s cousin came over, and I thought/felt like I had something to prove to Mike. That night I slept with a girl for the first and only time.  I knew then I was in deep trouble with my life.

When I got the Internet at the age of 17, I thought, OK this is going to give me access to what I have been seeking for a long time. Instead it backfired for me. What I was seeing was gay couples being happy and being able to be who they are. It had a total reverse effect on me, on what I hoped would open my mind. I knew in my mind I could not be what I saw in the images. Not where I was in life. Depression kept building and building until I could no longer take it. It’s kind of odd, that even after 14 years I can remember the night before, and the night of my suicide attempt, like it happened yesterday.

The night before, the wrestling team, which I quit the beginning of the year, named me honorary captain when we faced our rivals, the Canton Warriors. The following night I was swallowing pill after pill no longer wanting to live the lie that I had built. As I took the pills, one thing that entered my mind was not being able to see the Giants win another Super Bowl. Kind of odd how us jocks think. All I knew is the white picket fence fairytale dream wasn’t for me, and I had to end it.

Unfortunately that night I told some one in California what I was doing and he called 911. Those who know my story already know what happened that night.

Being shipped to a teen psych ward is some thing no one wants to have happen to them. I had one thing working for me though: The other teens woke up that morning to know that a new kid arrived during the night.

I was in survival mode. I had played the part as the perfect jock for way to many years. I could fool these guys as well, I thought. And I did. Donning my letterman jacket, I started flirting with every girl in there. I was not ready to face my biggest fear. But I failed at my attempt to hide whom I was, so it was time to make the best out of it. Most of the staff that worked nights were Penn State college girls. They often flirted with me, and I flirted back. In my mind I was going to make it through this and everything would be fine. Little did I know…

I remember speaking to Mike that first night I got home from the psych ward. He was hesitant to tell me: Kyle had told the whole school about me being gay. Mike also told me that no one cared. He was worried about me: Mike wanted the best for his brother, but he knew my fate was sealed.

You can find Greg Congdon on Facebook.

Part 2 of his story will be published on Outsports next week.

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