Why Professional Sports Still Has a Gay Problem
In the depths of Tropicana Field – between the Tampa Bay Rays and San Francisco Giants clubhouse and below a sea of more than 40,000 fans – a United States military veteran approached Billy Bean.
Major League Baseball’s ambassador for inclusion, Bean was talking to people all night the evening of June 17th. He threw out the first pitch, a fastball right down the middle. He watched Tampa Bay fill up the stadium for the first time in six years, all on its Pride Night. He shook hands with everyone: players, coaches, front office and fans.
It was five days after the mass shooting in Orlando that left 50 people dead. A baseball stadium filled with rainbows in all different forms, the evening functioned as something far more meaningful than a Rays-Giants game. A pregame tribute played on the stadium’s scoreboard, with every person silently standing — some with tears visibly streaming down their cheeks.
On a night filled with emotion, the veteran who approached Bean after his first pitch gave him an American flag that he’d received on a tour of duty in Afghanistan.
“He was very, very emotional,” Bean tells Rolling Stone. “He just wanted to say thank you. He said that he was bullied in ways in the military that scarred him. It’s so humbling that, in a way, I feel like I am a public servant.”
Bean, a gay former Major League Baseball player, has spent the past 15 days traveling around the country, helping to educate MLB‘s 30 teams on the LGBT community. When this tragedy affected so many, sports helped people come together. The Rays raised $300,000 from ticket sales for the Pulse Victims Fund. The fact that more than 40,000 people showed up, paying $5 a ticket, when the Rays typically average 16,000 during games, could be seen as a sign that they tapped into a need for community that transcends baseball.
When it comes to the sports world connecting itself and fully embracing the LGBT community, however, not all teams and not all leagues are equal. And in the wake of the Orlando massacre, that became increasingly apparent. While MLB held a moment of silence in each of its stadiums, the NFL took 12 days to acknowledge the attacks – and still didn’t mention the fact that many of the victims identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual or trans. During Sunday’s LGBT Pride Parade in New York City, the NBA and WNBA became the first professional sports leagues to march in the annual event, and NBA commissioner Adam Silver and NBA deputy commissioner Mark Tatum wore #OrlandoUnited T-shirts. The NHL, on the other hand, never gave an official statement.
Though teams and leagues may be taking positive steps in their support and connection to the LGBT community, there has been an apparent hesitancy to use associating language with the community that was targeted on the early morning hours of June 12th.
Athlete Ally founder Hudson Taylor sees it as a breakdown that starts at the top of the organization. “When you have the worst mass shooting in modern history taking place, and you have LGBT fans as your constituents “and you are in the state of Florida, and you are not being vocally and visibly in support of the community in this time of need, that is a failure of leadership.”
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