With March
Madness basketball championships almost a week away, and the Olympics slated
for this summer, 2016 is turning out to be a busy year for sports fans, but
there is concern that straight enthusiasts are still having a better time at
the game than their queer friends.
A recent study conducted by the Bingham Cup (the world
cup of gay rugby) in collaboration with Penn State, University of
Massachusetts, and several other colleges in the US, Canada, and Australia,
found that an alarming 83% of Americans don’t believe that a LGBTQ person is
safe as an open spectator at a sporting event.
Last week, The Economist hosted
Pride and Prejudice: The Cost of LGBT Discrimination, an event about LGBTQ
diversity in sports. Speakers included former college wrestler Hudson Taylor, whospoke against homophobia in the pages of Out,
and Jason Collins, the first basketball player to come out as
gay.
Taylor and
Collins discussed issues of LGBTQ inclusion in sports, including the progress
they're witnessing since Collins's coming out, in 2013. The former NBA player
thinks there are more gay and lesbian players of racial minorities in sports
leagues than what we might expect:
“I talk to a
lot of athletes, playing either pro or at the collegiate level who haven’t come
out yet," Collins said. "Now there’s an out referee in the NBA, [Bill
Kennedy] who is African American. It’s great when you see more and more people
step forward to live their authentic lives.”
Taylor, who
develops educational campaigns for LGBTQ inclusion in sports through his
organization, Athlete
Ally, had similar feelings. “We need to redefine the dominant identity of
the sports audience,” he said. “We need to get more allies to be vocal and
speak out. Allyship needs to be intersectional, and context matters. Homophobia
is a weapon of sexism, gender, race, religion. These are all things that are
compounding factors to discrimination that already exists.”
That’s why
Taylor developed the #Everyfan campaign, to encourage fans and teams to create
an environment that is open and welcoming to LGBTQ fans.
In a similar
vein, Collins added: “If you see something, you have to say something,”
especially when it comes to the use of homophobic language on the sports field,
in the bleachers, or in the locker room. “Try to come to an understanding of
why a person uses inappropriate words, and explain to them how that word can
have an impact on someone who is LGBTQ.”
It's about time
to change the rules of the game so LGBTQ sports fans and athletes can get equal
respect, in and out of the stadium.
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