Basketball's 4ft 10in Ally

Every summer I work basketball camps with roughly 2k teenage boys. One afternoon it began raining men, cats, and dogs. I was trapped in the IM gym for two hours with 250 rambunctious, hungry, and impatient youth.

I set up camp to guard the exit, but the twelve-year-old inmates were already running the asylum. Over time, kids bored of shooting hoops and circled their own wagons to mingle. The conversation was earth shattering. Topics covered the superiority of different 6^th grade AAU teams and the hotness of middle school English teachers. The convo volleyed back and forth, and eventually the inevitable that’s so gay, fairy, and fag comments were kicked around.

Usually I try to pull a Barry and come off as staying above the political fray, but the conversation was rapidly devolving and these closeted Elton fans needed my help. Just as I began to open my mouth, a shy kid in the corner spoke up.

“There’s nothing wrong with being gay.”

Of course Dweedle Fairy and Dweedle Fag retorted with, “Ew, are you gay?”

“No, but I know people who are. Love involves passions, feelings, and emotions that all people can share. Who really cares if it’s a guy or a girl? Just because you may not like something doesn’t mean it’s stupid or wrong.”

Silence followed.

And then conversation picked back up about a kid’s new Kobe basketball shoes.

This young lad’s stoic defense of LGBT rights won’t change the world overnight. Numerous kids around that conversation were probably sitting on their hands, uncomfortable with what was being said. But I’m encouraged by the fact that no one challenged his assertion. It t’was genuinely nice to see a status quo of tolerance and acceptance laid out on the table and generally accepted. And this was within a group of teenagers where sticking out your neck is harder than endorsing climate change in a GOP primary.

Talk about feel good story of the summer.

Except for one thing.

Our twelve year old ally is a white kid from affluent Chapel Hill, the kid who repeatedly tossed around fag is from rural Mississippi, and the that’s so gay kid is African American and from inner city Philly.

Tackling homophobia in sport and society is an uphill but winnable fight. Personally, to become better equipped to wage this battle, I need to better understand the intersection of sexuality with age, race, gender, and socioeconomic status.

LGBTQ Female Role Models: Sheryl Swoopes

Hey! So I know we're still trying to keep the blog active this summer (if you want to write, talk to Risa!), so I thought I'd talk about a wonderful LGBTQ female role model who has been in the news a little bit lately!

When legendary basektball player Sheryl Swoopes came out in 2005, she was the second WNBA player to do so in history.

Over the course of her career, Swoopes has won 3 Olympic gold medals, is a 3-time WNBA MVP, 4-time WNBA Champion and a 3-time winner of the WNBA Defensive Player of the Year award. The player who has been referred to as "the female Michael Jordan" (or maybe Michael Jordan is just the "male Sheryl Swoopes"), she is most famous for her 10-year career with the Houston Comets, and has also played for the Seattle Storm (2008). Most recently, in March of 2011, at the age of 40, Swoopes returned to the sport after a hiatus due to injuries, to play with the Tulsa Shock.

In regards to her sexuality, Swoopes says, "it doesn't change who I am. I can't help who I fall in love with. No one can. ... Discovering I'm gay just sort of happened much later in life. Being intimate with [Alisa, her partner] or any other woman never entered my mind. At the same time, I'm a firm believer that when you fall in love with somebody, you can't control that." Nevertheless, Swoopes doesn't want her LGBTQ identity to become her only identity that people acknowledge: "I don't want people to just focus on me coming out and that part of my life, because there are so many other aspects to who I am. As a strong, black, female athlete, and as a single parent, there are so many different parts of my life that could really influence someone else's life."

In a 2006 interview with ESPN, Swoopes explained why she came later on in her career, rather than earlier: "It's not something that I want to throw in people's faces. I'm just at a point in my life where I'm tired of having to pretend to be somebody I'm not. I'm tired of having to hide my feelings about the person I care about. About the person I love." She also mentions that she didn't always identify as a queer woman: "I didn't always know I was gay. I honestly didn't. Do I think I was born this way? No. And that's probably confusing to some, because I know a lot of people believe that you are. I've been married, and I have an 8-year-old son. Being with a man was what I wanted. When I got divorced in 1999, it wasn't because I'm gay. I'm three years older than my ex-husband, and I matured a lot faster than he did."

When Swoopes went on a cruise with Olivia crusies in 2005, a LGBTQ women's cruise line, she was approached by the CEO, Amy Errett, and asked if she would like to become the face of Olivia cruises, to which she agreed: "Amy came out to L.A. when the Comets were playing the Sparks, and we talked. She asked if I would be the face of Olivia. I was like, 'Wow, that's big.' Martina Navratilova endorses Olivia. Rosie Jones endorses Olivia. But I had to think about it. A few days later, I called Amy back and said yes. It's funny, when I booked the Olivia cruise I didn't even think about people seeing my name on this list full of lesbians. I guess I didn't care. I just felt like, if I'm going to do the cruise and I'm going to be the face of Olivia, why not just come all out? I mean, you have Ellen DeGeneres and Rosie O'Donnell, but you don't have your well-known gay African-American who's come out. Not to my knowledge. I know it's not accepted in the black community. I know I'll probably take a lot of flak. But in all honesty, that's not my biggest concern."

(Swoopes with her partner of 13 years, Alisa Scott)

In addition to being an advocate for LGBTQ individuals in sports, she is also an advocate for changing the face of women in sports leadership positions: "There is definitely a need for good female coaches. In the WNBA and in college, I see teams leaning towards former NBA players — and men in general — as coaches, and that is a slap in the face, because there are so many quality, qualified females out there that should be given the opportunity to coach." She is also an advocate for the American Lung Association and most recently has become a role model for her come-back to the sport at the age of 40, earlier this year: "I may be older, but the competitive fire is still there and I'm excited about the possibilities. The only reason why I'm doing it is because I still love the game. There was the misconception out there that I retired after the 2008 season, but that was never the case. I wasn't done with basketball yet, and I'm still not done."

Athlete Comes Out as a Man; Plays Collegiate Women's Basketball

Every other Thursday I will be writing about LGBT Issues in Sport. Between each regularly scheduled post I may chime in with more posts if something comes up and/or I have the time. I have a serious academic interest in sport and in this column I’ll be highlighting current events, sharing resources, reflecting on complex issues and sharing athlete’s stories among other things. For more about me, you can read my first post, here. Please feel free to email me with thoughts or if you come across something you’d like me to include on the blog.

Informally called “The Center” by frequenters, the official name for the space below The Loop is The Center for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Life. That said, our trans community, while several students have submitted anonymous posts, doesn’t get a lot of attention here on the blog. Some events of the last week and other upcoming events make now as good a time as any to talk about what it means to identify as trans within the realm of sports. Consider these next few posts to be a mini-series.

The sports world operates largely operates along gendered lines, which can make it an unwelcoming place for people who don’t fit snugly into the boxes of male, female, man, woman, male=man and female=woman (you follow that?). [In this way, the issue of binaries in the sports world doesn’t just affect trans people—it also applies to intersexed individuals.]

Last week, outsports, a site which focuses on LGBTQ issues in sport, broke Kye Allums’s story. Since then, it's been picked up by a lot of other news outlets. Kye is a junior starter on the George Washington Women’s Basketball Team and he is a (trans)man.* As such, he is the first publicly out Division 1 transgender athlete.

He explained that he “always felt more comfortable dressing like a boy,” and even went through great lengths to do this. [His mom forced him to wear “girl clothes” to school, so he would change into sweats and basketball shorts when he arrived and then back into his other clothes before he left to go back home.] Despite this feeling, Kye didn’t identify as a man or as transgendered. In fact, he said he “used to feel like trans anything was really weird and those people were crazy, and [he] wondered, ‘How can you feel like that?’” Finding that the lesbians at his high school acted and dressed similarly, he identified as a lesbian for several years. During his first year at GW, however, his mother sent him a text message that asked him “Who do you think you are, young lady?” Reading this text message, he realized it was "simple:" he wasn’t woman.

After coming out to teammates a year ago and eventually talking with his coach (this summer), Kye publically came out as a man last week. Coming out to teammates, his coaches, or the rest of the world wasn’t his original plan, but when “it got too tough to not be [him],” he decided to move forward with the process. From all accounts that I’ve read, the university has done a tremendous job in supporting Kye. When he first told his coach, his coach responded by saying “Why would you think I wouldn’t have your back? I’ve had your back through everything. Our relationship has grown from nothing to this, and now you think I’d just turn my back on you because you told me this? No. I love you and I’ll always be here for you.” His coach has since released a statement saying that “The George Washington University women’s basketball program, including myself, support Kye’s right to make this decision.” The team’s co-captain has also issued supportive statements, praising Kye’s “courage and fortitude.”

Kye’s experiences illustrate the “small things” that a school can do to be supportive and create an affirming environment for a trans-identified student athlete without breaking any NCAA rules (ie: testosterone is a banned substance, so they can’t ‘legally’ permit Kye to begin hormone treatments**). For one thing, the team website lists him as, and he will be announced as, Kye —not Kay-Kay, the name he used to go by. His teammates and coaches use male pronouns while all future press releases (ie: post game notes, etc) will also use male pronouns. Those issues may seem small compared to the physical components of transitioning, but for someone who is putting off taking hormones until he’s finished playing and may not undergo surgery until then, either—they make all the difference. “A name is just a bunch of letters, but the letters make up a work and the words that make up my name have so many more emotions behind them. My old name, that’s just not me. When I hear Kye, everything feels okay, everything is right.”

GW officially opens their season on Sunday against Wisconsin Green Bay, just 30 minutes from Kye's hometown.

*In one account, Kye explicitly identified as a “transgender male,” though other reports explain that he sees himself simply as a man and not “female-to-male.”

**In general, student-athletes may receive approval to take typically “banned substances” by having their doctors fill out certain forms. However, it remains unclear if the testosterone levels taken by a transgender individual would be permitted, even with proper documentation.

A Rarity in Women's Basketball; Duke Leads the Way

I have a serious academic interest in sport and in this column I’ll be highlighting current events, sharing resources, reflecting on complex issues and sharing athlete’s stories among other things. For more about me, you can read my first post, here. Please feel free to email me with thoughts or if you come across something you’d like me to include on the blog.

Basketball season starts this week. Friday, to be exact. That's tomorrow, for those of you thrown off by fall break starting our week on a Wednesday. For most Duke students, that probably means attending Countdown to Craziness, painting our faces in blue and white, losing our voices and engaging in traditional cheers all for the first time this year (or if you’re a first year, your first time ever). If you’re a manager for one of the basketball teams, it means working a three hour practice (which means working for at least four hours, mind you), filling up more water cups, chasing down and rebounding more balls, wiping up more sweat, and resetting the shot clock more times than you have during the previous four weeks of preseason work outs. And if you happen to play basketball for Duke, it means surrenduring your soul social life for the remainder of the school year (and you thought the school year just started!).

So, what’s that have to do with anything? Well, every so often Duke Women’s Basketball releases a question and answer style update on the life of a former player. Most (though not all) of these “Catching Up” pieces ask a question about the alumna’s spouse and kids. It’s a pretty heteronormative question and I always wondered if they only asked it of straight athletes (I sort of figured that they only asked it if they knew that person was in fact married, though I don’t know this for a fact). But what about a player who was in a committed same-sex partnership? Would Duke Women’s Basketball ask former players they knew to have a partner about this aspect of their lives, the same as they ask their straight counterparts? Or would it be a matter of reporting on the relationships of the straight athletes while simply not reporting on the “love lives” of any LGB-identified former players, thereby ignoring any same-sex relationships?

My skepticism isn’t unfounded. Women’s basketball—both the professional and collegiate ranks—along with other women’s sports—has a sort of complicated relationship with the LGBTQ community. The WNBA, for instance, is notorious for highlighting on their website and during telecasts the weddings, kids and spouses of straight players while never mentioning the commitment ceremonies and partners of LGB-identified players. This is a different issue than the internal culture of teams—though they’re not necessarily totally unrelated to one another. But as advertising/fan outreach goes—it’s rare to see coverage of an LGB-identified athlete which acknowledges their sexuality. I want to recognize that it’s possible that this lack of coverage is at the request of the athlete, but I have a hard time believing that every athlete falls into this category [especially considering that it occasionally comes up in other, non league/team related publications, but then is never highlighted on that league’s/team’s website, the way that other news releases and articles are indexed]. This isn't unique unto the WNBA. It's the story across the board.

Well, I’m here to applaud Duke Women’s Basketball, GoDuke.com and Nicole Erickson! This June, Duke Sports Information posted a question and answer feature called “Catching up with Former Hoops Player Nicole Erickson.” In her interview, Erickson mentions her partner of nine years multiple times!

When GoDuke asked her “Do you have a spouse and children?” She answered that “I have been in a nine-year relationship and we have two weimeraner dog kids :) Gracie and Guinness…” Earlier in the interview she mentioned that she and her partner are partial owners of two restaurants. Check out the full interview here.

Erickson played for Duke during the 1997-1998 and 1998-1999 seasons after transferring from Purdue (along with fellow former Boilermaker Michele VanGorp [also openly gay]) following the 1995-1996 season (she sat out during the 1996-1997 season per NCAA rules). She helped lead the team to its first Final Four and championship game appearances in 1999 (to get there, Duke defeated three-time-defending Champion Tennessee) and was named to the Final Four All-Tournament Team. [Side note: Duke played Purdue, Erickson and VanGorp's former school, in the championship game.] She was also named to the all-regional (NCAA tournament) teams during 1998 and 1999. During the 1998-1999 season, Erickson was tabbed ACC player of the week on at least two occasions and was an All-ACC selection each of the two years that she played in a Duke jersey. At the time she graduated, she held the school record for number of three pointers in one game (7) and the number of three pointers in a season (62) [ten years later, she is tied for record for number of three point field goals in one game and is fourth in number of three point field goals made in a season]. During her Duke career she shot 88.0% from the free throw line, which is still the best in ACC history and her 32 consecutive FTs (in 1999) is still the longest FT streak in Duke history.

I've detailed some of the complexities between women's sports and the LGBTQ community in other posts (Elena Kagan comes to mind) and could probably write a lot more about it than what I'll say here. Despite all of the complexities between women's sports and the LGBTQ community, though, there are promising signs of a time when women's sports won't feel like it can't talk about LGBTQ individuals in sport. I'm proud that Duke is already moving in that direction.

The season starts Friday and Duke Women's Basketball has more to be proud of than the fact that the team's five first years make up the top-ranked freshman class in the country, Jasmine Thomas continues to rack up the honors (named a preseason first team All-American and to the watch lists for the Wade Trophy and Wooden Award) and national publications rank the Blue Devils as high as sixth (and as low as eighth) in the country (though, those are pretty awesome accomplishments, too).

[Author's note: In the interest of transparency, I spent my freshman year as a manager for the women’s basketball team and have since resumed my responsibilities after not holding the job last year. Also, thank you to Duke Sports Information for providing me with accurate up-to-date statistics on Erickson's career.]