Women's Olympic basketball players hope for more LGBT acceptance in NBA
RIO DE JANEIRO – Less than a week after the subtle revelation that WNBA MVP Elena Delle Donne is gay -- the third paragraph of an Aug. 4 story in Vogue magazine that didn’t even mention the news in the headline -- the story had all but died.
There were no follow-ups about how her Chicago Sky teammates might handle the situation when the Rio Olympics end or what it might mean for the LGBT community. This is nothing new in women’s basketball, where coming out is common and acceptance widespread.
Jason Collins becoming the first active NBA player to come out more than three years ago – and the only one since – this was not.
So after answering a few questions from reporters at the start of the Games, Delle Donne went back to the challenge of winning a gold medal with the Americans in her inaugural trip to the Games.
“It’s been normal,” Delle Donne said this week. “Nothing crazy. Obviously a couple of people wanting to talk about it here and there. A lot of support. It’s been really nothing too crazy, which is great. That’s where I hope our society moves to, where it’s not a story. It’s normal.
“I would love to see that (sort of support in the NBA), if there are any (gay men). No one should have to hide who they are.”
Yet as it stands, it appears they still do.
While the NBA is progressive on this front – reconfirmed recently when it decided to move the All Star game out of Charlotte because of a North Carolina law that eliminated some protections for the LGBT community – the fact remains that no player since Collins has felt comfortable enough to come out. And that, as their female counterparts see it, is something that needs to change not only in basketball but men’s sports across the board.
“I would love to see more (come out) on the men’s side, more players feel comfortable to come out,” said Phoenix Mercury star Brittney Griner, the former No. 1 pick who came out in an April 2013 Sports Illustrated article that was met with similar shrugs. “But I also understand it because as a player, I’ve been that person where it’s really hard to come out. It’s super hard. You’re just not comfortable with it. You’re worried about not being accepted, being rejected, being cast out. It’s tough. It’s really tough.”
While projections vary greatly on the percentage of gay men in the population worldwide, the odds are that there are somewhere between a handful and at least a few dozen gay NBA players among the 450 total. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated in recent years that approximately 2% of American men are gay, but 10% has long since become the unofficial standard estimate. In between, a 2012 Gallup poll indicated that 3.3% of more-than-1,200 subjects interviewed said they identified as gay, bi-sexual or transgender. As Charles Barkley put it in a May 2013 interview, “Everybody (in the NBA) has played with a gay teammate.”
Yet it seems as if Collins (who retired 18 months after coming out) and former Utah Jazz player John Amaechi (who came out long after retirement) were the only ones to fit the description since the league’s inception in 1946. Meanwhile, there are four openly gay players on the women’s basketball Olympic team alone: Delle Donne, Griner, Seimone Augustus of the Minnesota Lynx, and Angel McCoughtry of the Atlanta Dream.
Their basketball worlds couldn’t be more different.
“That’s a subject that is so taboo in men’s sports, (where) if you bring up anything gay they run out of the room like it’s a virus,” said Diana Taurasi, the Phoenix Mercury guard. “I feel like that’s just something that as you grow up, as you mature, those are the things that you accept as a human being that people are different. Whether it’s sexuality, whether it’s race, whether it’s religion, as you get older and as you become a smarter person, you’d think you would look at things differently.
“I think maybe (the problem is) education, and I think it’s maturity. I think our league has really grown in that way, and in a lot of ways. Obviously Jason, what he did was monumental, but there’s a long ways to go.”
The NBA has made its pro-LGBT stance clear. In the wake of the June 12 shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., commissioner Adam Silver and deputy commissioner Mark Tatum joined WNBA Commissioner Lisa Borders in the New York City pride parade in early June. Until then, a pro sports organization had never had a float in the parade. More often, however, league support has been shown through disciplinary measures.
There have been hefty fines for players like Kobe Bryant and Joakim Noah who hurled homophobic slurs at officials and fans. Last season, Sacramento Kings point guard Rajon Rondo was suspended for one game after in-game insults toward official Billy Kennedy ultimately led to him coming out.
Verdicts from the league office are one thing. Real change in the locker room is quite another.
“It’s more about stigmas than anything else, and I think with those stigmas you have people who are going to be judged,” said Sue Bird of the Seattle Storm. “I think on the men’s side, they’re not quite there yet. Jason Collins, for him to do that, particularly in the basketball world, he was the one who kind of broke down the barrier. And maybe in the future, it’ll change. But I think right now there’s still that stigma. I would love for it to change, because it’s really not that big of a deal in all reality.
“The NBA moving the All-Star game was a tremendous stand. It’s about the NBA having that platform to create change that needs to be created.”
Which means it’s about education. For the last three years, the league’s Rookie Transition program has included a session on this topic led by Collins and Hudson Taylor, founder and executive director of Athlete Ally. According to its website, the nonprofit organization “provides public awareness, campaigns, educational programming and tools and resources to foster inclusive sports communities.”
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Taurasi, and many others, remain skeptical real change and inclusion will come.
“Probably not,” she said to that question. “I mean (being gay) is just taboo. It’s something that I feel like a lot of those guys think is a weakness, and they look down upon it. That’s a lot of upbringing. A lot of that is religion, so I think once they get past those things maybe in the future.
“It must be hard for them to know that they walk into the locker room having to put a façade on every day. I think one day, like (former University of Missouri football player) Michael Sam did, like Jason did, like a lot of the players in our league have done, it won’t be talked about. It will just be like anything else.”
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