From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 16 Aug 1996 11:45:21 -0400

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NEWS YOU DIDN'T SEE ON TV

A commentary by Patricia Nell Warren                      
7/26/96

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GAY PIONEERING  IN SPORTS
By Patricia Nell Warren

Let the Games begin!  And let the gay pioneers in sports not be forgotten!
As America glues itself to the TV, ten percent of that 20-percent drop in 
video rentals is due to non-straight fascination with all things athletic. 

Many people think of the first Gay Games  in 1978 as the "beginning" of 
gay athletes coming out.  Not so.  In 1969, as one of the first woman 
marathoners and an AAU official, I saw gay male, lesbian and bisexual 
athletes already taking their first reckless peeps out of the closet. 

Gay liberation in sports was a natural spinoff of the rebellions against 
overweening constraint and authority that had marked the Sixties.
Previously, there were the lone individuals -- like golfer Babe Didrickson --

whose looks or lifestyle hinted "queer".   But by the late '60s, in sports 
where individualism was tolerated,  our brothers and sisters were inching 
towards a bolder visibility.

Long-distance running certainly qualified  as a "individualist sport." 
 It was still shunned by many coaches and officials, who deemed it 
dangerous to health.  While track stars had to be monkish in 
everything from dress to sex life, long-distance runners took every 
opportunity to thumb their noses at the sports establishment.  Males 
toed  the starting  line in hippie headbands and (shudder) long hair.  
Many  women competed bra-less.  Everybody gossiped endlessly about 
sex, and its effect on performance.  Traditional hetero machismo and 
sexism was refreshingly absent  -- male and female distance runners 
trained together, competed together, even shared locker rooms.   In 
short, our sport was wildly inclusive.The long asphalt roads where we 
raced were relentlessly level as social playing fields. 

So distance running was one of the first sports where  pairs of women, 
and pairs of men, made themselves more visible.  They weren't "out," 
in the sense that we understand today. But they openly wore that 
different sexual vibe around them.  "Vibe" was that  Sixties word 
about energies being sent between the lines. I wasn't out myself, then.  
But I knew what I was, and I knew what I was vibing in others.  

There's no doubt that the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion impacted the
sports world.  If drag queens had the guts to engage in hand-to-hand combat
with the New York City police (it was reasoned)  then jocks had better catch
up to the queens in showing guts.

Indeed, by 1969, a  transgender issue entered sports, when  the
International Olympic Committee demanded chromosome testing for 
women. Their aim:  to screen out females who had anything but a "normal" XX
sex-chromosome configuration.  (The fact that some men also have extra sex
chromosomes seems not to have occurred to the IOC).

Through the early '70s, as a reporter for Runner's World, 
I vibed out runners, officials and coaches, and had cautious
off-the-record talks with some.  For example, one evening in late 
1972, a young guy buttonholed me at a Road Runners Club party in 
Manhattan.  Maybe he vibed that  I was safe to talk to.  He shared
the heartbreak of being gay and a gifted athlete -- he was an NCAA 
national track champion. He'd had to choose, he said.  Be out and
lose his shot at a medal, or be in the closet and stay on his university
 team.  So he'd opted to come out.  Now the only place he could run, 
and be accepted, was in long distance.    

That this conversation spurred publication of my 1974 novel about 
homosexuals in sports is only part of the story. 

As the 1970s passed, we became visible in other sports.  In show
jumping (which I also knew), a few horse-owners and amateur riders 
were rather openly out.  In Canada while booktouring
for "The Front Runner", I met the gay jockey who had the racetracks 
in an uproar.In 1976, the subject finally exploded into national profile
when the Washington Post published its series on real-life gays in 
sports.  With time, we  heard about umpire Dave Pallone, football player 
Dave Kopay, many women golfers and tennis players. Eventually
there was Greg Louganis.

Olympian athlete Tom Waddell was a pioneer who knew that 
homosexuality sometimes steps secretly onto the victors' podium.  
When Waddell launched the Gay Games, it was an idea whose time 
had come.

Today, international stars  like Rudy Galindo stand on the peak
of a pyramid of visibility.  Beneath them, and supporting them, are all 
those hundreds of thousands of athletes, officials and coaches, going 
back over decades.  Most of their  names have never been in print.  
They include a pair of grinning girls who held hands as they crossed
the finish line of the first New York Marathon in 1972.  All of them, idols 
and also-rans, were bringing in a new age of athletic -- and 
sexual -- discovery.

Copyright (c) 1996 by Patricia Nell Warren.  All rights reserved.

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