In Aussie slang, calling someone a poof is the equivalent of calling someone a faggot, and that is exactly what Australian tennis star Lleyton Hewitt did last month during the Davis Cup after getting into an argument with an umpire over a line call.

With that comment, Hewitt earns his place among a growing list of professional athletes who regularly make disparaging remarks about gays in the realm of professional sports.

It is important to acknowledge that this is an article specifically looking at the experience of gay men in sports, because the experience with homophobia is very different for male and female athletes. Words like “fag” and “dyke” – both of which are meant to be an insult to the athlete’s masculinity or femininity, as the case may be – are commonplace in sports today, and are probably the last acceptable epitaphs that can be used.

In addition to being an assault on their masculinity, male athletes are commonly criticized by being called a fag, implying that they are less of a man on the field and not capable of competing at the skill level. The question is, how do these slurs influence closeted gay athletes in the world of sports, and for young men, do these words enforce a stereotype that you can’t be gay and play sports?

It seems that on a more than regular basis, one news outlet or another reports on professional athletes who call another player or coach a fag, or who has spoken disparagingly about gay people (see sidebar, page 41, for a few illustrious examples). However, many athletes at all levels of play (high school, collegiate and professional) are supportive of gay teammates and have positive views of gays in sports.

“How many times do you hear on ESPN that an athlete came out and made a pro-gay statement? … You don’t,” said Dr. Eric Anderson, a researcher and lecturer of sociology at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. “You don’t hear a reporter cover that because that is not news. Not having a problem is the common attitude in major league baseball and the NFL. The number of people who made positive statements about Billy Bean when he came out were in the dozens, and you didn’t hear about it anywhere but in Billy Bean’s book.”

Anderson is widely considered an expert in the field of gay athletes and homophobia in sports. He holds a bachelor’s degree in health science and physical education, master’s degrees in sports psychology and sociology, and a doctorate in sociology from the University of California, Irvine.

Prior to lecturing on issues pertaining to sport, gender, sexuality and homophobia, Anderson became the first openly gay high school coach when he came out to his track team at Huntington Beach High School in the early 1990s.

“My research shows that homophobia at all levels – high school, college and professional – is decreasing rapidly,” Andersen said. “The support for gay teammates is increasing rapidly, and the support for gay teammates is somewhere around 75 percent.”

Much of this change in attitude about gays in sports is being led by today’s young athletes, who have grown up in a world where being gay in general is more culturally acceptable. And while there are currently no out members on a major professional sports team, athletes are coming out at the high school and collegiate level more and more often.

While much of the search for an openly gay athlete is focused on the celebrated pro sports arena, Anderson pointed out, “There are only 3,500 positions in team pro sports … I think it’s so interesting that we are concerned about such a small segment of the population … We take the smallest sample of the most elite sports and use that as an example.”

It is indeed a small sample compared to the hundreds of thousands of high school and collegiate athletes that are competing in sports, and it’s no wonder that organizations like the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is leading the way to make changes in people’s perceptions about gays in sports.

In 2002 the NCAA began to address the topic of homophobia in sports at its national convention and during educational sessions at its annual leadership conference. The NCAA also made revisions to diversity training seminars to include sexuality. All of this was done in response to student athletes’ concerns over hostility toward gays and lesbians, and demeaning language directed at them that was routinely heard on school campuses. It was the first time that the NCAA addressed the issue of homophobia in sports in its 90-year history.

“Number one [the steps that the NCAA has started to take] are long overdue,” said Dave Lohse, associate athletic communications director at the University of North Carolina. “At least it’s a start. Is it where it needs to be yet? I don’t know.”

Lohse is one of the highest-ranking openly gay men in college athletics these days, and is proud to point out that the students around his office consider him the de facto source on the topic.

“They call me the Mecca for any media request that involves the two words ‘sports’ and ‘gay’ together,” Lohse said. “They’re really cool about it. Some of them think it’s actually cool that I am out as I am, and willing to be as political as I tend to be.”

Lohse regularly speaks with groups about issues concerning gays and lesbians in sports, and has written several editorials on the topic for the NCAA newsletter. He came out in 1992, 15 years after he began working in the Tar Heels athletic department.

“Coming out wasn’t that big of a deal in terms of things that were said to me directly that were negative,” Lohse said. “People didn’t do it for the most part because they knew it wouldn’t be cool, because I had been here a long time. People knew that I was good at what I did, and I had built up enough friends in the department that [it] would not have been looked on in a positive way.”

Lohse even had the support of John Swofford, the UN athletic director at the time, and assumed that he would be leading the way for other people in athletics administration to come out. But very few people have followed him out of the closet.

“Is there a lot of innate homophobia in sports? Clearly there is,” Lohse said. “Probably more than exists in the world of theater and the arts, education, business and government, even in this day and age. Is there a lot of homophobia in sports? Yes, I’m not foolish enough to say there isn’t.”

However, researchers are quick to point out that all of this is changing at a rapid rate, as student athletes who face homophobia and sexual orientation issues on a daily basis take up the cause.

“The most significant thing is that the nature of masculinity is changing rapidly, both for homosexual and heterosexual individuals. Incredibly rapidly,” Anderson said, talking about attitudes on gays in general, and in regard to sports. “The homophobia component of being a man is dropping out of the equation. Being a man used to mean you were homophobic … It used to mean that a gay man was a pariah and that those around him would be considered guilty by association. That component is dropping out.”

With the MTV generation that has grown up exposed to gays in the media, on TV and even in their own schools, there is hope that things are starting to change. And the NCAA’s policies will help both athletes and coaches create a more tolerant environment.

“I think kids today – and this is why I am hopeful for the future – it’s less and less of an issue for them,” Lohse said. “It’s less and less of something they’re scared of or threatened by, and as these kids grow older – and that’s where your next generation of athletes become coaches and people who take athletic administration jobs – they are coming in there with different mind sets about how people should be treated.”

Even the nature of athletes coming out is changing, as more and more athletes begin to feel comfortable with talking about their sexual orientation with teammates.

“The first wave of gay athletes to come out of the closet were very good,” Anderson said about his research findings. “They were the best on their teams. Statistically speaking, it was highly improbable that what I found was random. Basically, all of the athletes I talked to between 1998 and 2002 were the best on the teams.”

These athletes have become the poster children for gay athletes, and have been profiled in a variety of gay publications. Corey Johnson made headlines across the country in 2000 when he came out to his high school football team. Mike Crosby, the openly gay captain of the Harvard water polo team, was featured on the cover of Genre magazine in 2002, and in the same year, the Gay & Lesbian Times profiled Shawn Hiatt, a member of the San Diego State tennis team who was preparing to pursue a career on the European pro tennis circuit.

In the 2002 interview with the Gay & Lesbian Times, Hiatt said, “I came out to the coach right away, who said, ‘I’m a real strong Christian guy, but I believe in treating others as you would be treated and not being judgmental, and if any of the other guys give you any crap, I’m not going to take it, so let me know.’ He told me that on my recruiting trip right away, so I had that backing. I had the support of the entire team.”

Hiatt said that the supportive coaching and team environment not only made his career at SDSU more enjoyable, it allowed him to focus on the game and not on his sexuality.

Anderson noted, however, that the profile of gay athletes who are coming out is beginning to change.

“In the last couple of years, I have begun to see a second wave of athletes come out of the closet, athletes that weren’t physically as capable; they were middle level players,” he said. “What happens is a gay athlete will come out on a team and that paves the way for other athletes that might not be of their caliber to come out.”

And as more and more athletes come out, a broader portrait can be drawn of what it means to be gay and an athlete.

“What’s very important for both sociologists and journalists who are covering the issue to remember is that one individual story cannot be generalized to be indicative of everyone’s experience with this,” Anderson said.

When Anderson came out to his team, he found them to be supportive and respectful of him. Other students at Huntington Beach High did not share those same ideals, and beat up members of his track team who were vocal about their support for Coach Anderson.

“I came out of this horrific experience as an openly gay high school coach, and if I allowed my feelings to interfere in that, I would have found more homophobia in the sports setting than I did,” he said. “Instead I approached it with an open mind and saw what the data said. What that data said was virtually 100-percent opposite of what I expected to find.

“I think it is very important that when we hear about the experience of athletes like Billy Bean and Esera Tuaolo we, keep those in context – that those are old stories,” Anderson continued. “For example, Billy did not come out while he was playing back in 1998, and his level of fear cannot be attributed to all athletes.”

A large part of Anderson’s research has been dedicated to the experiences of athletes who have had the courage to come out while actively involved in sports. It’s not surprising that many of these athletes are competing at the high school and collegiate levels, and the results of his research are helping to facilitate a better understanding of where gay men find their place in the world of athletics.

“There seems to be two basic categories of closeted gay men,” Anderson said. “It seems that those that are deeply closeted seek out team sports, and those that are less closeted tend to seek out the individual sports. What you find is that it isn’t easier for athletes to come out of the closet in, for example, figure skating and swimming than it is in soccer and tennis, as much as it is the type of athlete that is drawn to that type of sport. It has less to do with team dynamics.”

According to Anderson’s research, when an athlete comes out of the closet it makes no difference whether they are in an individual or team sport – they tend to be treated pretty much the same. Yet closeted athletes do find themselves concerned with how team cohesion will be affected by their coming out.

“The common experience is that all athletes, across all types of sports, fear the same thing before coming out,” Anderson said. “They fear social isolationism and marginalization, and sometimes they fear physical hostility.

“What happens once they come out of the closet is that they aren’t targeted for harassment,” he continued. “That homophobic discourse about them ceases and they aren’t called fags. None of them are harassed or marginalized or kicked off the team. In fact, no gay athlete that I have talked to since I began doing this research in 1998 has reported that.”

Even though athletes do not report being harassed, teams tend to respond to an athlete coming out in one of two ways: It is either celebrated by the team or it is pushed to the side in a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” manner.

“What makes one team celebrate and another team not want to talk about it? It seems a lot of that has to do with the attitude of the coach, and it has to do with the personality and the character of the gay athlete himself,” Anderson said. “If the athlete was really popular and had a more outgoing and dynamic personality, it’s more likely that the team is going to celebrate him. If the athlete has a more homophobic coach, then it’s much more likely that the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy will come into play.”

Despite the fact that the world of sports is changing, and more and more athletes are coming out during their high school and collegiate careers, there is still the question of the world of pro sports. A lot of attention is paid both to looking for an out gay athlete among the big sports like football, baseball, basketball and hockey, and to what pro athletes are saying about gays.

“This is just our celebrity society, where people are more interested in the lives of celebrities than they are in the lives of their own neighbors,” Anderson said. “People are interested in gossip and wonder what’s happening in these celebrities’ lives.

“It is horribly un-academic and a huge misunderstanding to say that whatever happens at the professional level of sports is what goes on at all of the other levels … that is just not the case.”

The shift toward greater acceptance of gays in sports is not due to a forced sense of political correctness. As more people in all walks of life continue to come out, it changes people’s perceptions. Study after study shows that as people realize that they have family, friends, classmates, and even teammates who are gay, their attitudes change.

Closet doors are opening up in the locker room, and doors will continue to open as more and more young athletes lead the way in changing people’s minds about gays in sports.