The Answer Has Very Little (or Nothing) to Do with Homophobia

By Eric Anderson January 23, 2025 (ZocaloPublicSquare.org)

In 1993, I was 25, and coaching a cadre of high school distance runners in Southern California. I was also miserable. I had known I was gay since I was 7 and had been hiding my sexuality ever since. The extreme homohysteria of the 1980s was beginning to fade. I determined that to live authentically, I needed to come out.

I told a few of my athletes, which was effectively telling the whole school. My revelation unleashed violence against me and my athletes, who were assumed gay by association. One was severely beaten, breaking four facial bones, for which there were no criminal charges. I became a talking head for issues of gay men in sport, and I returned to university to study the experiences of openly gay male high school and collegiate athletes.

Through my research I’ve found that gay sporting experiences have improved greatly over my own: Men’s sports today are highly inclusive. Any absence of gay men from team sports has little to do with homophobia, and much to do with the diversity of gay people’s athletic and extracurricular interests.

In 2002, nearly a decade after coming out, I published the first-ever examination of athletes who played out of the closet for their teams, interviewing openly gay male high school and university athletes across the U.S. Most (but not all) feared violence, bullying, discrimination and/or harassment from teammates—some because they had heard teammates discussing homosexuality negatively. But things had already improved since 1993. By and large, these sportsmen experienced no violence. Almost all were the best athletes on their teams, which, I surmised, may have mitigated the stigma of being gay.

By 2011, gay male athletes reported even less heterosexism, noting that they could thrive out of the closet even as mediocre athletes. None expected bullying, harassment, discrimination, or violence—because, they suggested, their peers were not overtly homophobic, on or off the field. When I asked one participant, Neil, if he had ever heard his teammates speak negatively of gay men, he answered, “No. Never. Not before or after I came out.”

In the years since, colleagues and I have published ethnographic, qualitative, and quantitative studies showing that as cultural antipathy toward homosexuality declined, so did homophobia in sports—suggesting a significant, continued shift toward inclusivity. My 2021 research with Outsports founder Cyd Zeigler, for instance, revealed that only 5% of LGBT high school and college athletes reported negative encounters, with none facing physical hostilities, social ostracization, verbal abuse, team de-selection, or lack of playing time. Athletes viewed their sports teams as more supportive and accepting than the school population at large. This is most likely a reflection of the fact that their teammates also represent strong friendships, the kind of people who will have your back when you fall.

Results did not vary by team type, geographical location, nor the year an athlete came out—suggesting that inclusive attitudes are widespread, and stable over time.

All to say: Things are getting better for gay people in sports.

The question is not why gay athletes fail to come out, but why they fail to try out.

Still, despite these highly positive findings, Cyd and I located only a few dozen LGBT men who played in the “big five” sports: basketball, baseball, football, soccer, and ice hockey. Of a quarter million retired professional soccer players across the globe, only a handful have come out, even decades after retiring; few athletes followed suit when then-trailblazers Jason Collins (NBA) and Michael Sam (NFL) came out in 2013 and 2014.

For many, the statistical absence of gay men in elite team sports leaves the impression that these sports do not welcome gay men. If they did, the argument holds, we would see more athletes come out, in professional and in youth sports. Gay men must exist in macho team sports relative to their population numbers. They must just be afraid to come out.

It is my hope that this assumption disappears. The question is not why gay athletes fail to come out, but why they fail to try out. There is no definitive evidence that gay men avoid the “big five” out of homophobia. There is also no evidence that gay men want anything to do with these sports.

Gay men make up about 2.8% of the male population. It is salient that they do not represent 2.8% of the rosters of football teams; it is self-evident that they comprise more than 2.8% of men in dance and other aesthetic sports, music, fashion, art, theater, and the service sector. What this tells me is that gay men are simply not largely attracted to dirty and dangerous sports. It’s not discrimination, but diversity.

Gay boys are introduced to sport as children in the same institutional, almost compulsory, way that straight boys are. If they loved highly masculinized sports, in this day and age, there would be no reason for them to cease playing them as they grow older.

We should not measure progress in sports by whether gay men represent 2.8% of football athletes. We should measure progress by the freedom that gay men have to choose any sport, without consideration of homophobia. And if gay men choose figure skating or swimming over ice hockey, or cheerleading from the side lines over tackling straight men in football—if they choose the aesthetics of ice dancing over the brain trauma of ultimate fighting—we should celebrate our difference, and stop lamenting about the ghost of sporting homophobia.

To maintain that team sport athletes as highly homophobic simply because gay men are not attracted to these sports is prejudice itself.

When my students ask me why there are no gay men in football (or soccer; I teach in England) I put it like this:

“Because football is f—king boring, mate! 90 minutes of dudes running around failing to score. No thanks. Gay men are far too smart to care about such folly.”

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Eric Anderson’s research and books on LGBT athletes, heterosexual masculinity, and more can be found at his website.

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Primary editor: Talib Jabbar | Secondary editor: Eryn Brown