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Eric Brown
S porting C hance
Lewis & Clark professor fights homophobia in college athletics
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by M elissa Say ler
A
football player beats up a tennis
player because he is gay. A coach
outs a student to his teammates
and family. A coach is outed and
his students become the victims
of vandalism and verbal and physical assaults. A
known lesbian grows out her hair, begins wear
ing skirts and puts away pictures of her girlfriend
when she gets a job as an assistant coach at a
large university.
For most, college is a time of great self-discov
ery, idealism and freedom. But not for many gay
athletes and coaches. Every day they have to
struggle with the pressure of staying closeted— or
going back in the closet— for fear of being
harassed, not being played or not being promoted.
But Nora Beck, faculty athletic representa
tive and professor of musicology at Lewis &.
Clark College, and a handful of like-minded
peers are hoping to change that.
Two years ago she attended her first N CAA
Annual Conference in San Diego. After sitting
through a panel on diversity and hearing no
mention of sexual orientation, she made one
simple action that hopefully will send waves
through the sports world for a long time.
During the question-and-answer period, she
stood up and said: “This was a wonderfully
informative panel, but I’m a lesbian and I played j
basketball at Barnard College in New York for
four years, and it was really hard being in the
closet and our coach was in the closet and it was
just a tough time. Could someone address
homophobia on the diversity panel?”
The convention hall, packed with hundreds of
people, answered her with dead silence. But offi
cials eventually came forward from the NCAA
and assured her they were working on the issue.
After two years and a few well-placed letters
urging them to address the matter, they held
their first panel on homophobia in sports during *
the 2002 conference Jan. 12 in Indianapolis.
Speakers included Laurie Priest and Michael
Muska, openly gay athletic directors at private
colleges; Dwight Slater, a student and former
football player at Stanford; Jenny Allard, head
softball coach at Harvard; and Beck.
About 200 people listened as the panelists
shared their experiences with homophobia and
outlined the issues facing campuses nationwide.
The common threads connecting everyone’s
stories were performance and well-being— as a
student, an athlete, a coach, a teammate, a
teacher or a mentor.
According to NCAA News, Slater explained
that keeping his sexuality secret in a team envi
ronment rife with anti-gay and offensive com
ments and jokes was eating him alive. “My aca
demics were affected, my football was affected. I
couldn’t sleep or eat.”
Allard said coming out to her team brought
about a stronger sense of trust, which improved the
level of play and classrcxim achievement. Muska
said he could’ve been a better coach had he been
honest about his sexuality earlier in his career.
“1 just couldn’t concentrate,” Beck ex
plains of her experience as a closeted athlete.
“My grades went dow n.... I was nervous
someone was going to find out. I just didn’t
perform well.”
Beck is also a musician and writer; she just
finished publishing Fiammetta, a novel about les
bian love and adventure. “I come from a world
where the more honest you are, the better your
art is,” and she hopes to relate that understand
ing to gay athletes and coaches.
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Nora Beck spearheaded the NCAA’s first
panel on homophobia in sports
But is the country ready for its beloved star
quarterbacks and record-breaking home-run hit
ters to he openly gay? Considering athletes often
represent the penultimate image of masculini
ty— not to mention the shaky ground of gaining
acceptance female athletes still stand o n -
change will come slowly.
Beck points out an added obstacle for col
leges is their focus on having a good image to
attract new students. Out gay athletes might
damage the school’s reputation and bring them
unwanted attention.
But “education is where it has to start,” Beck
says. Although administrators have been slow to
address the matter, “the students won’t let the
issue he dropped.”
T his summer Beck is planning to meet
with the N C A A ’s Management Councils
and Student A th lete Advisory Com m ittees,
which then will start building an informa
tion base on what kind o f support systems are
in place and get ideas about niles that can he
enacted for dealing with homophobia. She
says the association has the right language
regarding discrimination in its bylaws hut
doesn’t have any policy to deal with it when
it does happen.
In the meantime, she and Andy Holder have
co-founded a nonprofit called Sexual Minorities
in Athletics. Its goal is to develop financially
sustainable programs to combat homophobia
within the world of athletics and its connection
to societal acceptance of gays. |H
S e x u a l M in o r it ie s in A t h l e t ic s can be found
on the Internet at www.smuumline.org. Other sites
to check out are www.outsports.com and
www.axtchgum by.com , which has mformatum
about form er track coach Eric Anderson's coming-
out experience in Southern California.
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