Kentucky High School Removes Gay Basketball Player from Yearbook Page

The sheer pettiness and mean spiritedness of the "godly folk" at times seems to know no bounds.  The gratuitous slights and insults that they direct towards LGBT individuals leaves one's mouth open in stunned disbelief.  Especially when the targets of such hate filled behavior is directed at the children of gays or LGBT Teens.  Betsy Layne High School in rural Kentucky provides us a recent glimpse at the ugliness of the "godly folk" and just how cruel they can be.  (In the spotlight of negative national media coverage, the high school claims it did not remove the gay player from the year book pages, but obviously, he was not magically removed himself).  Out Sports looks at the sad situation. 

Betsy Layne High School in rural Kentucky this year had a two-page yearbook spread that featured all of the seniors on the boys basketball team. Except, one senior was left out of the tribute: Dalton Maldonado, the team's starting point guard who came out publicly as gay a couple months ago.

This is the latest slap in the face of Maldonado and the entire LGBT community by a high school administration that simply won't accept that one of its star athletes is gay and was harassed for his sexual orientation by an opposing basketball team last December. The school's yearbook has omitted its starting senior point guard from the senior boys basketball tribute page in the yearbook, a deeply insulting blow to an athlete who has contributed to his school.

Maldonado is, in fact, missing entirely from the page's call-out list of players (even including underclassmen)

Maldonado confirmed with Outsports that each of the other players on the bottom of the page was a senior, and that he is the only player omitted from the page. He commented on Facebook about his omission from the yearbook tribute page, and other actions the school has taken to marginalize him and his story:

Then I had a person [affiliated] with the school tell me what they had learned about the school attempting to cover up the whole story. I recently saw my senior yearbook, I flipped right to the sports basketball page only to find my senior basketball picture missing...which devastated me.

The school has repeatedly refused to answer questions or disputed what Maldonado has claimed, despite various eye witnesses confirming that Maldonado was targeted by anti-gay harassment.

Maldonado has shared stories of discrimination by the school for the last few months, so it shouldn't be a surprise that people at Betsy Layne High School may demonstrate deep-seated homophobia by excluding him from such an important honor for recent high school graduates.

It's pretty disgusting. Principal Cassandra Akers and her staff need to answer to questions about the exclusion of Maldonado from such an important piece of the high school experience of Maldonado and so many other high school athletes.

Thankfully, Maldonado has found support from LGBT people and supporters both in and outside his hometown. This fall he will attend the University of Louisville, which already has provided him with a support structure.

This bigotry is beyond sick.  As noted previously, when I hear someone bloviating about their Christian faith or over hear them making homophobic remarks, I simply write them off as horrible, nasty people.  Thankfully, others appear to be doing likewise.  It's no coincidence that 34% of Millennials have walked away from organized religion, which in the USA means that they have walked away from Christian denominations.  As for Betsy Layne High School, the administrators involved in this bigotry need to be summarily fired.

Former University of Richmond Football Star Comes Out as Gay

In the hierarchy of colleges and universities in Virginia, the University of Richmond does not rank among the more liberal institutions, although it is light years ahead in logic, reason and the embrace of modernity than the spittle flecked Bible beating institutions such as Pat Robertson's Regent University and the late Jerry Falwell's Liberty University.  Thus, it is interesting that Kevin Grayson (pictured above) one of the University of Richmond's former football stars who helped the school win a national title has come out as gay.  I suspect some heads in the alumni ranks must be exploding.  The Virginian Pilot and WTVR-TV have coverage on this  story.  First these highlights from the Pilot article:

Kevin Grayson, a former University of Richmond football standout, has announced he is gay.

Grayson, a wide receiver, played for the Spiders from 2007-2010, helping them win the Football Championship Subdivision national title in 2008. He was not drafted by an NFL team but played last year for a professional team in Italy.

“Why can’t I be the guy making plays that help my team win and still on the flip side be a gay male?” Grayson said in an interview that aired Tuesday night on WTVR-TV in Richmond.

“If you’re an athlete, you want to be an athlete,” he said. “You want to be known for what you’ve done. … You don’t want to be that person who is always the gay athlete.”

WTVR reported Grayson is considering a return to Italy or trying to play in the Canadian Football League this year.

Here is additional information from WTVR (which also looks at the emotional and psychological pressures of being in the closet)

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (WTVR) – Kevin Grayson has won championships at every level of competition–high school, college and professionally–and he has carried a secret each step of the way.  He is one of the most decorated football players Central Virginia has ever seen, and he happens to be gay.

“People didn’t believe it because I was an athlete,” Grayson said in an exclusive interview with CBS 6.

“They’re like ‘Kevin plays football, he plays basketball  he runs track–no way you know?’”
“Those are the types of things where if I could go back and say; ‘Why can’t I be an athlete? Why can’t I be a star player? Why can’t I be the guy making plays that helps my team win, and still on the flip side, be a gay male?’”

Grayson has “no doubt” there are gay players in the NFL currently, and admits to knowing some active players himself. But, he explained that “it’s one of those things where you meet someone and you find out about something it’s a ‘you take it to the grave’ type thing.”

Dr. Leticia Flores is a clinical psychologist at VCU specializing in issues of sexual and gender identity. She explained that some gays and lesbians spend much of their day trying to remember who might know about their sexuality, trying to guess how their friends..family and co-workers might react.

For athletes, and male athletes particularly, she said the stress can be compounded by societies’ perception of how they are supposed to behave.

“Male athletes are seen to be very masculine, very macho, a guy’s guy,” Dr. Flores said.  “And people’s stereotypes and biases against gay men is that they are the opposite of a guy’s guy.”  “It’s that extra pressure that you can’t even remotely show something that would lead someone to suspect you,” Grayson said.  “So it makes it ten times harder.”

Some of that pressure was relieved when Grayson chose to confide in a few trusted teammates, some of whom he found out were also gay and none of which shunned or turned their back on him. Now he is sharing his story with everyone, not only for the release for himself, but to hopefully inspire others hiding behind one too many masks.

“There’s clearly a relief and that relief comes from finally being themselves,” Dr. Flores said.  “We call it being, in the psych jargon, being authentic. But you’re who you are and you don’t have to wear the mask anymore”

Kudos to Kevin.  I hope his coming out will help young gays to come to terms with their sexual orientation and act in positive ways and not allow the hate merchants of the GOP and professional Christian crowd to diminish their pride in themselves.

The Locker Room and the Closet

Rumors continue that one or more pro sports athletes may soon come out of the closet.  And unlike those who have come out upon retirement (such as Robbie Rogers at left), this player (or players) will continue their pro careers. The rumors have prompted some to talking about a "gay Jackie Robinson" particularly with the release of a new movies about Robinson's shattering of the color barrier.   But as Frank Bruni notes in a New York Times column, the comparison is not truly appropriate in many ways, not the least of which is that Robinson could not hide his skin color whereas most gays, despite the destructive effects of the closet, can hide their sexual orientation - a fact that is one of the reasons the Christofascists who seek to impose their hate and fear based religious beliefs on all Americans continue to dishonestly claim that sexual orientation is a choice.  Much of Bruni's column looks at Robinson's unique achievement.  But it also looks at the game changing effect openly gay pro athletes would have.  Here are excerpts:

I’ve been hearing the name Jackie Robinson a lot lately, and not just because a movie about him, “42,” hit multiplexes on Friday and had a bigger opening-weekend gross than any baseball movie ever.
 

I’ve been hearing it in the context of an intensifying drumbeat: that the “gay Jackie Robinson” is just weeks or months away. 

We should retire the phrase now. It’s a flawed comparison.  As a few other observers have noted, it doesn’t do justice to Robinson’s experience and to the many differences between the challenges he confronted and those facing the first man or men to acknowledge being gay while still active in one of America’s four major professional sports (baseball, football, basketball and hockey).

The movie also makes clear that Robinson got his precedent-setting assignment not just because of his talent but because of his character. Branch Rickey, the team president who hired him, wanted and picked someone who might not buckle, as most men surely would, under such pressure and such a mantle. 

The first openly gay player in a major sport could instead be an accidental and unwilling hero, hauled into history by a random photo, a talkative boyfriend, some other unintended exposure or the fear of it. That sort of messy scenario was suggested by Cyd Zeigler and Howard Bragman in a post on the sports Web site SB Nation. Its headline: “Hoping Our ‘Gay Jackie Robinson’ Isn’t the ‘George Michael of Sports.’ ” 

Robinson was openly black, if you will, before he played in the big leagues, and what he ended in baseball was apartheid.  The trailblazer still to come will most likely have his place in the big leagues before he’s openly gay, and the frontier he’ll inhabit is not one of access — there have been and are gay players in the four major sports — but of candor. What he’ll end, or erode, is a culture of duplicity and denial. And if he hasn’t in fact been forced out of the closet, there will a particular kind of decision and volition in his emergence.

The first openly gay player in football, baseball, basketball or hockey will be tested, no question. With an extra measure of fame will come naysaying and nastiness. 

And he’ll potentially have a huge impact, toppling certain stubborn stereotypes by “smashing through the closet door in the most masculine of our pastimes,” as Brian Ellner, a prominent gay rights advocate, said to me. 

That burden and promise are noteworthy enough that whoever takes them on needn’t be framed in terms of anybody else.  

But there’s one Robinson analogy I’ll indulge. In a few emotional scenes, “42” emphasizes his special meaning to black children, who see in him a future they weren’t sure they had. The first linebacker or center fielder to say “I’m gay” will be a similar agent of hope, assuring more than a few scared boys that glory and honesty are both possible, even in our country’s sacred cathedrals of sport.