Coming Out for Athletes - 1. Baseball

The idea of a gay athlete still seems foreign to most people. We live with the stereotype every day that the best athletes are aggressively heterosexual and masculine in the extreme. So it’s hard to believe that for the past twenty years, I’ve been engaged in five different sports in varying levels of competitiveness, including a few appearances at provincial championships in two of those sports.

I was always tall, and usually taller than my peers so it was suggested that I should play basketball or volleyball. I tried them, didn’t really fit in among the other people on the teams; they were cocky, and the Asian half of me simply didn’t fit in, even if the Caucasian half was having a blast. I inherited Asian eyes and hair, but Caucasian everything else, as well as being a thin rail of a person.

Players really get close to one another and we share more than other groups of friends will share, especially when we’re younger and it’s still in our nature just to be friendly with everyone. That’s hard to do when you’re in the closet and you know that an important part of yourself is being hidden from people you spend so much time with working towards a goal that’s bigger than any one person on the team. You don’t want to let them down or have them think less of you because you’re gay, so many student athletes keep quiet and stay closeted instead of embracing who they are and really having a chance to connect with their teams and the decent people who are around them.

Pressure is something you learn to deal with once you start playing a sport competitively, you accept and thrive from the fact that everything you do on the field or on the ice can have an impact on the results of the team and even the season as a whole. You learn to deal with that too, or at least we like to think that we do whenever anyone asks if we’re terrified about how we’re performing. As student athletes we face pressure tests all the time, but nothing put more pressure on me than when I finally started coming out to my teammates. It’s a terrifying experience, but as I learned, it’s also a deeply satisfying experience and is worth every moment of freedom and relaxation you give yourself after relieving such a burden from your shoulders.

I’ve always played sports. It started with hockey, but I couldn’t deal with 6am practices and the truth of it is that I wasn’t very good at the sport. I’m still not good, but I sometimes play in a drop in style of game whenever I decide that midnight is better than 6am. Baseball was my next sport, and currently the one I’ve played the longest. In elementary school I played volleyball, and now my sport is curling. Baseball was good to me and sometimes I regret that I haven’t kept up with it as much as I should or could have done. I don’t admit to being a star, but I could have kept playing as I got older, if I wanted to; there were places where I’d be welcome and even the university team would have been a slim possibility.

For most of the time I played baseball, I was bounced around between the competitive rep team and the house league teams. I was usually one of the top players in the house league, but I was always on the bubble when I was playing rep ball. That changed once I turned fourteen and started getting more professional help with my game, and I started being more consistently placed on the rep team. It was a good time for me as a player; we were able to keep the core of the team together several years in a row, and for a couple years after this story takes place. There were six of us in the core, and we had all grown up playing against each other and were the same age, so there was a long competitive streak between us to continually do better and sometimes to be abusive in our treatment of each other.

This story occurred when I was sixteen years old and the core of the team had spent the past two years together. The year immediately previous to this was particularly brutal; we were easily the worst team in the league, and with nerves being pretty easily frayed, it led to a lot of homophobic commentary from my teammates, quite a bit of it directed at me. I had always been quick to respond when they called me faggot or said I was gay or queer, because at the time I was still closeted to my team and didn’t want to give them another reason to gang up on me and give me a hard time. More than that, I didn’t think it was important to playing baseball, so I tried to ignore it and respond the way a typical straight teenager would react.

It was more difficult than I let on then or now to simply sit there and tease my teammates in return because that’s what was expected of me. When I first started playing with these guys, I was really in turmoil about my sexual orientation. It had only been a year earlier when my dad caught me having some explicit conversations with a male friend of mine on the Internet and my subsequent outing to my immediate family. It didn’t help that I didn’t feel like there was anyone I could talk to at school who would understand, nor that my parents were not entirely able to comprehend or support me as a gay male. Being constantly identified as gay by my teammates and having gay sexuality used as a derogatory term on the field made my self-esteem problems worse, and for a lot of the time until I became comfortable with myself, I was physically sick.

Things didn’t really change until I turned sixteen and spent two more years in the closet and two more years learning about my teammates and actually forming personal friendships and relationships with the guys that extended beyond the baseball diamond. I was becoming more aware that my sexual orientation wasn’t a derogatory thing to be hidden from the world around me, and I started becoming more confident about who I was. This confidence gave me the chance to start coming out at school and in other controlled environments, which helped boost my self-esteem enough to be even more public about who I was.

I finally decided to start coming out to my baseball team. We had just suffered through a traumatic season where we lost every single game we played, and I figured that it wasn’t going to get any worse than it was now. The core members of the team barely tolerated any of our older peers, and we didn’t have much time for each other at this point either. I got by because I did know how to play and didn’t make as many mistakes as some of our peers outside the core group, but there were still a number of gay slurs directed at me throughout the year.

Losing on long road trips especially hurt. We weren’t used to the rigors of multiple games in a single weekend, and the long travel time gave us plenty of opportunities to get to know each other better and to pass along recriminations for our losses. It was a bonding experience, even if we hated each other more often than not. With the core group of us, we started hanging out together during practices and when we had spare moments between games. We even a few dinners together after half of a weekend series whenever we were traveling.

As part of the pitching staff, I worked quite a bit with the other pitchers and catchers at our practices, which was helpful since most of us were part of the core group on the team that had known each other for years. One of the people I had become closer to was Brendan, my usual catcher and the coach’s son. Brendan was one of those guys who was always trying to get under my skin.

Before we started playing together, we had been on opposing teams for years and took our rivalry pretty seriously. It meant that we were used to hating each other and being very intense in that hatred for one another. Getting used to being on the same team was more than a minor adjustment for us both, and I’ll admit that we both enjoyed criticizing and trading barbs with each other. A lot of what was said was deeply personal and was done equally by both sides.

After the first season of midget baseball and our winless season, I decided to start coming out. I was sixteen and I assumed that the teasing and bullying wouldn’t get any worse than it was at the end of the season and our frustrations were more than apparent. I figured that waiting a few weeks until tempers over the dismal season had abated before trying to get back into contact with him would be a good idea, so it wasn’t until August that I really started thinking about how I was going to come out to someone who really had the potential to make my sports life miserable because of how respected he was by the team and how much he already teased me about being gay, even though he didn’t know he was hitting pretty deep at the time.

I knew from being around him that he enjoyed golf, so I asked him if he wanted to go golfing as a way to review the year in a less confrontational environment, and to start thinking about the upcoming fall season that we were preparing for as a team. We both saw ourselves as leaders of our team, so this appealed to him and we decided on a date the following week. Golf is not a sport I excel at, in spite of my skills in baseball. Even if I had been good at golf, I would have played terribly.

I was a nervous wreck the whole time, always waiting for when Brendan was going to start getting suspicious of my motives for bringing him out that day. It never happened; we continued playing terribly and discussing the upcoming season. Brendan was even treating me pretty nicely today; there wasn’t as much teasing or homophobic language being used, so I assumed that I was right to have decided to come out to him first since he didn’t really seem to believe in it, and was only acting homophobic towards me because it was socially expected of him. That doesn’t really make it any better, but it was nice to know that he didn’t really mean any of the things he had said to me in the past, and that they were more just along the lines of the inconsiderate things teenagers say to each other when they’re trying to act more masculine than their peers.

At around the sixth hole, I knew we weren’t going to make it through the whole round of golf. My tee shot managed to hit a tree dead on and bounce back towards us both, and the rest of my skills weren’t any better. Brendan wasn’t exactly on fire either, and at the ninth hole we finally quit and put ourselves out of our misery. Unfortunately for me, that was when the teasing started again, possibly because of how badly I played. We kept up the teasing and name calling; him insinuating that I was gay and I mercilessly commented on his weight, until we got to a picnic bench and I just laid it out.

I told him straight up that all his and everyone else’s comments about my perceived sexual orientation were hitting too close to home because I was actually gay, and it drove me crazy to hear him and the rest of the team keep attacking me for being gay when they have no idea what that feels like to face that much scorn and hate just because people think you might be gay. I told Brendan that when the team calls me faggot or says I’m too gay to play on the team, it actually does cause me to rethink whether it’s worth it to play and put up with everyone’s crap on a daily basis.

The effect was instantaneous and dramatic.

I’ve always heard of the idea of being slack jawed and stunned into a stupor, but I never thought I would actually get to see it. I certainly never expected Brendan to be shocked enough that he fell off the picnic bench. In almost any other context where I would be spending time with Brendan, it would have been a hilarious site, and in hindsight I can laugh about it because of how vividly I remember his facial expression; going from a stunned silence to a dawning realisation of all the things he’d said over the many years we’d known each other, and wondering just what each one did to me and relating it to his own experience with his weight, which was an issue that I responded with almost instinctually when he started making issue of my perceived sexual orientation.

It would have been amazing if he had stopped there, I could have lived with that and it would have been a fantastic start since he wasn’t attacking me or generally making my life worse in some way. That would have been great for my self-esteem to know there was at least one teammate who wasn’t going to try and use me for batting practice. But then the apologies came and the promises of never doing it again, which we both knew weren’t going to happen because that’s just how we talked and I understood that in some contexts it wasn’t meant specifically to attack my sexual orientation.

I say that only because it set him apart from the rest of the team now that he was going to be my defender instead of someone who took part in the insults, and that wasn’t really what I wanted either. I didn’t need someone to defend me from the rest of the team, I just wanted them to understand where I’m coming from and what their words do, hoping that they’ll pick different words that hit less close to home. I learned later that day that he was able to accept me so readily because other people he knew had also come out to him, which was making him begin to wonder why all the gay males in his social group were coming out to him and if there was some hidden meaning to it.

This was about the same moment that i started to relax and realise that everything was going to be okay. Brendan wasn’t angry or disgusting with me or anything else that I expected him to be. More than anything he was shocked at my admission that I was actually gay. Part of the shock was that I never really acted or talked in a stereotypically gay manner, or at least that’s what he told me. He always just called me gay because it was the quickest insult he had available.

It was a really surreal experience for me; I fully expected Brendan to lash out at me, but instead there we were, sitting in a park with me explaining how long I’ve known I was gay and why I never said anything earlier in the year when everyone was piling on me. It was such a huge burden to lift off my shoulders, and it challenged my perception of sports and especially of my teammates, who I naturally assumed would treat me worse because I was different.

Even though I had come out to only one player on the team, the following year I played with a lot more confidence, and as a result my playing time increased and I became more popular among my teammates. I started making plans to come out to more of the team. I knew Zach the longest of all my teammates; we had played together for years at this point and also went to the same school. This was another layer of risk for me, since Brendan didn’t go to school with me, there was a limit to the number of people he could tell who could bother me and make me miserable. I didn’t have that luxury with Zach, so I knew I was placing myself in another risking, precarious position.

Once again I chose golfing as a venue that could be used to let me come out without too much of a threat to my personal safety. Unfortunately we were forced to join another pair of players, so I couldn’t speak very freely about what I wanted to tell Zach. I’d like to be able to say that these golf coming out events were improving my skills in the sport, but that would be easy to dispute and disprove. I was more relaxed this time around Zach, so I was able to play without embarrassing myself too much. The only real catastrophe for me was on the fifteenth hole, when I nearly injured the party of golfers ahead of us. It was a terrifying experience, but no one was harmed and it definitely got Zach to see me as just one of the guys who can make mistakes like anyone else.

It came as no shock to me that after the round was over, Zach started trash talking me about the near miss. I interrupted him and said

“Zach, shut up for a second, I have something to tell you; I’m gay”.

Thankfully, Zach didn’t fall off a bench or do anything else crazy or unfortunate, he just stared at me like I told him a bad joke and he was hoping I would say I was kidding. When Zach finally regained the use of his voice, the first thing he asked was

“Are you trying to hit on me?”

It was awkward, tense and I wasn’t entirely sure how to respond, so I fell back on my instincts and made it very clear how uninterested I was in what he was thinking.

“Oh god no.” I exclaimed. “Dude, no. You are not my type at all. This is just so that the gay comments stop. We’re teammates and friends. Not a damn thing more.”

With that out of the way, Zach was far more relaxed about the situation and started enjoying the fact that I was gay. I would never have expected it from him, but he had a lot of gossip about who else in school might be gay, and even though I never got to try and prove any of those theories, it was nice to think that there were other athletically inclined gays at school who I could relate to better than the people who were part of the gay straight alliance.

Later that year, I came out to the other members of the core group on our team and was well received by them. I learned very quickly that they really didn’t judge me based on who I was attracted to and only cared about whether I could play the game we all enjoyed. Not all of them were able to start changing the language they used around me, and I never really considered it as much of a slur after I had come out and they knew my position on the issues; it became a sort of mutual understanding that it wasn’t acceptable, but that it would take time and patience to really change at the instinctual level. I played a lot better and my self-esteem grew once I didn’t have to worry about what people thought of my being gay, and the lack of stress actually made me healthier and meant I didn’t have to take as many sick days.