Jock whispering

I have a story I wanted to tell when Carl Nassib came out earlier this summer.

I kept it to myself at the time because I was overjoyed about Nassib's coming out and I didn't want the focus off him on my page in case he was a temporary one-off in terms of pro-athletes coming out, especially in traditionally macho, conservative sports.

With Luke Prokop making NHL history today, I'm surer that we're at the start of something, and I'm more confident in the merits of telling this story here, now.

Decades ago, before the novels, or before the essays, or before 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐴𝑑𝑣𝑜𝑐𝑎𝑡𝑒, and well before the entertainment profiles, I had a brief, precious moment when I was a young sports journalist.

This was the early-to-mid-80s, near the start of the AIDS epidemic, in a very different world—one that some readers of this post were born too late to know. I’d even earned a modest reputation as a "jock whisperer," someone who could get athletes to open up about their feelings, and their fears, and then write about those feelings and fears with respect and sensitivity, along with the rest of their story.

The interviews I conducted during those years were among my favourites of my career, and they left me with a lifelong respect for the men and women who've trained their bodies like kinetic art, particularly the Olympians, of whom I knew several.

I wrote about athletes for a variety of magazines, big and small, some long out of business and some still thriving in one form or other today.

One evening, I was doing an interview with an athlete [for the purposes of this post, out of respect for the athlete, no gender pronouns, no names, and no identifying details of their sport or event, and no confirmation of the sex of the athlete] that ran late into the night. We'd liked each other instantly, and a trust and rapport was established at a speed that was unusual. The interview ran very, very late.

At one point towards the end, the athlete told me they were gay. The athlete knew I was non-heterosexual, and clearly felt I was someone to whom they could unburden themselves.

Thinking back, the relief probably lasted five minutes before the terror started to set in—the terror of having made a terrible mistake, of having handed a journalist a secret that they’d been keeping from their fellow athletes, their family, and the public.

Tears ensued, and none of my assurances that I’d keep their secret out of the story would calm them. They were inconsolable.

Finally, I took off my wedding ring and pressed it into their hand, and told them to hold onto it until the story came out; they would keep my most precious possession, and I would keep their most precious secret.

If I betrayed them, I said, they could throw my wedding ring into a gutter and tell everyone about my lack of integrity, even kill my nascent career by branding me as untrustworthy and dishonest to sports editors, publicists, coaches, and the athlete's own peers.

By taking on vulnerability myself, I was able to unburden the athlete of some of their own.

Four months later, the article was published, the ring was back on my finger, and the athlete in question still had their secret. They could choose to share it or not, and when. I hope they eventually did share it, and that they went on to have a long, happy life of peace and acceptance, and, most of all, love.

It wasn’t my story to tell, or my secret to share, and all the journalistic “rights” I had to tell it just because I had it on tape didn’t trump the possibility of annihilating another queer person just to sell magazines, especially not at that time.

Integrity is not situational; it’s either real, and you have it, or it isn’t, and you don’t. There is no space on a true moral compass for destroying someone's life.

Jocks were the bane of my existence when I was a young, feminine queer child. They tormented, terrorizd, and belittled me, and bullied me beyond endurance. One of my choices, as an adult, was to close the door on those memories, and the class of people who made them.

The other choice was to open myself to them, to get to know them, to understand them, to forgive them, to not be afraid of them anymore, and to see if there was something there to love. And, as with most human beings, there was.

Years later, jocks and metalheads are still among my favourite company.

When Nassib came out, there was a lot of cynical nastiness online, the sole aim of which was to diminish the cultural impact of his coming out. A lot of insididous, homophobic sneering about “cis white gay men,” and how his coming out today, even in a traditionally homophobic milieu, was a cakewalk, and irrelevant.

Even, God help us, his "handsome privilege," and the odious phrase "passing privilege," which should have been retired decades ago.

Even the epic L.Z. Granderson weighed in and (very) politely suggested people dial it back, and he did it much more kindly than I would have.

I’m bracing myself for more, now, this time about Luke Prokop.

The thing is, it 𝑖𝑠 a big deal. It’s a 𝑚𝑎𝑠𝑠𝑖𝑣𝑒 deal. It 𝑖𝑠 culture-changing. One of the advantages of looking beyond your smug, judgemental, self-righteous, brittle little box of a life is realizing that other people have different challenges than yours, and just because you don’t have them yourself, or understand why they’re challenges, doesn’t make them any less burdensome or terrifying.

The homophobic and transphobic mob, both online and off, doesn't care if you think sports are "stupid," or whether you think athletes are "privileged." No one carrying a secret they're afraid to share is overly burdened by privilege, especially when they could lose everything by disclosing it. Just because you're so insulated that you don't see their vulnerabilities doesn't mean that they're not searing.

I can still see that young person sobbing on the sofa, clutching my wedding ring, terrified that they’d just ruined their life by telling their precious truth to someone with a tape recorder.

Until our realities as queer people don’t put us in danger, all of this matters. Every coming out story matters. And coming out stories in milieux where disclosing can either have a terrible cost, or else change a harsh climate by making it temperate and welcoming, matter most of all.

Good for Nassib. Good for Prokop. Good for all those yet to come. Good for any young queer athlete who's inspired or comforted enough by these adult athletes' openness to sit his or her teammates down for a talk about who they really are.

That’s how we leave a better, safer world for kids who’ll never know how hard it all used to be