Throw Like a Girl, Cheer Like a Boy by Robyn Ryle

Author:Robyn Ryle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

One coach told Curry, after they parted ways, that Curry would never make it as a skater or a man. After the interview, Curry became a haunted hero and a lesson to other closeted gay male skaters on the circuit.[11] There were consequences for coming out or for pushing the boundaries of the sport, and they weren’t good.

Twenty years later, Rudy Galindo, a Mexican American pairs figure skater, still felt the same pressures when he came out. He describes being put under a microscope and the ways in which the power brokers within the sport tried to contain him.[12] As described by one reporter, figure skating had become gendered in a more subtle way by making distinctions between more “athletic” (i.e., masculine) and “artistic” (i.e., effeminate) men. Being athletic, and therefore masculine, was rewarded, while being artistic and therefore effeminate was punished. In the same time period, critics of the sport attributed its declining popularity in part to its “gay reputation,” while others suggested that judges punished gay male figure skaters with a subtle homophobic bias.[13] Galindo and others hope that with openly gay skaters like Rippon and Radford, the sport has finally turned a corner so that gay male skaters can be out without suffering any of the negative consequences faced by previous generations.

Figure skating isn’t the only sport that has experienced progress in its acceptance of gay male athletes. Research on the experiences of openly gay male athletes in high school and college in the United States demonstrates significant progress since the beginning of the twenty-first century. In a comparison of interviews with gay athletes in 2002 to a cohort in 2010, openly gay men playing high school and college sports experienced considerably less heterosexism.[14] In 2002, most of the athletes who were out feared violence, bullying, discrimination, and/or harassment from their teammates. In 2010, athletes like Charlie, a soccer player in California, could say, “I’ve never bothered to be anything other than out. And nobody, I mean nobody, has cared.”[15] In 2002, all the gay male athletes in the study heard the word “fag,” as well as phrases like “that’s so gay,” frequently. By 2010, athletes heard these less often and some reported that homophobic words and phrases were not used at all. The level of acceptance on some teams was demonstrated by the fact that gay athletes could talk openly about their sexuality with their teammates. The environment in which gay athletes are still less likely to come out is in cases of dealing with a homophobic coach.

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