Former NBA player John Amaechi on homophobia and pro sports
BY ANDREW MCCARTHY

Basketball player John Amaechi made headlines last February when he became the first openly gay basketball player in the NBA. On a recent visit to Harvard, Amaechi spoke with the HPR about the politics of sports and the challenge of homophobia.

HPR: Do you have any theories on why Americans might be uncomfortable with the idea of a gay athlete?

John Amaechi: Where I went, Penn State, got revenue from football, and anything that affected football has a tremendous interest to the school. We have very strict ideas of what is and what isn’t a good athlete, what is and isn’t a proper man and a proper woman, and as such when you gray those lines—when you have a gay person on the team, all of a sudden that’s not a real athlete.

You see quite clearly that you can do all kinds of awful things: you can allegedly rape women, you can have guns underneath your car seat, you can do drugs, you can be negligent towards your children, and yet still be seen as a great athlete. But you add a gay component and people aren’t assured.

Sports have been quite homoerotic for a long time—since the Greeks it’s been a pretty homoerotic institution. As such when you introduce an actual gay person to that environment it makes everybody realize just how homoerotic some of the bonding activities, some of the everyday things that you do are. You have two men in a suit sitting next to each other and have one of them pat the other on the butt—that’s quite gay. You put them in a baseball uniform: it’s de jure, it’s normal—that’s what you do. And when you put a gay person in a baseball uniform, that makes you realize: “Oh yeah, that is kind of gay.”

HPR: What do you think are the major ways that homophobia hurts America?

JA: There are numerous ways. My major theory on it is the idea that when you have one part of bigotry like homophobia that is more publicly acceptable you create this breathing space for all bigotry, that is normally under their covers, to get strength. Homophobia is allowed in more places—in the halls of schools where it goes unchecked or in workplaces. The policy of a country indicates to people that it’s okay to be a homophobe. I think that we’ve seen in recent days that racism and sexism are dead on the surface, and having one aspect of bigotry that is out front is like having a straw out of the water. All that bigotry breathes and I think that is really dangerous.

You can’t eradicate bigotry while also allowing one aspect of bigotry to be alive, and that’s what we’re doing. People always say I’m an "out" athlete who is actually acting to change the world, to change how Americans think. I think I would be disgusted if that was the case. If the murder of Matthew Shepherd, the Michael Sandy case, or the guy who’s lured and chased across the highway and killed doesn’t shake the country out of homophobia and a gay “Shaq” does, then something’s clearly wrong.

HPR: Has your experience after coming out altered your perception of American homophobia? If so, how?

JA: In my head I once looked at America as a bell curve—I thought it would be a negative response from about 60 percent of people and then silence. What I actually found was a very virulent response in a tiny minority, a response that was positive from the other end, and then in the center, silence. And so what has actually changed is that fact that I now think that it is the silence that is so devastating about homophobia, rather than the noise. It’s the people in the middle—the reasonable, well-thought people in the middle who hear someone being called a “fag” and then say nothing—those are the people who are devastating. That’s what has changed and has made me slightly more cynical from time to time.¨