Fair Play: How LGBT Athletes Are Claiming Their Rightful Place in Sports (Akashic Books, $16) could be the most important book you read this year. A clear-headed exploration of the integration of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender athletes into the world of mainstream sports, it will be published next week and should be required reading for anyone involved in playing, coaching and administering organized athletics at any level.
When author Cyd Zeigler, himself a gay athlete, founded Outsports.com in 1999 and began covering LGBT sports issues, nobody else was asking athletes — including National Football League rookies — if they would accept a gay teammate. “The first year, the [NFL Players Association] rep actually told me to stop,” Zeigler writes. “But former Packers running back Ahman Green told the guy — in the nicest of terms — to fuck off.”
Today, while acceptance of LGBT athletes is more common, fears of rejection, retaliation and exclusion still linger, Zeigler says. So he wrote Fair Play in an effort to encourage the culture of American sports to fully embrace LGBT individuals.
The tipping point came in 2007, according to Zeigler, who writes that “homophobes lost the culture war in sports” when former NBA first-round draft choice Tim Hardaway told a talk radio host he “hate[s] gay people.” Zeigler goes on to debunk the myth that having a gay athlete on the roster is a “distraction” and shares stories about transgender MMA fighter Fallon Fox and Michael Sam, the first publicly gay player to be drafted in the NFL. But he also profiles the positive experiences of high school and college athletes who have come out to coaches, teammates and family members.
“Today it’s difficult to find an athlete who came out and was not embraced by their teammates,” Zeigler told me in a recent email exchange. “What we most need now is people in sports to come out and shine a light on just how far athletes and coaches have come on these issues.”
Zeigler admits that LGBT people likely will never completely overcome their fears, but in a poignant conclusion to Fair Play, he urges every reader — gay and straight — to inspire courage in others to come out despite those fears.
“The only path to true inclusion [in sports] is to convince people to come out — come out in their own lives, come out on their teams, come out publicly,” he writes. “Courage is contagious.”
