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In
one week two celebrities skipped out of the closet. Sheryl Swoopes,
star forward for the WNBA’s Houston Comets, and George Takei, the inimitable
Mr. Sulu on “Star Trek,” both did the deed.
I could get used to weeks like this.
When the news about Swoopes hit, WNBA-loving lesbians, like yours truly,
burned up the phone lines. We essentially re-created the scene in “Bye,
Bye, Birdie” where every teenager in town is on the phone, only instead
of singing, “Did they really get pinned?” we asked, “Did
she really come out?”
Swoopes spilled the beans in an “as told to” in ESPN The Magazine.
This gal is a three-time league MVP, a four-time league champion with the
Comets and a three-time Olympic gold medalist. I know from painful experience
that she can take over a game and make my beloved Seattle Storm look like
a Brownie troop. But Swoopes says she was “miserable.”
She says she’s coming out now because “I’m tired of having
to hide my feelings about the person I care about. About the person I love.” (Bang
go the hopes of those dykes who lusted after her. But I digress.)
Swoopes tells of coming out to her mother, who responded with the time-honored, “What
did I do wrong?” Swoopes is a Christian, so she endures the Religious
Hotfoot. She says too she expects “a lot of flak” from fellow
African-Americans. “My biggest concern is that people are going to
look at my homosexuality and say to little girls — whether they’re
white, black, Hispanic — that I can’t be their role model
anymore.”
I’m sympathetic to all those concerns. But I’m also irritated
with her for saying, “Do I think I was born this way? No. And that’s
probably confusing to some, because I know a lot of people believe that
you are.” She goes on to say that her partner, Alisa Scott, was there
for her during the breakup of her marriage. “Maybe it was just the
fact that I needed that comfort.” Oh Lord. A tale made to order
for the religious right: the noble hetero woman was emotionally vulnerable
and the big bad lesbian swooped Swoopes away.
My ex, a straight, male sportswriter, had a different complaint. He emailed
me, “Just once I’d like to see a gay woman athlete come out
without an Olivia endorsement deal on the table.”
He added he’d also like to “see a gay male athlete come out
before his playing days are over,” and ultimately that’s
the point. Quibblers like myself may nitpick over the particulars, but
Sheryl
Swoopes has had the guts to come clean about being in a gay relationship
while an active player fresh off an MVP season. She, theoretically, has
a lot to lose. Okay, this is the one and only time I will say this: Go
Comets!
George Takei, twice the age of Swoopes, came out in Frontiers, a magazine
covering gay L.A. The news that the Enterprise’s helmsman has never
steered a straight course didn’t, I suspect, shock many of us,
though some Trekkers are doubtless as jarred as if a Klingon had suddenly
burst
into Norwegian.
Takei spent a chunk of his childhood in internment camps for Japanese-Americans
and he grew up feeling ashamed of both his ethnicity and his orientation.
In his view, racial prejudice and anti-gay prejudice stem from the “same
mentality.” But he’s seen a ton of positive societal change
in his lifetime, “both in terms of Asian-Americans in the theater
and television and films, but also for gays and our self-image and the
ability to move in our society.”
One American life. From the camps to coming out. That’s a breathtaking
trajectory even Mr. Spock couldn’t have programmed.
info: LesRobinsn@aol.com• www.GeneralGayety.com
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