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Frank's Place: A life lesson from a departed friend

In the 1960s, when the only acceptable contexts for acknowledging homosexuality were police blotters and punch-lines, a friend I was walking with in a Delaware County shopping center was ridiculed as a "sissy."

The Mets' Daniel Murphy told reporters he disapproved of a homosexual lifestyle "100 percent" after a visit to the team by Billy Bean, a gay former ballplayer. (Jeff Roberson/AP)
The Mets' Daniel Murphy told reporters he disapproved of a homosexual lifestyle "100 percent" after a visit to the team by Billy Bean, a gay former ballplayer. (Jeff Roberson/AP)Read more

In the 1960s, when the only acceptable contexts for acknowledging homosexuality were police blotters and punch-lines, a friend I was walking with in a Delaware County shopping center was ridiculed as a "sissy."

Knowing both my friend and his taunters, I tried to defend him against such an illogical attack.

"He's no sissy," I began with the certainty of someone about to validate a point with mathematical proof. "He knows more sports than I do. He's got Eagles season tickets. And he's a really good athlete."

Like most uninformed adolescents of the time, I thought sports was an antonym for homosexuality.

No one who could whip me at pool the way he could, no one who threw a killer curveball and could name the Eagles offensive line could possibly be a "sissy."

It would be years before my ignorance on this subject - and so many others - lifted.

Last week, the issue of sports and homosexuality surfaced again.

The New York Times reported that Erskine College had issued a statement denouncing homosexuality as a sin, despite the fact - or perhaps because of it - that some of the South Carolina campus' best-known male and female athletes were openly gay.

A day earlier, after gay baseball pioneer Billy Bean, now the game's first ambassador of inclusion, had visited the Mets training camp, all-star infielder Daniel Murphy told reporters he disapproved of that lifestyle "100 percent."

Even as gay and lesbian athletes are finally gaining a toehold in the macho sanctuaries called locker rooms, even as the final social barriers to their acceptance are eroding, the world of games remains an unwelcoming place.

The U.S. military at last has managed to accommodate homosexuality. America's courts, civic institutions, and corporations have adapted. Many religious denominations, though not the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church that runs Erskine, now welcome gays and lesbians, some even into their clergies.

Meanwhile, in this race for social justice, sports continues to get lapped.

Today we know that Billie Jean King, one of American tennis' most accomplished players, was gay. So was middleweight boxing champion Emile Griffith, Olympic diving legend Greg Louganis, and so many other world-class athletes.

Sadly though, despite those accomplishments, homophobia remains a potent sickness in sports.

Murphy's comments weren't surprising. He's a fundamentalist Christian whose opposition is Bible-based. Still, though they were couched in religious terms, his words were no less hurtful than those from players who once claimed their objections to Jackie Robinson weren't racial at all, but rather cultural and social.

This kind of homophobia, as research confirms, is a close relative to other social disorders, like the domestic violence that neared epidemic levels this season in the NFL.

Recent research by social scientists in California found that our sports culture - especially our team sports culture - breeds "intolerant males . . . less likely to sustain a long-term relationship" and more prone to violence, domestic abuse, and homophobia.

That's hardly a shock. The locker room's enforced male bonding, the youthful hormones, the cultural stereotypes all contribute to an environment that can drive gay and lesbian athletes deeper into the closet.

In a Huffington Post article last year, ex-Nebraska football player Eric Lueshen wrote that in 2003 he informed his Huskers teammates that he was gay.

Their response?

"I feared for my life," Lueshen wrote.

Another tragic example of sports' difficulty in dealing with this subject occurred in soccer's English Premier League during the 1980s.

When Justin Fashanu revealed that he was gay, he became the first world-class footballer to do so. The disapproval and ridicule came quickly. Among his harshest critics was his Nottingham Forest coach.

Fashanu's career suffered, and in 1998, facing sexual-assault charges for an encounter he contended was consensual, he committed suicide.

Subsequently, only one other gay English soccer star has dared come out.

In the last year or so, there's been a slight thaw, thanks in part to the publicized comings-out of courageous athletes like Jason Collins and Michael Sam.

But such positive steps are negated every time a Murphy or an Erskine College point us back toward the darkness.

In 1979, while we reunited over beers in Wilmington, the friend I'd once defended revealed that he actually was gay. By then it wasn't a complete surprise.

That conversation between two old friends who didn't know each other nearly as well as we thought quickly turned back to more familiar ground - to the Eagles and Phillies, the hometown teams he missed greatly as a recent transplant to Washington.

When we were done with the beer and the conversation, he returned to his new job, home, and partner. Later, just before the AIDS epidemic decimated that city's gay population, he moved to New York.

We lost touch in the years that followed, but I thought of him often, when the Phillies finally captured a World Series in 1980, whenever his Eagles won a big game, each time a story about gay-bashing arose.

Then in the spring of 1992, when the Rodney King riots canceled a Friday Phillies-Giants in San Francisco, I phoned his mother, who had moved to Northern California.

Intending to get contact information for him, I first asked how her son had been doing these last 13 years.

"He died, Frank," she said in a barely controlled sob. "Two years ago in New York."

My friend never could teach me how he managed such a sharp break on his curveball.

Apparently, he had bigger lessons in mind.