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Further thoughts on The Gay NBA
I never knew you all had such a pent-up demand to discuss matters gay. Having read through 110 plus comments, I am now more inclined to see genetic correlations -- rooted in the human mind rather than the body -- with athletic achievement (NB: I don't agree with all the "genetic" claims in the thread, by any means).
Most of all, I am struck by how few former male athletes have come out of the closet. That would seem to adjust for "the locker room effect" and "the endorsement effect," as explained in my original post. Once an athlete is retired, those factors shouldn't matter much.
I also noticed that Amaechi signed a book contract about being gay in the NBA. He was a pretty feeble player, and quite nerdy, more here. How large was his book advance? 50K or 100K is not a bad guess. I've known plenty of gay guys who would self-identify for much less; the fact that so few former male athletes have done so is striking.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on February 10, 2007 at 07:46 AM in Sports | Permalink
Comments
I think you are grossly underestimating just how hard it is to come out as an adult, after many years of being in the closeted. It's mostly a matter of social esteem, avoiding awkward interactions, etc... not of strictly monetary payoffs.
Posted by: Gay and still closeted at Feb 10, 2007 9:10:03 AM
I am struck by how few former male athletes have come out of the closet.
Maybe they are not all attention seekers. I mean, if this Amaechi fellow had not come out on some grand stage would we have even known (I don't follow BK closely so I have never heard of this guy)? Would the press have even picked up on it if he lived his life like a "normal" person (meaning quietly, not meaning like a heterosexual)? Obviously, if a major player were to come out then the press would have picked up on it (if Magic, or Bird, or Mark McGwire or Barry Sanders or Gretzky came out then we would certainly know about it no matter how discrete they were trying to be). But what if someone like "John Player" who had a cup of coffee career came out but did NOT announce it in some press conference or by writing a book? Would the press actually pick up on it if a guy like Tom Brookens came out (not implying anything about Brookens, but there's a stack of cards sitting on the table and he's the first card on the stack - and my guess is that if you are not a follower of MLB then you have no idea who he is - and he had a substantial career of 12 years and 1300+ games)?
That would seem to adjust for "the locker room effect" and "the endorsement effect," as explained in my original post. Once an athlete is retired, those factors shouldn't matter much.
My guess is many former professional athletes still work in their sport after retirement because for many of them it is what they know (when I looked up Brookens on Google I saw that he recently began a minor league managerial/coach career, which led me to this thought). Many baseball players become minor league managers, or coaches, or roving instructors. Others may act as instructors at youth camps or start their own private "consulting" business for young players. If the locker-room effect still pervades then these minor players have a HUGE economic incentive to NOT come out if they are going to lose their livelihoods (not just their jobs). Remember, MOST players don't sign mega-million contracts and their sport IS their livelihood. If you are a fringe player for 3 years in MLB then you might earn about $1 million - not bad for 3 years, but if you skipped college and went straight to the minor leagues then what skills do you really have to offer an employer?
I know less about basketball, football, and hockey, but consider how many former professional players are coaches at high schools or colleges. Now think about some of the parents of these kids participating on these teams - if a high school coach in "Conservative USA" came out do you think he would still have a job? The parents would probably freak out and think he was a pedophile.
Posted by: AZ at Feb 10, 2007 9:33:06 AM
Nerdy? What a strange description. For nerdy, read well-rounded human being, engaging with the world.
Posted by: Tom at Feb 10, 2007 11:25:50 AM
Following up on steve's sugestion I googled for AIDS data for major sports plays who have either died from aids or tested HIV positive, and found 6. The infection rate in the US population is .6% but it is concentrated among males who where between 20 and 40 in the 1980's so in this group it is propably closer to 2%.If you assume that majority of the cases are a result of activities in the 80's, and that the playing life time is about 7 years,the total number of player over this time period would be about 2000. Then expected number of cases in players would be 40+- 14. This is statisticaly significant unless they conceal their AIDS also.
Posted by: joan at Feb 10, 2007 11:37:47 AM
Where by "they conceal their AIDS" you mean "it's not possible to find out about their AIDS by googling"...
Posted by: micah at Feb 10, 2007 12:05:51 PM
Again, try talking to someone who has played competitive sports. You never really leave the locker room.
Posted by: andrew at Feb 10, 2007 12:15:37 PM
Where by "they conceal their AIDS" you mean "it's not possible to find out about their AIDS by googling"
Yes. That is what I mean. If we continue with the number fantasy and assume that 1 in 4 men who engaged in male/male sex in the 80's contracted HIV, then 6 implies that about 1% of the players are gay. There are probably over 10,000 living retired players and 1% is 100 which would mean less than 6% are out of the closet. This does indeed raise doubts about the accuracy of googling. Also feel free to correct my numbers. I am not a sports fan, nor am I particularly well informed about gays. I do have a thing about what the implications of numbers and I didn't like what steve did with them.
Posted by: joan at Feb 10, 2007 12:56:32 PM
Team dynamics probably exhibit a tendency to either shift in one direction or the other to establish conformity to a norm. Nonconformists are driven out or leave of their own accord. Non-team sports are a different story though.
Posted by: Lord at Feb 10, 2007 3:02:53 PM
Occam's Razor suggests that most sports (with the exception of aesthetic dance sports like figure skating) tend to appeal most to the more masculine boys and girls. Thus, the young people of each sex who work the longest and hardest to be good at a sport tend to be more masculine than average. That's why lesbians are so common in the WNBA, the LPGA, and so forth, and why gay men are less common than average in professional sports. (The famous exception that almost proves the rule by itself is figure skating, which was ravaged by AIDS.)
John Amaechi fits this model perfectly. He didn't like sports in general, nor basketball in particular, never even tried basketball until he was 17, but the NBA paid him $9.6 million over five seasons because he was a 6'10" and 270 pound project. He was frank about only being in the game for the money. He has a very high IQ (he's getting a Ph.D. in child psychology), which let him slide by making the big bucks without putting much mental effort into the game.
For more on how Amaechi validates the general pattern, see:
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2007/02/retired-nba-journeyman-comes-out-of.html
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Feb 10, 2007 6:01:37 PM
Professional sports locker rooms certainly are anti-gay in atmosphere, but that has a lot to do with how extremely masculine men on average are the men who fill them, as shown by the how often pro jocks get charged with sexual assault (on women, of course), being involved in nightclub shootings, beating up strangers in Dennys's at 3am because they look nerdy, and other manifestations of masculinity run amok.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Feb 10, 2007 6:10:59 PM
The really interesting test case for my theory that the biggest reason there aren't many out of the closet retired male jocks is because male homosexuals aren't much attracted to non-dance sports is golf, which isn't a team sport, doesn't have much of a locker room dynamic, and, at the pro level, is populated mostly by loners willing to work endlessly on their swings.
Golf attracts and accomodates lots of homosexuals -- they're just not male homosexuals. The LPGA's Nabisco Championship in Palm Springs each March is the occasion of one of the largest lesbian gatherings of the year, with 15-20,000 lesbians flying in from around the country. Published estimates on the lesbian fraction of the LPGA range from 20% to a perhap improbable 50%, so call it an order of magnitude more lesbians in pro golf than in the general female popuation. See my article on the Nabisco tournament for more details:
http://www.isteve.com/Golf_Lesbians_Nabisco.htm
So, golf is, if hardly "gay-friendly," at least genteel and reserved enough to allow a large number of lesbian golfers to pursue their obsession with hitting a ball with a stick.
Nonetheless, gay males are extremely rare in golf. At the pro level, among men, you see no AIDS deaths, no coming-outs, few rumors, lots of second marriages, and lots of children.
At the recreational golfer level, none of the hundreds of strangers I've played 18 holes with over the last 35 years have set off my gaydar.
Another way to test this: lots of celebrities are gays and lots of celebrities are dedicated golfers, but the only overlap I've ever found in years of looking for evidence of men who fall in both groups is the late Danny Kaye, who was mentioned in a 1960s Dan Jenkins article on avid Hollywood golfers and who, although a husband and a father, is rumored to have had an affair with Laurence Olivier.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Feb 10, 2007 6:54:28 PM
Joan's back-of-an-envelope estimate from AIDS cases of 1% of big league male athletes being gay sounds in the right ballpark. If, say, 5% of younger men are homosexual, then, the pro sports rate would be about 1/5th of national average. That fits in with my subjective estimation that homosexuality among big league athletes is less than half of the national average, but more than an infinitesimal amount.
Her AIDS-based estimate of 1% is quite a lot higher than than the voluntarily out-of-the closet percentage, which also makes sense. A number of gay athletes, such as Jerry Smith and Glenn Burke, were outed by AIDS.
Are there others who died of AIDS that we don't know about? Probably, but also probably not too many, since the premature death of celebrities leads to a great amount of attention paid to whether they died from AIDS, steroids, or illegal drugs.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Feb 10, 2007 9:57:21 PM
To the extent that gay men are underrepresented in pro sports, one contributing factor may be network effects. If I think I might be gay, and I've heard rumors that other gay guys are in the school play, I might try out for the play in hopes of meeting them, or at least being in an environment that is relatively welcoming. This might be so even if I have a natural talent or preference for football over theater. Note that this effect can produce the observed result, even without an explanation for why there were initially more gay men in the school play and fewer on the football team.
Of the various theories kicked around here, I find the idea that gay men don't have the physical or mental talents (for golf, for example) to be wild speculation. More plausible to me is the idea that they don't have the drive (for various reasons) to succeed at top levels in certain types of sports.
Posted by: Alec Scudder at Feb 10, 2007 11:51:23 PM
Sure, network effects explain rather boring things like why there are so many Cambodian immigrants who run donut shops (because in the 1970s there was an article in the newspaper about a Cambodian immigrant who became a millionaire running donut shops, which was widely discussed around among new arrivals from Cambodia). There's no deep connection between Cambodian culture and donuts.
But the typical differences in avocations between gays and straights are not random like the donut shop example. Instead, they follow general patterns that anybody with a modicum of pattern recognition skills can pick out for themselves if they just force themselves to be honest and follow where the facts and logic lead. It's tone deaf and unappreciative, for example, to the gay talents that helped create the Broadway musical or the modern fashion industry to say that it was all just random luck that they went into those fields rather than into, say, the NFL or Lockheed's Skunk Work warplane engineering lab.
Back in 1994, I published in National Review in my article "Why Lesbians Aren't Gay," a table of three dozen traits on which gay men and lesbians tend to differ. I'm sure you will be able to detect a few basic dimensions underlying these patterns of diversity:
http://www.isteve.com/lesvsgay.htm
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Feb 11, 2007 12:54:57 AM
Of the various theories kicked around here, I find the idea that gay men don't have the physical or mental talents (for golf, for example) to be wild speculation.
Actually I provided science journal references to support this in the last thread.
Posted by: Jason Malloy at Feb 11, 2007 3:03:08 AM
"If we continue with the number fantasy and assume that 1 in 4 men who engaged in male/male sex in the 80's contracted HIV, then 6 implies that about 1% of the players are gay."
Whoa! I admit that I'm having trouble finding the stats, but why are you putting the infection rate so high?
Posted by: Sebastian Holsclaw at Feb 11, 2007 4:55:43 AM
Jesus, Steve how (and why) did you develop your ignorant stereotypical notion that gay men are not "masculine"? Go to a leather bar or bear bar in SF or NY and try to come away with the notion that gay men cannot be "masculine". Why are there disproportionately large numbers of gay bars in small towns abutting bases where Marines are stationed? Are the gays in the Marines all feminine sissy faggots?
Why do you want to believe that all gays are limp-wristed lisping sissies who love Broadway and figure skating and work as either hair-dressers or interior designers? Ever consider that this is only one subset of all gays out there? There are plenty of gay truck drivers and accountants who never feel the desire to act like effeminate queens or come out of the closet.
There are more gay athletes than you know about. For example, I knew a guy who played on an NHL team in the 1980s. After plying him with a little liquor he'd happliy regale us with plenty of tales of who was and who wasn't gay, and it was a bigger number than most would expect (typically, 3 or 4 guys on a 25-man roster.) None of the guys he listed ever "came out" after they retired. And the fact is, most of the players have a "live and let live" attitude as long as the gays don't act that way in the dressing room. And most of them know better than to "act gay" in the locker room.
For example, there's a guy who used to play for the Leafs who was commonly known around the league as "Wendy". Not hard to figure out who I'm talking about. This person was, in no way, effeminate or lispy or limp-wristed and has never came out, even though he's long been retired.
BTW, Steve, ever hear the phrase "one doth protest too much"?
Posted by: bartman at Feb 11, 2007 5:11:17 AM
batman,
Sure, I've known plenty of macho gay guys but you can't deny that their are certain statistical correlations between sexuality and behavior. I don't have any reason to believe gays are any less likely to be jockish but it could be that their is some correlation that makes them less likely to enter sports.
Still my best guess is that Tyler makes too little of the cultural/social effects of having once been involved in sports. I mean just take a look at any ex-catholics you know to see if proscriptions people no longer believe in simply disappear. People absorb the values and norms of the culture around them and keep them even when they leave.
Posted by: logicnazi at Feb 11, 2007 5:39:12 AM
I found a great study in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology that uses a number of different surveys and datasets to explore the occupational profiles of gay and straight men.
One method, interestingly enough, is using obituaries, both in the gay community and from the New York Times, which captures the elite samples.
For that sample, just like Steve, the author considers AIDS deaths a suitable proxy for identifying the homosexuals. He argues that it is unlikely that people in this sample would have died of dirty needles, that over 40% of the male AIDS death entries listed a male as a companion, that the rest had no listed companion, and for those who died of needles and such, the families explicitly had the Times mention this. Furthermore the AIDS proxy/elite sample data matched survey and gay obituary samples.
From these methods we learn that:
- Gay men (3% of the population) constitute over 50% of hairdressers and librarians, and 20-50% of artists, writers, and performers. (Also here is the Bailey study that estimated over 50% of professional male dancers are gay)
- Gay men are significantly overrepresented in nurturant professions such as teaching, nursing, and serving.
- Up to 73% of gays work in arts and entertainment fields, as opposed to 20% of straight men.
- Gay males are significantly underrepresented in sports (0.4% to 4.0%), law (4.0% to 11.3%), business (3.3% to 22.4%), and military (0.4% to 1.8%) occupations as well as in blue collar fields (9.0% to 49.4%). Typically women are twice as represented in 'masculine' fields as gay males. (e.g. 0.8% of women in sports)
This is all also consistent with gay male stated occupational preferences:
Whitam and Dizon (1980) found that a plurality of gay men, when asked for their ideal occupation, chose entertainment and the arts (42%), with the second most popular choice being teaching and the helping professions (22%), Their interest in acting, art and design emerged in early childhood, and was linked to other early cross-gender behaviors such as dressing in girls clothes and playing with dolls.
Of course this is consistent with atypical gay gender behavior even in early childhood (e.g. no "rough and tumble" play characteristic of boys), which change predictably according to prenatal hormonal events in people and animals. (as I discussed in the last thread)
Posted by: Jason Malloy at Feb 11, 2007 6:56:35 AM
logicnazi:
For statistical correlation to be made, one has to have data. Outside the self-announced, self-identified homosexual community, nobody knows who is and who is not gay. The people who publicly announce themselves to be gay may be predominantly effeminate, but a lot of gays do not publicly announce they are gay, and either keep their sexual acts private and discreet or repress them entirely.
Nobody has been able to come up with any reliable, verifiable answer to the question "How much of the population is gay."
I live in an Islamic state. If you took a survey here, you'd probably find approximately 0.00% of the population publicly self-identifying as gay. On the other hand, there are many more homosexual acts per capita than in the US, mostly because of strict gender segregation. Just like in US prisons. So, is a "straight" guy who takes it up the butt "to help his brother" in the dorms in Saudi more or less "gay" than a celibate Catholic priest who has relentless gay thoughts?
Begin to notice the classification problems, as well as the identification problems? They make statistical analysis so incomplete as to be utterly meaningless.
Posted by: bartman at Feb 11, 2007 7:11:26 AM
Thanks, Jason. I did the same study, completely informally, though, when I subscribed to the NY Times in 1993. I read the obituaries everyday of all the men who had died under age 50. The great majority appeared to be homosexuals (e.g., few were married and the obituaries often listed a "longtime companion"). The occupational distribution was very much as this study found, confirming common stereotypes about homosexuals.
I vividly recall, though, reading about a 35-year-old Wall Street leveraged buyout raider who had died leaving a wife and three children behind. "Wow," I thought, "So maybe this is an example of the closeted married gay macho men that gays are always claiming exist in such vast numbers." In the last paragraph of the obituary, however, it was revealed that while rock-climbing in Yosemite, he had fallen off Half Dome.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Feb 11, 2007 7:58:43 AM
Helene Elliott:
NHL breaks ice with role in gay-topic movie
February 11, 2007
Paul Brown, producer of the just-completed movie "Breakfast With Scot," said he wasn't trying to promote an agenda in this story of two gay men who become the guardians of an 11-year-old boy who's more out there than they are.
"It's an entertaining film, not an issue-y film," Brown said.
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His intent aside, the twist this Canadian production takes on Michael Downing's 1999 novel may turn "Breakfast With Scot" into a cultural flashpoint.
In freshening the plot, partners Sam and Ed, originally a chiropractor and a magazine editor, respectively, were recast as a former Toronto Maple Leaf and the team's lawyer. Delighting Brown, who grew up in Toronto, the NHL and its crown-jewel franchise allowed him to use their names, logos and action footage to enhance the film's authenticity.
Although movies made in Iceland and Germany portrayed gay soccer players and their struggles after coming out, this is believed to be the first time a professional sports league and team have lent their names to a film in which homosexuality is a central topic. That the NHL would be the groundbreaker is infinitely surprising.
The caretaker of this most macho of sports, the NHL has long been insular and conservative. Among its most prominent figures is Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz, who owns the Kings and Staples Center and has given financial support to an anti-gay ballot measure and anti-gay groups in his home state of Colorado.
On the ice, intolerance toward those outside the mainstream has been well documented. The first European players were verbally and physically harassed, and black players have told of being called "ape" or "monkey" by opponents as recently as last season.
Last month, the Palm Beach Post reported that two Florida Panthers shaved their mustaches because Vancouver Canucks players said the facial hair made them look "gay." Olli Jokinen, the Panthers' captain, said the comments came from "a couple of idiots," but he and Ville Peltonen nonetheless felt compelled to alter their appearance, presumably so they would no longer look gay.
If supposedly looking gay ignites slurs, imagine the bigotry an admittedly gay athlete would face if he were still active on the ice or field.
Former NBA player John Amaechi disclosed last week that he is gay, joining half a dozen or so men who came out after their pro sports careers ended. For women, the taboo seems less powerful: tennis players Martina Navratilova and Amelie Mauresmo long ago acknowledged that they are gay, as have Sheryl Swoopes and several other players in the WNBA.
Cyd Ziegler of outsports.com, a website that covers gay and straight sports, said the movie isn't earth shattering but might combat homophobia at the corporate and management levels. He believes there are pro athletes who might have come out to friends but won't come out publicly because they fear teammates would shun them.
The movie "sends a message to some of those players that a bad attitude would not be accepted here. You could have a broader level of acceptance," he said. "That level shows some advancement, that the Maple Leafs and the NHL might support someone who's gay."
The film is in the final editing stages and will soon be screened to test audiences in Canada. Made by Miracle Pictures and distributed by Capri Releasing, it will be released in late spring or early summer. It doesn't yet have a U.S. distributor.
Its most notable actor is Tom Cavanagh, who starred in the TV series "Ed."
Richard Peddie, president and chief executive of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, called Canada "a diverse and accepting country" because of its ethnic mix and its recognition of same-sex marriages and partner benefits. But Peddie said he got a flurry of objections when the movie began shooting in Toronto and he's braced for more when it's released.
"We're obviously a sports team that's the New York Yankees of Canada, the No. 1 sports brand, and we decided we had no problem being depicted in the movie," Peddie said. "It's quite benign.
"When you've got 'Will and Grace' on TV and a comedian kissing her girlfriend on TV, it's so accepted. We think it's very entertaining and tame."
The NHL gave its approval after staffers from NHL Productions, club services and communications read the script. They passed it to the Maple Leafs for their consent.
"The group thought this was a very interesting and heartwarming tale of two parents who are trying to raise a child who is a bit eccentric and just suffered the loss of his mother," said Bernadette Mansur, the NHL's senior vice president for communications. "We were all in agreement that this was something we wanted to pursue."
Like Peddie, the NHL has received protests over its involvement. Mansur said most came from followers of James Hartline, a self-described former homosexual turned Christian activist in San Diego.
Without having seen the movie, Hartline called it "degrading" and condemned the NHL for "promoting homosexualization of small children." He added, "The National Hockey League is now becoming a willing partner with the fringe elements of the radicalized homosexual agenda and their ultimate goal of worldwide sexual anarchy."
His dismay is shared by Brian Rushfeldt, co-founder and executive director of the Canada Family Action Coalition. Rushfeldt said the Maple Leafs were "underwriting homosexuality" by permitting the use of their name and logo.
"This is another attempt by certain individuals to normalize homosexual behavior, and they assume that the Maple Leafs will help the cause," Rushfeldt said. "I don't think it does much for the image of the NHL amongst families who may want their children involved in hockey."
Mansur said the league "didn't intend to make a statement one way or another about homosexuals." However, it surely will be taken as such by anyone who has an emotional stake in this issue.
"Certain individuals are truly missing the point here," she said. "This is a story of a contemporary American family that exists today and is trying to raise a son in the best way possible."
If the presence of the NHL and the Maple Leafs in "Breakfast With Scot" can stir a healthy dialogue and shatter some assumptions, it will be the most worthy accomplishment either can hope for this season.
Posted by: AB at Feb 11, 2007 9:39:50 AM
Steve and Jason: It's really insincere to rebut the worst arguments of your opponents and claim you've made your case. Reasonable people in this thread are not arguing that closeted married gay men exist in "vast numbers" -- only that they exist in larger numbers than what straight people would know from personal experience.
> "But the typical differences in avocations between gays and straights are not random like the donut shop example."
This distorts my argument. I am not claiming such differences are random -- only that once a critical mass has been reached, the effect can magnify for reasons unrelated to why the initial (smaller) groups formed. This isn't intended as a complete explanation of why gays are underrepresented or overrepresented in different fields, so no need to characterize it as such.
Several commenters here have challenged the idea that the incidence of AIDS is a useful in determining the number of closeted gay men in the general population. For those who didn't follow the earlier thread, the problem is that the population of gay men who contract HIV is not representative, due to differences in sexual practices. On the one hand, we have the flamboyant party queen who lives in a gay neighborhood, has a "gay job," and has hundreds of tricks a year, year after year, and goes bareback (no condoms). On the other hand, we have closeted married preacher Ted Haggard, who out of discretion, apparently restricted himself to a single male partner and took precautions. While there certainly are closeted men who have wild and unsafe sex with large numbers of men, my sense *from personal experience* is that those who are married are more likely to take precautions (condoms, oral only, fewer partners, lower frequency, choosier about partners, etc.). This also keeps them freer of other STDs (e.g., syphilis, gonorrhea) which the wife might notice earlier than HIV.
I haven't heard a response to this point here.
Posted by: Alec Scudder at Feb 11, 2007 11:20:36 AM
Coming from the other direction, Tyler seemed perhaps to imply that
gayness might be associated with nerdyness. Of course nerdyness is not
associated with athleticism, whether of the NFL center or the figure
skating types. However, I would note that in the earlier thread on
all this, physics was listed as the academic field with the highest
rate of males being married (I think it was 96%), and I think there is
a greater tendency to nerdyness among physicists than among most fields.
Of course, it could be argued that nerds are more likely to be married
because it is the only way they have much hope of getting laid...
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Feb 11, 2007 1:20:24 PM
Regarding the alleged masculinity of the gay leather scene, there's a saying in the gay community about such hyper-masculine venues:
"They're all swapping recipes in the back."
Seriously, there are plenty of masculine gay men. But we are talking averages here, and on average, gay men are more feminine. I'm gay and I can admit it. What's the big deal?
Posted by: MarcZ at Feb 11, 2007 4:04:26 PM
