Gay rights has infiltrated our sports pages, otherwise, I'd be the last person to carry on this debate.
If there was a good reason why I got into sports journalism, which there probably isn't one, it was to avoid serious discussions posed by intellectuals like John Amaechi.
I'm the person who wears high school football hoodies (because it's cheaper than buying different ones), broke his face making a tackle during the fallsemester (still relishing my new scar and titanium plate). And I would use the word "gay" to describe a cheap shot block (as if there was something blatantly homosexual about that).
Amaechi just so happened to play his college basketball at Penn State and decided to come out right when I was covering the current men's basketball team, which increasingly becomes an afterthought.
If neither was the case, I would never have interviewed him last Wednesday.
If I didn't spend 20-mintes on the phone with Amaechi, I might have already dropped this subject and moved on. If Tim Hardaway hadn't apologized yesterday, for the second time, after saying, "I hate gay people," this sports page might be Amaechi-free.
People want to think that Hardaway is an anomaly, that most Americans are educated and can connect with the struggles of a homosexual man or woman in the year 2007, but more heterosexuals have to admit they have no idea.
While everyone would like to think whom you sleep with shouldn't matter -- it does. Discussing the topic is the only way for that to change. Sports page or not.
I admit it. I grew up in South Jersey and never, to my knowledge, met a gay man. All I learned about gay culture was from rough stereotypes on television and from characteristics that my football teammates would label as gay -- and it wasn't a compliment.
So when I spit out that first question, I asked Amaechi why he didn't you come out during college, forgetting my own experiences, and forgetting that he probably heard those same jokes in his high school.
He laughed before answering, saying it was "incongruous" with his goal of playing basketball at Penn State. Also, he was living in an American culture where "you can't see your cat before you come across somebody who wants to damn you to hell."
"Well, then why are you doing it now?" I asked, not fully grasping the big picture.
"This is very uncomfortable, but this is all important, that's all," Amaechi told me, sounding frustrated by the absurd amount of ignorant questions he had been subjected to before hearing my batch.
He had used words like "vanguards" and "titillating" enough times to make my head explode. I was getting mentally schooled.
"Do you want the exposure to end soon?" I asked, trying to understand what he was feeling.
"No, no. I'm going to use this to bring change," he said. "I'm not going to go away. I'm going to make it [the homophobia] go away. I'm going to make people open their minds and have conversations and change."
Amaechi wants to get people like me, the stereotypical American boy, who grow up to look at gay men in a negative light, to talk about homosexuality.
Otherwise, I would only see Amaechi as a 30-second clip on SportsCenter. Remember how long it took everyone to forget about Sheryl Swoopes, a star in the WNBA, who told us she was gay? How long will it take before we forget about Amaechi, or the forever-linked Rene Portland and Jen Harris?
Ironically, any issue that involved discrimination or sexual orientation in sports has followed me during my Collegian career. When Harris filed suit against Portland last year, I was covering the women's basketball team.
While many evangelistic Christians might consider me cursed, these series of events have gotten me thinking that maybe some higher power has meant for this to happen. Maybe I am one of the first ignorant people to be educated.
At the end of the interview, I actually apologized to Amaechi if I didn't grasp all of the wisdom he had tried to impart. He had a few kind words, a "thank you" and a "take care of yourself," and school was out.
It's hard to change the way you think. I'm probably going to have trouble not calling extra homework during spring break "gay." I bet it will slip out a few times, and then I'll think back to this interview and realize how wrong it is.
Then, maybe, with a deeper outlook, I'll keep talking.
