What does sex-positive APS think? Lots of talk about it with NBA players coming out and NFL players threatening to come out.
AZR's perspective:
I don't care.
I don't want pro sports anyways, with the exception of a little hockey every now and then.
However, I think openly gay players in any pro sport will hurt the financial bottom line. Reasons:
1. Urban blacks don't like gays. Urban blacks like basketball. Gay players will cause urban blacks to buy some other baseball cap or hoodie sweatshirt than an NBA or NFL one if there's a gay player on that particular team's roster.
2. Manly PBR swilling tailgaiter crowd watches football for the primal combativeness of it. It's the modern day equivalent of the gladiator arena. Gay players = not quite so manly and combative, less chest thumping and boasting about how "my" team is gonna make "your" team its biyatch. Locker-room-by-proxy vernacular will decrease ("He's gonna own his ass" and so on). So some of the fun of the manly tailgating beer swilling experience is reduced, resulting in fewer instances of such behavior.
You might be right about #1. Milwaukee is currently plastered with this org's ads on buses and billboards.
http://journey2accept.org/content/about-acceptance-journeys The whole sub-text obviously is, "Please don't beat, kill, or disown your LBGT black family members/neighbors.."
Frankly, if the inner city black community de-emphasizes sports as one of their few visible "attainment goals" over this, it might have a silver lining. As long as rap/pop or worse doesn't pick up the slack. Although I admit, the law of unintended consequences might just push them even harder towards gangs, drug-dealers, and charlatan preachers, race-baiters, and .gov and non-profit .pub sector bureaucrat jobs. As nasty a steep pyramid it is, and how long the odds, at least it was the one redeeming goal that demographic had.
2. Not so sure. Western Civ has a pretty long tradition of accepting homosexuality in certain manly kill-em/beat-em pursuits, Spartans, Rome/Gladiators, quite a bit of it all through the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and onward. And it's been out there for awhile in some pro sports like tennis and golf, even if they don't get to the core of flannel and PBR sports-America.
If they get past this hump and the Left/MSM is careful to not over-use gay pro-sports players as a cudgel, I don't think it'll make a huge difference.
Whether or not it's marching orders from the NBA, or the desire to maintain acceptance with the NY/Hollywood glitterati, the supportive words from the majority of NBA talent we've seen so far is probably how it'll go in each league where it happens next... at least publicly.
