SPORTS

Challenging homophobia in the NBA

by Darren Edgar

On April 12, in the middle of a televised game, NBA superstar Kobe Bryant called a referee a “fucking fag.” On May 22, in the opening minutes of a televised game, Joakim Noah, a centre for the Chicago Bulls, was heckled by an obnoxious fan of the opposing team and retorted, “Fuck you, faggot.”

Both players were quickly fined by the NBA for “using a derogatory and offensive term.”

Coincidentally, on the same day Bryant made his anti-gay slur two other NBA players—Grant Hill and Jared Dudley, both of the Phoenix Suns—filmed a public service announcement (PSA) on behalf of the “Think B4 You Speak” campaign, an initiative of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network and Ad Council for which the NBA partnered.

In the PSA, various basketball-playing youth are filmed looking into the camera as though they are “trash-talking” their opponents and one young man denigrates his imaginary opponent’s skills on the court by saying, “Your moves are just gay.” This is followed by Grant Hill challenging the comment: “Using ‘gay’ to mean dumb or stupid—not cool.” Then Jared Dudley explains just where one should feel welcome to use such offensive language: “Not in my house—not anywhere.”

In the second-most watched NBA game in the history of cable television, this PSA was aired twice to 11 million viewers. But in a further coincidence this was also the game in which Noah made his homophobic remark.

On April 15, former NBA journeyman centre John Amaechi, who wrote a book in 2007 titled Man in the Middle in which he came out publicly as a gay man four years after retiring from the league, posted a response to the incident involving Kobe Bryant on the New York Times NBA blog “Off the Dribble.”

In his response, Amaechi takes Bryant to task for his initial comment as well as his less than impressive apology. “When you know that people hang on your every word, you should take more responsibility when the wrong words spill out in anger. When you understand that people treat you like a god, you should endeavor to be more benevolent when you exceed expectations and more contrite when you let people down.”

Unfortunately, Amaechi drops the ball by refusing to connect the history of racism through the use of the word “nigger” with the history of homophobia through the use of the word “faggot” when he writes, “I make no attempt at an analogy between the historical civil rights struggle for blacks in the United States with the current human rights struggle for LGBT people.”

Missing the opportunity to make connections between the historical struggles against these two forms of discrimination, he redeems himself somewhat when he writes, “I am tired of people having this debate about the relative impact of pejorative words on their target minority group. If injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, then the relative power of an antigay gay slur is irrelevant, it is simply a threat to human dignity, and that should appall us all.”