Justice Served in Fresno State Case

While I was out of the country, in the end of June and July, the Fresno State Title IX discrimination case went to trial and the jury issued their verdict. Though this is old news now, I’ve not had a chance to comment on this important case since I’ve been away. So, I’m going to do it now.

For those who are unfamiliar with the case – in a nut shell – the Fresno State former women’s volleyball coach, Lindy Vivas, sued the university charging that she was dismissed from her position in retaliation for her efforts to achieve gender equity in the Fresno athletic program. She charged that she was discriminated against because she is a woman and because she was perceived as a lesbian. The jury agreed with Vivas to the tune of a 5.8 million dollar award. The university had offered a $15,000 settlement. The jury’s verdict and monetary award was a decisive victory for Vivas, Title IX and those of us who abhor discrimination against lesbians and gay men (or those perceived to be) in athletics.

Opponents of Title IX often try to intimidate women coaches and administrators into silence and discourage them from challenging gender inequities in athletics by playing the “evil lesbian” card. In the past this strategy has worked and still does in some cases. Let’s hope that the outcome of the Fresno State case puts other homophobic and gender equity challenged university and athletic administrators on notice that this kind of bigotry will no longer be tolerated.

In the Fresno State case the administers looked (and apparently acted) like members of a preadolescent boys-only club in somebody’s backyard about 20 years ago. The descriptions of their arrogance and unprofessional behavior made it easy for the jury to decide in Vivas’s favor. According to multiple testimonies they even celebrated an “Ugly Women Athlete” Day complete with posters. I remember something like this happening in the third grade, I think. What were these guys thinking? Apparently, they weren’t.

In the past several months we’ve seen at least three discrimination cases successfully settled or won:
• Former basketball player, Jen Harris, won a large monetary settlement in her anti-lesbian discrimination case against Penn State (and coach Rene Portland resigned a few weeks later).
• Former Birmingham, Alabama high school girls basketball coach, Roderick Jackson won his case against the school system charging that they retaliated against him by firing him after he complained about the unfair treatment the girls team received
• Now the Fresno State case

These cases demonstrate the importance of coaches and athletes standing up to discrimination to send a message to other schools that gender and sexual orientation discrimination will not be tolerated and that schools who are caught participating in or condoning this kind of discrimination pay a big price, not only monetarily, but also in reputation. Imagine trying to recruit athletes to Fresno State right now.

Plus, the troubles for Fresno are not over yet. The former women’s basketball coach and the former senior women’s athletic administrator there also have lawsuits pending charging the school with more sex discrimination. Despite this, Fresno State has vowed to appeal the Vivas judgment and fight the additional charges. Earth to Fresno State: Settle the other cases now while you can and then clean up your act. It wasn’t the women athletes at Fresno who were ugly, the jury decided it was the sexism and homophobia of several men in leadership positions there that was ugly.

Time Away

I’m going to be away from my computer and out of the country until mid-July and will not be writing any new posts on my blog until then. Check back later in the summer when I’ll be back, recharged and full of more opinions and observations about homophobia in athletics and the state of sport for LGBT people and their families and allies.

Coaches Behaving Badly

Does it seem to anyone else that there have been a lot of college coaches in trouble or resigning this spring because of allegations of sexual misconduct or sexual harassment of women athletes?

In March, Louisiana State University women’s basketball coach Pokey Chatman resigned amid allegations that she had a sexual relationship with a player while the player was on her team. In April, charges of sexual harassment first leveled against University of North Carolina legendary women’s soccer coach, Anson Dorrance in 1998, resurfaced when federal judges ruled that the allegations seem to be supported. In May, Boston College women’s ice hockey coach, Tom Mutch, resigned amid allegations that he was in a sexual relationships with a player on his team. Also in May, University of Georgia women’s golf coach, Todd McCorkle, resigned after a university investigation into charges that he repeatedly made sexual comments to team members and apparently showed them a Paris Hilton sex tape. You can’t make this stuff up.

Mutch and McCorkle are both married to former athletes on teams they coached. It is unclear when these relationships began but it does raise the suspicion that these coaches have a history of unclear professional boundaries in terms of their relationships with athletes on their teams. Media reports of court records of the allegations against Anson Dorrance claim that he repeatedly inquired about team members’ sex lives, asked who on the team was lesbian, speculated about the size of a boyfriend’s genitalia and used the F-word liberally in these comments. Dorrance apologized, called his comments “sexual banter of a jesting or teasing nature.” Yeah, right. Just light-hearted sexual harassment between a coach and his athletes. Call me a prude, but this is not funny or light-hearted stuff.

I worry that these are only the stories that make it into the public discourse. My fear is that there are many incidents of coaches abusing their positions of authority by engaging in sex with or sexually harassing women athletes that we never hear about either because athletes are afraid to speak up or because athletic departments have covered the situation up. In the cases of Chatman, Mutch, and McCorkle, the athletic directors and the coaches in question tried to skate by at first with claims that the coaches were merely leaving to pursue other career interests. Right, like we believed that. Each team was in the midst of or had just concluded a successful season. When that explanation didn’t fly, The ADs had to reveal the real reasons for the coaches’ resignations. This kind of dishonesty only makes everything worse.

Add these allegations to the stories of simulated sex, sexual humiliation and homophobia that are staple parts of athletic team hazing practices for men’s and women’s teams. Then mix in the stories of college athletic programs using attractive female “hostesses” and visits to strip clubs to entice male high school athletes during campus visits as part of the recruiting process. What do you have? Some pretty serious problems that athletic departments need to address.

Every college and high school athletic department should have written policies about sexual conduct, sexual harassment, team hazing and athlete recruitment that make it clear that these kinds of egregious violations of coaching ethics will not be tolerated. Coaches and all other athletic staff should know their responsibilities and the consequences for not living up to them. This should be part of new coach orientations. Every parent sending a daughter (or son) to a college athletic program should ask about these policies.

You’d think that coaches would just know that having sex with their athletes and making sexual comments to their athletes is never ok and, in the long run, undermines their ability to coach. I guess we’d be wrong to assume that.

I Get By With Very Little Help From My Friends

I was just reading an article about a talk John Amaechi gave to the Log Cabin Republican group, a gay republican political organization. I won’t even get into how twisted I think it must feel to be a gay republican. We can leave that for another time. What I wanted to talk about is something John said in his talk that really struck me. Here is what John said:

“Probably 30 of my former (NBA) teammates have my e-mail and my telephone contacts and probably 16 or so of those I was in regular touch with and there are probably 10 people who I have (on instant messenger). And zero—nobody—who’s active in the NBA has been in touch with me since the day I came out, despite the fact that most of them knew I was gay in the first place.”

Wow. I’m trying to think about what this means. Is it an indication of the extent of homophobia in the NBA? Was Tim Hardaway speaking for the majority of the league, after all? I mean, these guys were his teammates and, presumably, some were his friends, and not one of them called, texted or emailed?

Former players like Charles Barkley, Doc Rivers and Isiah Thomas did make supportive comments in the press about John’s coming out. So did Shaq and a few other current players. I could even understand players not wanting to talk to the press about this, but it is mind boggling that not one of the players who he has regular contact with got in touch with him.

Maybe since many of them knew about John already, it wasn’t a big deal to them. Maybe they don’t understand that coming out publicly is always a big deal to the person doing it. I’d like to think this was the reason for their silence. I hope their non-response is not an indication of their discomfort, their hostility or their fear. Maybe having John call them out on this will get some of them to contact him now. Better late than never, I guess.

It is always amazing to me that heterosexual male athletes, especially team sport athletes, cultivate this big tough guy image, yet for some of them, the thought of one gay guy in the locker room poses a big threat. Or is it the idea that a gay guy can be as tough and strong as they like to think they are that poses the threat? After all, if a gay guy can be tough and strong or if a woman athlete can be tough and strong, maybe it makes their exclusive right to toughness and strength a little shaky. Maybe that's the biggest threat to heterosexual masculinity, revealing how fragile it is, after all?

Coach-Athlete Sexual Relationships: What’s Good for the Goose Should be Good for the Gander

On April 24, Boston College women’s ice hockey coach, Tom Mutch, resigned amid allegations of a sexual relationship with one of his star players. Mutch is married and he and his wife just had a baby this fall. The situation apparently came to light when the player in question failed to erase some sexually explicit text messages on her cell phone before giving her phone to a teammate.

The similarities between this situation and the one at LSU involving women’s basketball coach Pokey Chatman are striking. Both Chatman and Mutch had incredibly successful careers, taking their teams to the Final Four and the Frozen Four. Both coaches resigned in the wake of allegations of sexual relationships with team members. In Chatman’s case, the allegations are that she was involved with a player who is no longer on the team, but the relationship began when Chatman was an assistant coach and the player was still on the team. The allegations against Mutch are that he is in a sexual relationship with a current star freshman on his team. Both coaches are in their 30’s.

It appears that both schools wanted to try to deal with the situations by having the coaches resign without revealing the actual reasons for the resignations. Both coaches maintained that they were resigning to “pursue other career interests.” In Mutch’s case, BC Athletic Director, Gene DeFilippo, thanked Mutch for his contributions to the women’s ice hockey program and then wished him the best in his “future endeavors.” In both cases, as the allegations against each coach surfaced, neither was available for comment and the ADs at both schools found themselves responding to a whole new set of awkward media questions and, in DeFilippo’s case, backpedaling on his support and praise for Mutch.

The BC incident, so closely following the allegations and resignation at LSU, give us an opportunity to examine the “double standard” in play when the coach is a heterosexual man coaching women and when the coach is a woman coaching women. Though Pokey has never affirmed her sexual orientation publicly, the charges are that a lesbian relationship occurred.

So far, the Boston College situation has been most broadly covered by media in the New England region and in the women’s ice hockey “community.” The Pokey Chatman story was a national story with far broader coverage. Some of this discrepancy could be due to the timing of the resignations (Pokey resigned on the eve of the NCAA tournament while the ice hockey season is over) and the higher visibility of women’s basketball vs. women’s ice hockey.

However, it is my sense that the problem of male coaches becoming romantically involved with female athletes on their teams, though a widespread occurrence, is not treated as seriously as when a lesbian relationship occurs between a coach and an athlete. There are boatloads of male coaches who are married to former female members of their teams. In fact, Mutch’s wife was a former player on one of his teams.
Whether most of these relationships began when the athletes were actively competing is unclear. My sense is that, in most cases, as long as a male coach involved with a female player is not caught in the act (so to speak), and they marry after she graduates, everything is hunky-dory and we get to read cute Valentine’s Day articles about them coaching teams together.

I don’t think we will be reading stories like this about Pokey Chatman and the player she was allegedly involved with or may still be involved with. What we get instead are stories about fears that allegations of lesbian relationships endanger women’s sports and stigmatize all women coaches who cannot produce a husband or boyfriend. Aren’t male coaches who become sexually involved with female athletes also a danger to women’s sports? Why aren’t male coaches of women’s sports worried about being stigmatized?

Maybe the BC situation following the LSU situation so closely will help us think about this: Coaching ethics standards should apply to all coaches, men and women; gay and straight; black and white. What’s good for the goose should be good for the gander.

Reflecting on Rutgers Women’s Basketball and Don Imus

I am happy to say that I was wrong about the fallout from Don Imus’ comments about the Rutgers women’s basketball team. I didn’t believe that there would be any serious consequences for Imus other than his two week suspension. Boy, was I wrong and happily so. He finally crossed a line that even the American public, numbed by years of hostile and demeaning radio talk, wouldn’t tolerate. We spoke up and Imus’ commercial sponsors and finally CBS and MSNBC heard us.

Though much of the outcry was about the racism embedded in his comments, Imus’s rant was also sexist. I wonder if there would have been such an outcry if he had called the women from Rutgers some sexist name that wasn’t as racialized as the one he used (I won’t repeat it. We’ve all heard it enough).

Little media attention was paid to the homophobia also embedded in Imus’ comments. Calling the team “tough” and comparing them to professional men’s basketball teams is only thinly veiled homophobia. Calling women “tough” and “masculine” or “like men” is a time honored attempt to intimidate strong women. He didn’t call them “dykes” but the implication was there. Describing the Tennessee team as “cute” in contrast also revealed the expectation that women athletes must be sexy and appealing to men in order to receive their approval as athletes.

I wonder if the public outcry would have been as loud if Imus had only called the Rutgers team “tough” or “mannish” without the racialized slurs. I don’t know. I’m skeptical. Yet, Tim Hardaway paid a similar price for his anti-gay rant. Maybe our tolerance for all kinds of public mean-spirited putdowns whether racist, sexist or homophobic has run out. What do you think?

The Sad Tale of Don Imus: Racism and Sexism as Entertainment

We all knew Don Imus is an idiot. This not the first time he has made offensive racial, sexual or homophobic comments on the air. Since his sponsors and MSNBC have not had a problem with his “jokes” and listeners apparently have not been offended by his “humor” why would he think it was a problem to call the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hos” and “rough girls with tattoos?”

His comments are reprehensible and, in my opinion, he should be fired. He expressed no remorse at all until it became clear that this would not just blow over. Then suddenly he is all sorry and telling us, “I’m not a racist.” Well, what would you call it, Don? On what planet is calling a largely black women’s team coached by a black woman coach “nappy-headed hos” not racist AND sexist.

I am so sick of people spouting racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-semitic crap and then making non-apologies (“I’m sorry if I offended anyone.”) and/or going off to rehab for a few days and thinking it is all ok. This is so much bigger and deeper than most of us have the courage to admit.

It’s our fault, you know. We tolerate this bigotry out of apathy, helplessness, or whatever else keeps us silent and so it goes on. Imus will be suspended for two weeks and then be back no doubt to treat us to more of his ignorant rants. His corporate sponsors will revel in the added attention to his show (they have no social conscience unless it makes more money for them). MSNBC will disavow his comments. Yada, Yada Yada.

Every one of us who care about social justice in or out of women’s sports should be in their face about this incident and every other time it happens. If we aren’t, we are complicit in tolerating racism, sexism and homophobia and should not be eternally surprised when it happens again and again.