That’s what made Corey Johnson’s story so appealing. He was no superstar, but he was that masculine icon, the high school football captain. A linebacker, yet.
Less than a year after the Billy Bean story, again following up on a gay writer’s local piece—this one by Peter Cassels in Bay Windows—I met Corey, who had revealed his sexuality in a series of meetings orchestrated by his school and a Massachusetts gay rights group, while he was still playing. It was a textbook model of how to peel the coming-out onion in a nonconfrontational way. It turned out well; after one big victory in which Corey starred, his Masconomet High teammates gave him the game ball and sang the unofficial gay anthem “YMCA” to him on the bus ride home. It was a feel-good story but hardly typical. A few miles away, a high school football player had been beaten by teammates when he came out. His family was driven out of town.
I thought that because of Corey’s age and the iconography of high school football, this story was advancing the stories of Gallagher and Billy Bean. But it would not have been on page one without a fortuitous news peg. The Sunday it appeared, Corey, who had just turned eighteen, was a speaker at the Millennium March for Equality, a gay and lesbian rally in Washington.
For gay activists trying to shatter stereotypes, Corey Johnson was a rare find, a bright, vivacious quick study who also wrestled and played lacrosse and baseball as he won three varsity letters on a winning football team. He was also conscious of his role.
“Someday I want to get beyond being ‘that gay football captain,’” said Corey, “but for now I need to get out there and show these machismo athletes who run high schools that you don’t have to do drama or be a drum major to be gay. It could be someone who looks just like them.”
At five feet, eight inches and 180 pounds, Corey had to make up for his drama club size with the speed and brutality of his blocking and tackling. He suspected his homosexuality by sixth grade but suppressed further thoughts about it. He did not feel part of what he called “the elite jock mix” of heterosexual innuendo and bravado. He didn’t go out with girls, he told me, because he didn’t want to waste their time. It wouldn’t be fair.
In the very first game of his varsity career, as a sophomore starting at both right guard and middle linebacker, his blocking was so effective and he made so many sacks that the line coach awarded him the game ball. Yet he was so afraid that everyone would hate him when his secret was revealed that he was often unable to sleep at night or get out of bed in the morning. He would reach out on the Internet, finding other gay youngsters, even other gay football players. For years, he exchanged e-mails with a gay right guard in Chicago.
Corey’s decision to come out began taking shape during his family’s 1998 Super Bowl party. One of his uncles pointed at the comedian Jerry Seinfeld in a commercial and called him a fag. He said that such “sick” people needed to be “put into institutions.” Another uncle laughed. Corey’s mother, unaware at the time of Corey’s orientation, chided her brothers and asked them not to use such language.
Corey went into the bathroom and cried. A month later, he told his guidance counselor and biology teacher that he was bisexual. He was a virgin at the time. Later, he told his lacrosse coach that he was gay. All three were supportive. They also began to understand his moodiness and mediocre grades.
He told no one else during that summer and the football season of his junior year. He joined the school’s Gay Straight Alliance, which was made up mostly of straight girls. Since he was known for defending kids who were being hazed or bullied, no one found this remarkable. The team voted him cocaptain.
After Christmas vacation, he decided to tell his parents.
His father already knew. He had read an e-mail exchange. For months he had held the secret; he didn’t want to burden his wife, who was absorbed in ministering to her dying mother.
“I dropped the ball,” he told me. “What if Corey had done something to himself?”
Corey told his teammates that he was gay, that he hoped for their support, and not to worry: “I didn’t come on to you last year in the locker room, and I’m not going to do it now. Who says you’re good enough, anyhow?”
That lightly dropped remark had been scripted in the preliminary meetings with his teachers and the state’s Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.
Corey remembered, “At first the team was meek about it, people didn’t talk to me, and when they saw it was still just me they asked all kinds of questions. They wanted intimate details. They thought it would be cool to know more about the subculture. When they heard about a gay bar called the Ramrod, they asked me to get them T-shirts.”
There were incidents, quickly shut down. The president of the school’s booster club, the father of four past, present, and future players, demanded that Corey be removed as captain to preserve “unit cohesiveness.” Coach Jim Pugh told him that he was the divisive one and that it was not an issue. When younger players complained to another cocaptain about having to shower with a gay teammate, he would growl, as he would to most complainants, “You’re a football player, toughen up.” But then Masconomet football players traditionally never showered at school; they went home from games and practices filthy and smelly. I couldn’t figure out how much of that was teenage self-consciousness and how much the nasty condition of a rusty old high school locker room.
After the story ran, Ed Gallagher called me, ecstatic. “This Corey is a pioneer, a leader, but he’s up against the hypocritical right-wing hate mongers who want to punish people for being human. I say there are no straights or gays, just ‘strays.’”
We both thought the dialogue would begin now. This one was the Big Story, a high school football captain rallying the jocks, smashing the stereotypes. High school was the heart and soul of Jock Culture; it was where the values and definitions of American manhood were imprinted. Sports columnists, talk radio hosts, the latest phenomenon of Internet chatterers (this was 2000) would be all over this story.
It never happened. They didn’t want to hear about gay players. It was off message, it complicated the mainstream fantasy. Rumors of gay stars tended to be floated by gay fans who wanted to claim them and antigay fans who wanted to put them down.
My third and final Big Story about an athlete coming out was again about a popular hard worker who tried to fit in, but this time it was a 300-pound NFL defensive lineman, a veteran of nine years in the trench warfare zone of sports. How could you discount this symbolism? Pro football players have been promoted as supermasculine warriors, no women or sissies allowed. So how do you explain Esera Tuaolo living in a suburban house with his adopted twenty-three-month-old twins and the man he described as his husband?
Tuaolo had been a star at high schools in Hawaii and California, and at Oregon State. He’d had a successful rookie year with the Green Bay Packers in 1991 that included thirty solo tackles and the singing of the national anthem at Lambeau Field before a game.
“I knew when I was young that I was attracted to men,” Tuaolo told me. “But once I could give a name to it, I backed off. I had girlfriends as a cover-up, and I made sure I was seen leaving strip clubs. I drank a lot. I was always anxious, always in pain. I was afraid if I was too much of a star I’d be exposed. Once you learn the system, you can play just hard enough to make the team. That’s pretty sad. I didn’t want to call attention to myself. If I had a sack I’d have a sleepless night, wondering if now they would catch me.”
In the locker room he was the jolly “Mr. Aloha.” He says he never suspected that there were other gay football players. (“His gaydar must have gone dead,” says Dave Kopay.) Tuaolo’s social life playing for Green Bay, Minneapolis, and Jacksonville was limited except during the off-seasons, when he returned to Hawaii and to friends who knew he was gay. In 1997, concerned about Tuaolo’s suicidal depression, a friend gave him a copy of The Dave Kopay Story. The book had just been reissued. It was the first book he’d read since college.
“It confirmed everything, it was eye-
opening, I wasn’t alone,” he said. “It forced me to make choices. I decided I was going to be open to a real relationship.”
A segment about Tuaolo on the HBO show Real Sports underscored the rationale for his secrecy. A former teammate and current ESPN broadcaster, Sterling Sharpe, said that any player who declared himself gay would be driven off the team. Sharpe implied that players would feel threatened; a gay teammate would cast doubts in fans’ minds about all players’ masculinity and sexual orientation. Sharpe’s hostility extended the shelf life of the Tuaolo story, giving commentators a chance to expound on the unit cohesiveness theory used to discriminate against gays in the military.
My story ran in the back of the sports section. Old news. I was disgusted by Sharpe and by the mainstream sports media’s refusal to take these stories seriously. Maybe they too were afraid of being called fags.
Once again, I wanted too much. Kopay was thrilled. He said that Tuaolo’s coming out had an enormous impact on him. The two men hugged and cried when they met at our “Brokeback Locker Room” panel at the 2006 Chicago Gay Games. By that time, Bean was heading into a big-league real estate career (Alex Rodriguez was a client), Tuaolo was a successful singer, and Corey Johnson was a political operative in New York. They were all out in the world with thousands of Facebook friends.
But progress was still agonizingly incremental, I thought. Bean was disappointed, too. “I talk to too many kids who decide not to go out for the baseball team or the football team, they’ll be found out,” he told me in 2009. “They’re aware of the ramifications, they hear the gay slurs from the stands, and those are mostly straight guys yelling at other straight guys. I’ve spoken at thirty schools—mostly Division III colleges—and I’ve met one out person in baseball. A lot of guys still go out for cross-country instead.”
Chapter Fourteen
My Driver
In my naiveté (Cosell was right about that), I had thought the gay athlete stories would have a more visible impact. But they just rolled off the table. Was I the only straight journalist interested? What was wrong with those sycophantic dummies, too busy fluffing upcoming events and godding up or beating down athletes to follow real issues? Was Jock Culture that impenetrable?
I felt stuck. The Times column read stale to me. Like Ishmael, I was feeling “a damp, drizzly November in my soul.” Where’s Moby Dick when you need him? As usual, I turned to Neil Amdur, the Times sports editor, a pinwheel of ideas. As usual, he had an idea for me. He tossed me the keys to the car.
Speed thrills.
The Charlotte, North Carolina, racetrack was hosting ride-alongs for journalists, and on Thursday, January 11, 2001, I maneuvered into a line for a driver who seemed a little steadier, more careful than the others, although I have no idea how I could have made such a judgment on my third day covering NASCAR. I had never heard of Mark Martin. I was also attracted by the sponsor for his blue Ford Taurus: Viagra. Even if I hated the ride, I figured, I’d get a few paragraphs out of the brand-new drug, at that time a late-night joke more than a staple of late-night life.
Martin, small, wiry, leathery, at forty-two already old to be the contender he was, barely looked at me as I was stuffed through the window into the seatless passenger side of his car. Hands reached in to fasten a makeshift seat belt and push a red helmet down over my head. The number 6 Viagra growled into life under Martin’s foot. The sound, abrasive at first, became comforting as it enclosed me. By the time we burst onto the track, I felt part of the car.
The first one-and-a-half-mile lap, the warm-up, was faster than I had ever gone before, perhaps 100 MPH, but still slow enough for fantasy. I imagined the Speedway skyboxes filled with corporate sponsors eager to bankroll my NASCAR campaign, the 150,000 seats filled with hard-core fans screaming through the roar of forty-two other cars for me to find a hole in the snips of air between our metal skins and drive around them, through them, before I was crushed by the looming wall.
And then we were at speed, the qualifying lap, and I gave myself up to sheer pleasure. My body pressed back against the seat on the straightaway, but my mind lifted out of my head, a balloon freed of thought, and I felt an exhilaration so intense it seemed a white light. At each corner, as Martin braked and the car slipped down the banked track, I thought, Faster! Faster! and then he accelerated out of the curve and I lived again.
Into the last lap, approaching the checkered flag, Bob (Lippy) Lipsyte in the number 6 blue Ford about to make his move, passing the leader on the inside . . .
Martin’s hand was out the window as he slowed into the third and final lap. I felt satisfied yet incomplete as we rolled back into Pit Road. The rush had lasted less than two minutes. I wanted more. I thanked him. He nodded and looked for his next passenger.
Back at the garage, I was told that we had averaged 163.64 MPH on that second lap, probably somewhere between 175 and 180 on the straightaways. Someone looked into my eyes. “You okay?”
I raised a thumb. I wasn’t ready to talk. I had sensed what NASCAR was all about, and I thought, I am spoiled forever. I have known speed. I want to drive!
Amdur was delighted by my experience, and quite a few readers and colleagues turned out to be closet NASCAR fans, but most Manhattan friends were bemused by my enthusiasm. Some were merely ignorant, some judgmental. Why was I helping to promote a wasteful “sport” of no social value, environmentally destructive, dangerous, obscenely commercial? Isn’t oil the root of all international evil? I tried not to be too defensive. After all, did you have to love war to cover it? In truth, I was loving NASCAR for jump-starting my stalled column.
What was supposed to have been another short-term Times hitch had already lasted ten years. For six of those years I had also written a column for the Times’ weekly City section called “Coping,” whose conceit was that one man’s neighborhood was the city writ small and in my daily rub in the Union Square–Gramercy Park area of lower Manhattan with neighbors, tradespeople, the bureaucracy, I could explore the life of the city.
The two columns, so different in content and tone, created a wonderful professional balance for me. The city column was so much warmer and more intimate than the sports column that I felt like two Bobs. Or Bobbin and Lippy. Readers thought so, too. I’d meet couples at parties who claimed to be fans of mine. The husband would glance at his wife. “Since when did you start reading sports?” and she would say, “Oh, he doesn’t write sports.” I loved that, and I loved the opportunity to merge the personal and the political in “Coping.” But I came up against a wall because another marriage, my third, was falling apart. Though I could write about my mom’s slow death in 1998 and what I learned about the health care system, I couldn’t write about the central issue in my personal life, and “Coping,” this purportedly personal journal, felt bogus. So I quit it.
I’d been through illness and divorce and raggedy times before, but the sports column—or the new book or the TV show—had always been the guideline that led me through the storm. As Billie Jean King said, no matter what was going on in your life, at least you could lose yourself in the game. But this time I wasn’t losing myself in the game. I needed a new game.
Back in 1992, Amdur had suggested I spend an academic year following the boys’ and girls’ varsity teams of a big, diverse high school in Elizabeth, New Jersey. I met the remarkable former football coach turned principal, Frank Cicarell, who opened all doors for me. I vividly remember being taken by a sixteen-year-old football player to the school’s day care center so I could see the baby son he had sired with his former girlfriend. He was trying to impress me and his new fifteen-year-old girlfriend with his manhood.
A year later, Amdur deemed that ice hockey, a sport that I and most Times readers thought we knew enough about not to want to know more, was worthy of my intermittent attention. I spent two glorious seasons sporadically hanging out with the amiable roughnecks of the New York Rangers, including the Beowulf of pro athletes, Mark Messier, and came away with enormous admiration for the
ir hardiness, professionalism, and decency. Unlike most baseball, football, and basketball players, who tend to answer simple questions with something like “Why the fuck didn’t your editor send someone who knows something?,” hockey players seemed delighted to educate a reporter. Besides the obvious fact—that the sport was hungry for major-league publicity—I think the attitude also reflected the traditional, dad-driven, Canadian/midwestern/Eastern European families in which most players had been raised. And I was their dads’ age! The two seasons ended in a made-for-Lippy finish—the Rangers won their first Stanley Cup in fifty-four years.
Then, under pressure from soccer fans, Amdur thought we needed to pay some attention to the world’s most popular game. That turned into years of stories about the teams of immigrant West African, Caribbean, and South American boys who had turned Martin Luther King, Jr. High School in Manhattan—otherwise known in the tabloids as Horror High—into a nationally ranked power. The coach, Martin Jacobson, a former drug abuser and petty criminal, took control of his life by creating opportunities for his players. As long as they showed up, played hard, and eschewed the hip-hop life around them, Jake would be their father, guidance counselor, college guide, immigration adviser, nutritionist, dating consultant. “We are so good,” a Trinidadian player once told me, “ ’cause Coach Jake got no life but us.” It wasn’t true, but Jake had created an environment in which greenhorn kids felt safe. Being with Jake is like running inside a hurricane. He is still a recurring character in my life.
For 2001, Amdur came up with the most excellent of our adventures, a sport most Times readers were content to know nothing about. Amdur believed, rightly, that NASCAR would be the new century’s hot sport. We thought I’d write about stock car racing every six or seven weeks, features, tutorials, a little dilettante anthropology.
An Accidental Sportswriter Page 17
