Sep 24, 2004  |  By: RON HUBE  | COMMENTS     

THE SUCCESS OF Amelie Mauresmo, an out lesbian who recently was ranked the world’s No. 1 female tennis player, has been a tremendous inspiration for gay and lesbian athletes — and gay-supportive fans — worldwide.

But if you’re waiting for a player in a sport with such mass appeal as baseball or football to come out in the United States, don’t hold your breath.

Until at least one gay big-league first baseman or bisexual NFL quarterback decides not to hide his sexual orientation from public view, the world of professional sports will continue to seem like a mostly dark and unwelcoming place for gay athletes and their fans.

The story of former NFL player Roy Simmons, highlighted in the Blade last December and recently on HBO, illustrates this problem.

Simmons, a former offensive lineman with the New York Giants and then the Washington Redskins (he was with the Redskins for the Super Bowl in 1984), was “so deep in the closet he was behind it,” says correspondent Armen Keteyian on the HBO program “Inside the NFL.”

Last week the show profiled Simmons, who is HIV-positive and promoting his recent recovery from 20 years of drug addiction, prostitution, homelessness and depression.

Simmons’ football career ended 20 years ago, but his experience as an NFL player living a life of “lies” and “deception,” as he puts it, would likely be the same if he were playing today. Out of the hundreds of gay or bisexual men estimated to have ever been on an NFL team, not a single one was openly gay before leaving the game.

“There remains little freedom for men like Roy Simmons in leagues like the NFL,” Keteyian says on “Inside the NFL.”

He’s right. Major League Baseball has never had an active, openly gay player either. Same goes for the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League.

WOMEN’S SPORTS HAVE fared slightly better. A few lesbian golfers have been out while playing, including Rosie Jones, who announced in March that she is gay after signing a sponsorship deal with a lesbian travel service.

Sue Wicks of the New York Liberty came out in 2002, near the end of her 15-year basketball career and Michele Van Gorp of the WNBA’s Minnesota Lynx did this summer.

But the macho ethic of men’s sports in the United States — especially the locker-room culture of team sports — makes it all but impossible for a gay or bisexual player to be honest about his sexual orientation with anyone but, perhaps, his closest friends.

African-American athletes have an especially hard time, as Keteyian points out on “Inside the NFL.”

“Within the black community, there is a much greater resistance to coming out and to dealing with your sexuality in public,” he said on the program. “And I think Roy faced it and I’m sure there are other athletes … that are facing that right now.”

That’s not to say that attitudes toward homosexuality aren’t changing in men’s sports, just as they are in the rest of American society. But the change is happening much more slowly.

This week, the Tribune newspapers released a survey of Major League Baseball players in which 74 percent said they would not be bothered by having a gay teammate.

“I’ve probably had one already,” the Chicago White Sox’s Willie Harris is quoted as saying.

This, if nothing more, is a hopeful sign.