The Truth Is Out There: One of the more banal plaints in progressive journalism, usually written in an alt-weekly or "gay" publication, is the piece coyly outing various famous personages. In it, the writer will take to task some closeted celebrity for not being more forthcoming about their sexuality, or nail some Republican politician for hypocrisy over the same issue. Thanks to the internet, allegations about the sexual preference of Jodie Foster, Tom Cruise, David Dreier, Anderson Cooper and half the studio heads in Hollywood are available for public review, as if anyone outside the corner of Castro and Market gives a rat's ass whether Barry Diller or Pete Williams is queer.

There is one group, however, that never gets "outed" in any of those pieces, of course: gay athletes. This may be hard to understand outside the parochial world of independent journalists, but to the overwhelming mass of humanity in the Western World, sports are our single most important cultural pastime, a common language uniting all races, creeds, colors and classes, and play a much greater role in determining male (and, increasingly, female) sexual ideals in our society than movies, television, politics or any other institution.

Mix in the tendency for SportsWorld to support a generally conservative viewpoint, and one would think that public challenges to gay athletes would prove to be too tempting to resist. The battle to insure full civil rights for gays and lesbians is being fought out across the country right now, state by state, and it would be far more cataclysmic in Red States if an athletic hero were to "stop playing games and start answering ‘the question’," than it would for a supporting character on Will & Grace to do the same thing.

And obviously, gay men and women are as present in sports as they are in any other social institution. But if one didn't know any better, one would think that they were limited to individual sports, such as figure skating, or were confined to women's sports, where the stereotype of the tomboy is still present. But even those athletes can pretty much live a secret life in peace; the gay athletes we know about are either those who came out after they retired (Billy Jean King, Greg Luganis, Glenn Burke) or those whose homosexuality was revealed post-mortem (Jerry Smith, Bill Goldsworthy, Tim Richmond). Martina Navritolova is the only major athlete I can think of who was outed in the prime of her career, and that had more to do with a palimony suit against her than the efforts of the gay press. It would seem that the safest place in the world to avoid unwanted publicity about one's sexual preference is to play in the NFL or Major League Baseball.

So why isn't it done (and, mind you, I'm not endorsing the practice of outing celebrities; I'm just baffled as to why this particular social institution has not received the same scrutiny)? Why is a person's privacy respected if he is, lets say, famous for having hit over fifty home runs in a fluke season in the mid-90's, but not if he's a news anchor for Fox or CNN? [link via Wonkette]