Robbie Rogers, Chris Clemons, And Selfishness And Sexuality In Sports

Robbie Rogers

On February 15 of this year, Robbie Rogers, a former member of the U.S. Men’s National soccer team and a professional player in both Europe and the United States, posted on a personal blog that he was gay. Rogers would have been the first openly gay player in major American professional sports, but he announced his retirement in the same post. In a New York Times article today, Rogers didn’t rule out a return to the pitch but said he had no choice but to retire. “I need to be a little selfish about this,” Rogers told the New York Times.

This week, rumors swirled that a National Football League player was contemplating coming out as gay in the near future. That prompted Seattle Seahawks defensive end Chris Clemons to tweet that a player coming out would be a “selfish act” that would “immediately separate a lockerroom and divide a team.”

That makes for an odd juxtaposition, the now openly gay former athlete thinking he’s selfish for coming out in his own way and the straight athlete who thinks it would be selfish for a player to come out at all. Clemons, who later tweeted that he had no problem with gay athletes but thinks they should leave their love life at home, could learn from the story of Rogers, who lived as a gay man in secret for years. Until last year, Rogers hadn’t told his family, his friends, or his teammates. He didn’t go to gay bars or date other men. It was, he told the Times, a terribly unhealthy way to live, though coming out has enabled him to find peace:

“I’m a Catholic, I’m a conservative, I’m a footballer and I’m gay,” he said, trying to describe his fear. “Imagine living all that time with just a cramp in your stomach. I kept thinking, I hope I don’t do something that makes people wonder, is Robbie gay?”

He added: “I was never close to coming out before. Never. I never went to any gay bars, never hooked up with a guy. It was so unhealthy and so bad that I felt this way. Two years ago, I would have thought that I would never come out during my entire life.” [...]

About a year and a half ago, he said, his fear turned into frustration. He realized he had never been able to feel complete happiness or joy because he always felt that he was hypocritical; as an example, he recalled, he felt little desire to celebrate after winning the M.L.S. championship with Columbus in 2008.

By January of this year, Rogers began telling close friends. Sacha Kljestan, a midfielder on the United States team who plays professionally in Belgium, visited Rogers in London a few weeks ago — the pair went to a pub to watch the Tottenham-Arsenal match together — and Kljestan said he had never seen Rogers more at ease.

Seeking that happiness and comfort in your own life isn’t selfish. Nor is it selfish for Rogers to step away from the game to seek out that peace without the media spotlight that would come from being an openly gay athlete in major male professional sports at a time when there aren’t any others. What is selfish is that someone like Clemens would put his own personal discomfort and insecurity at being next to a gay man in the lockerroom ahead of that person’s health, well-being, and ability to live an open and happy life as the person they are. What is selfish is that Clemons doesn’t understand what people like Rogers go through on a daily basis, and worse, doesn’t seem to care about understanding their struggle.

Millions of LGBT people are struggling with the same decision Rogers made, and an untold number of them are athletes. There are gay men in the NFL, perhaps even in Clemons’ lockerroom, who are having that same struggle, who live in the same closet in which Rogers spent 25 years, living a lie and unable to both embrace themselves and be embraced for who they are. I would love to see Robbie Rogers continue his career by carrying the banner for LGBT rights in sports. But it isn’t selfish of him to choose not to. But one day, a gay athlete is going to pick that banner up and take on that fight. If that person separates a team and divides a lockerroom, it won’t be because he is the selfish one.

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Focus On The Family ‘Analyst’: Gender And Sexuality Are Only Determined By Procreation

Jeff Johnston is Focus on the Family’s resident ex-gay, who regularly promotes harmful ex-gay therapy because he claims conforming to heteronormativity is ideal for society. He applies this to trans people too, rejecting transgender identities as disordered. In a new screed against LGBT equality today, he discounted any understanding of gender whatsoever, claiming the only determining factors in gender are what men and women contribute to human reproduction:

Despite years of brainwashing from academia, radical feminists, the media, and entertainment, most people know that men and women are different, unique and complementary. A society that attempts to erase male and female or to create new categories to stand next to male and female is living in unreality. Which of the supposed “other genders” being created by individuals or groups can reproduce or replicate itself? [...]

As Christians we also reject the reduction of humanity to groups defined by their sexual attractions and behaviors. Male and female are categories of existence – there is the biological reality of being male or female, and we live in the spiritual reality of a masculinity or femininity that reflects God’s image. It is de-humanizing to categorize individuals by the ever-proliferating alphabet of identities based on sexual attractions or behavior or “gender identity” – LGBBTTQQIAAFPPBDSM – however many letters are added. No. We stand with the truth that there are male and female. There is no recently discovered race of “homosexuals” or “gays” or “lesbians.” We don’t define people’s essence, their being, by their sexual appetites or by other desires.

Actually, there is a biological reality of being gay or straight too, and no sexual orientation compromises whether someone is male or female. And gender involves so much more than just whether you contribute sperm or eggs — it is the complex intersection of socially constructed roles, behaviors, expressions, activities, and attributes that might be associated with one’s sex and how they interact with society.

Johnston believes he successfully erased his own sexual identity so now he works to erase others’. His simple-minded view of the world ignores wide swaths of diversity within sex, gender, and sexual orientation to the detriment of all. He may claim that Christians “reject the reduction of humanity,” but his narrow categories for who people can be does just that.

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