The struggle for LGBTQ inclusion in major sports

Last week, Boston Red Sox player Jarren Duran was suspended for two games after responding to a heckling fan with a homophobic slur.

Men’s pro sports have a rocky history with LGBTQ issues, and although teams are trying, some question whether it’s enough.

Today, On Point: The struggle for LGBTQ inclusion in major sports.

Ken Schultz, contributing writer for OutSports.

Christina Kharl, sports editor at the San Francisco Chronicle.

Ryan O'Callaghan, retired NFL player formerly with the New England Patriots and the Kansas City Chiefs. In 2019 he published his autobiography My Life on the Line: How the NFL Damn Near Killed Me and Ended Up Saving My Life.

Part I

TIZIANA DEARING: Jarren Duran is the ultimate up and comer. The 27-year-old outfielder for the Boston Red Sox embodies their next generation player. And earlier this summer, he was named the MVP in Major League Baseball's All-Star game. He is a bonafide rising star. So when Duran stepped up to bat nine days ago during a game against the Houston Astros, people were watching.

And when he unleashed a profanity laced tirade, including a homophobic slur at a fan who had been heckling him, all of baseball heard it.

JARREN DURAN: It was just a heckler heckling me, the entire game, and I just let the moment get the best of me and just said something I shouldn't be saying.

DEARING: Duran apologized from the locker room the next day while team leadership looked on.

DURAN: There was no intent behind the word that was used. It was just the heat of the moment and just happened to be said. It's just, it's on me for that word coming out, but there was no intent behind that word being used.

DEARING: The Boston Red Sox suspended Jarren Duran for two of their regular 162 games with Major League Baseball's blessing.

They're donating his salary for those two games to the LGBTQ advocacy organization PFLAG. Sam Kennedy, president and CEO of the Red Sox, had this to say.

SAM KENNEDY: Discipline is one thing and it's appropriate and necessary as we look to deter behavior and hold people accountable. But I think it's more important what happens going forward, in terms of stressing our organizational values of inclusion and belonging.

And we've worked really hard over these past two and a half decades to make sure that Fenway Park is a place where everyone feels welcome and our players to feel welcome, our fans, our media, everything.

DEARING: Now, this is the second time in two years that the Red Sox have dealt with a player who's used a homophobic slur, and Major League Baseball has faced multiple other cases, even as it specifically seeks to build a more inclusive culture for the LGBTQ community.

Are they alone? When you think of the Big Four. In men's pro sports, NFL, NHL, NBA, MLB. Do you associate them as positive places for people who are LGBTQ? And in the last few years, while football, baseball, hockey, and basketball have pushed to be more inclusive, a close look at what's actually happening raises questions about which direction they're headed. I'm Tiziana Dearing, and this is On Point. This hour, we examine men's pro sports and ask how LGBTQ inclusive they've really become. Joining us now from Chicago, Ken Schultz. He is a contributing writer to OutSports.com, a news website focused on LGBTQ issues in sports. Ken, welcome to On Point.

KEN SCHULTZ: Hello, Tiziana. Thank you for having me. It's not often I get to call into public radio to talk baseball, so this will be great.

DEARING: We like to, every once in a while, do a little baseball on public radio, Ken. It's unfortunate though that this is the circumstances we're doing this in. And I want to start specifically with situating the Jarren Duran case.

This was a big deal in baseball, yes?

SCHULTZ: Yes, it was. It's the kind of thing that does not happen, obviously every single day, because that would be a nightmare, but as you implied in the intro, it happens often enough in baseball where it is a pattern, and it is a pattern that needs breaking.

DEARING: And I want to bring in this other piece right from the top, because it's the environment in which this happened. Ken, one week before this happens with Jarren Duran a famous baseball player named Billy Beane dies. And he has been playing a really specific role in baseball, and it matters for this moment.

Talk about the Billy Beane who died on August 6th.

SCHULTZ: Correct. Yeah, Billy Beane is a player who played during the late '80s, early '90s. Was an end of the bench guy, played for the Dodgers, Tigers, and Padres. And someone who stuck around for six years, so had major league service time. But during the time he played, was a closeted gay man, for obviously the entirety of his life and the entirety of his career. And we only found out that he was gay when he came out a couple of years after leaving the game, when he opened up a restaurant with his then partner and did a profile.

And all of a sudden, a couple of years in retrospect, it was like, Oh, we had a gay player active in Major League Baseball, and nobody knew about it at the time, again, because it was the mid 90s. And then as he went and told the details of his story, it became clear that Billy Beane went through hell on earth to remain closeted.

Because again, it was the mid 90s, in an era where there was no understanding for that in the game. Or that's the way he perceived it. And as he told his story, more and more people realized that this is something that should not happen again in baseball and to their credit, Major League Baseball reached out and eventually hired him first as an ambassador for inclusion and then promoted him all the way up to special assistant to the commissioner.

And his job was partly in instances like this to reach out to players and speak to them one on one, as someone who had played the game, which is a voice that they respect, and let them know where they had transgressed, where they had done wrong and what they could do.

And this is the most important part, what they could do to make it better. And unfortunately, the way that this timed out, this happened less than a week after Billy Beane had passed. And it became abundantly clear afterwards that there was no one in the game who could provide the service that Billy Beane did when Jarren Duran transgressed by dropping a homophobic slur on mic.

DEARING: So a two game suspension, a regular baseball season is more than 160 games. Other players have received two game suspensions in the past in baseball. How should one look at that? Is that a slap on the wrist? Is that substantial? Put that suspension in context and what it communicates about how the league feels about those sorts of level of egregiousness of what Jarren Duran did.

SCHULTZ: It's extremely a slap on the wrist, that two games in the course of 162 games is a small sample size that you can write off, both in terms of on the field and in terms of the money, in terms of the salary, the proportion of the salary that you get. It's a suspension that essentially says we're doing this because we know we have to do something, but there is absolutely no teeth to it.

And there is nothing about a two game suspension that would cross a player's mind in the future if they transgress, that would make them think twice about dropping a slur on the field like that. So it's very much a PR thing.

DEARING: Ken, now we've got the facts on the table. So tell me, as you're thinking about it, 11 days on now, some time to process ... the suspension has been served, Jarren Duran is playing again.

How are you thinking about this in the context of LGBTQ inclusion in Major League Baseball?

SCHULTZ: I'm thinking about it in terms of LGBTQ allyship among baseball players. It shows where the limits of that are, at that point, as well. That we talked about a couple of minutes ago about Billy Beane and what he would do in a situation like this.

And it kind of occurred to me that there is a player on the Red Sox, that is a strong LGBTQ ally named Liam Hendriks. He's a relief pitcher and has been rehabbing, coming back from injury all year with the team, but he is someone that in the past has strongly advocated, and been admirably advocating for our community, both with his words and with his actions. That he has said in interviews previously, that whenever he signs with a team and free agency, he always asks them directly, do you have a Pride night?

And if the answer is no, then he just will drop the conversation completely and will refuse to sign there. So he is someone who will back up his advocacy with actions like that. He's also someone very active in the community. So I was hoping in the context of this, that when Duran dropped the slur on mic, that Hendriks would be the kind of player that would go up to him in the locker room and have something to say, maybe even functioning somewhat along the same level as Billy Beane would have had were he still alive.

And Hendriks gave an interview to the Boston Globe a couple of days afterwards. And he did the thing that Mor League Baseball players tend to do. And one of them is being criticized by fans or by media, which is usually they circle the wagons around one of their guys.

It's the thing you do when you want to be a quote, good teammate. And Hendriks said, that kind of similar to the sound clips that you played, that Duran said, that there was no intent to attack the community by dropping the F slur. And that Jarren Duran is not someone who is homophobic. He knows him personally and both of these, there's a profound lack, when you hear soundbites like that, it goes more into the realm of the cliché things that someone's friends say when they have dropped like actual hate speech in a public forum like that.

And that's the kind of thing that makes me think, first of all, Liam Hendriks, as a straight man, you do not get to tell us what we should be offended by when someone drops like literal hate speech on the field like that. And it also shows us the limits of what straight allies are able to do or to understand, as well. Because once the words, the F word that Duran used on the field is dropped, that's something that automatically involves all of us.

You can try to insist that it's not intended to hurt all of us, but once it's out there, it does hurt all of us.

DEARING: Ken, as I understand it, there is not yet a Major League Baseball player who has played in the Major Leagues while out.

SCHULTZ: That is correct. We know of precisely three players who, that there are three players that we know that are and were gay. ... That is Glenn Burke, who played with the Dodgers and the A's in the '70s. Billy Beane, mentioned before, and TJ House, who was a relief pitcher with Toronto and Cleveland in the mid 2010s. Now, if you know how the laws of probability work, there are probably more than three gay players in Major League Baseball history.

That's the only three we know. None of them came out while active players.

DEARING: And later in the show, we're going to compare baseball to the other, large men's sports. For now, does that make baseball the last of the big four to have a player play out?

SCHULTZ: Not, I believe the NHL also has not had an out gay player who has come out while active. Basketball has, with Jason Collins being the first in the mid 2010s. Michael Sam was drafted in the NFL and was out. Though he never actually played down on the field, but I think that he is technically considered an out player, who is active, because he was on the practice squad. But yeah, baseball and hockey are the two that do not have an out active player.

DEARING: So just one last quick thing, Ken, you mentioned Pride Nights, Liam Hendriks asking for that.

All but one team has a Pride night in Major League Baseball.

SCHULTZ: Yes. The Texas Rangers are the lone holdouts, and we have been on them every year.

DEARING: Although that is also where the All-Star game was played this year, was in the Texas Rangers Stadium, yes?

SCHULTZ: Yes. And someone, there was a reporter who asked about that when they were talking to Commissioner Rob Manfred, and he gave a very Rob Manfred word salad. Essentially ended up with him giving up the game and saying that yes, we are aware that we've given an All-Star game to the team that doesn't have a Pride night, but they just spent a billion dollars to build a new ballpark.

So there you go. So I guess as soon as the LGBTQ community can raise $1.5 billion to build our own ballpark, then we can have our own All-Star game. So that's great.

Part II

DEARING: Ryan O'Callaghan. He joins me now from Denver. He played right tackle in the NFL for six seasons with the New England Patriots from 2006 to 2009 and the Kansas City Chiefs from 2009 to 2012. And he is the author of the memoir "My Life on the Line, How the NFL Damn Near Killed Me and Ended Up Saving My Life."

Ryan, thanks for making time for us today.

RYAN O'CALLAGHAN: Hi, Tiziana, happy to be with you.

DEARING: So Ryan, how does a sport nearly kill you and save your life at the same time?

O'CALLAGHAN: So I've got a different story than the overwhelming majority of NFL players. Where I only played football as a cover for being gay. The things I really put myself through when I struggled being closeted led me to looking for a great cover. And to me, that was football. So I really invested everything that I had into football. And 100% neglected addressing my real issues of being closeted and my mental health. And towards the end of my career, the injuries I sustained with football turned to an introduction to painkillers, and I quickly became an addict and all of this was because I hated who I was.

And I loved how the pills made me not feel like myself, but it was also personnel within the Kansas City Chiefs that recognized me spiraling. So the same people that were, quite literally feeding me these pills, were the ones that recognized that it was a problem.

DEARING: Ryan, I'll note right away, we're going to talk about many dimensions of mental health crisis here. And for listeners, if you or somebody that you love are experiencing a mental health crisis, you can use the mental health crisis hotline. The number is 988, and you can call or text 24 hours a day. Seven days a week, for help and resources.

In reading your story, this goes all the way back really to middle school, early high school for you, and to paraphrase what you said, putting on football like a suit of armor, because of the things that would help you signal about who you weren't really. It was a lifetime of disguise, Ryan O'Callaghan.

O'CALLAGHAN: Yeah, I made a decision early on.

Where I was convinced early on that my family and friends would never love me for truly who I was. And, coming from a small or conservative area in far northern California, I never really saw an opportunity where I can live as an outm gay man. I just was convinced that my family would never love me, but they would love to have a NFL player's son.

What father wouldn't? And really these fears that I had steared me for the first 30 years of my life.

DEARING: One of the things that struck me, and the first thing that struck me about that story, Ryan, is that it was part of a pretty stunning plan that you had to hide in football. And when you couldn't hide in football anymore, to end your life.

And that was a plan you had for years, and football was a place that aided and abetted that plan. It wasn't a place where you ever either were drawn out, and encouraged to be who you were, or created opportunities for you to change your thinking about whether it was safe and positive to be an openly gay man.

O'CALLAGHAN: Yeah, I struggled a lot. As a lot of people do. Thankfully, times have changed a lot. I retired from football 12 years ago at this point. But obviously there were outside influences that made me feel the way I did, hearing hateful things out of the mouths of people you love really impacts you as a child.

And I just, at that time, I saw suicide as my best option. And really to me, that's really what it was, in the back of my head, it was an option. It was a plan, but it was an option, and I had every intention of following through with my plan. And, like we discussed a little bit early, thankfully for the Chiefs, recognizing that I was spiraling.

Now, they didn't understand why, they knew there was a problem, but they didn't understand what it was or why I was abusing the drugs. But thankfully for recognition from someone, that saved my life. Because all those years I was closeted and dealing with the things I was dealing with, I never spent 10 minutes trying to look at the positives, potentially could I come out?

How would it go? I was just so convinced of the negative.

DEARING: Ryan, when you did first come out to the first couple of people in the Kansas City Chiefs organization, how did it go?

O'CALLAGHAN: So yeah, surprisingly well. And that's really been the theme of everyone I came out to, for the most part. Obviously, there were a couple who I lost friendships with, but one of the first people I came out to is Scott Pioli, who at the time was the general manager of the chiefs. When I was with the Patriots, he was the GM there and he drafted me.

Scott was my boss; he was a general manager. So you're not really friends with your boss, but we had a friendly relationship and through the years, got to know each other. And had some more things in common outside of football. And, I trusted him, I respected him, and he recognized that things weren't going well for me.

And when I finally found the courage to come out and be honest, I felt like I owed it to him. And Scott's a great guy. One of those people where you nudge each other and have fun. And it's the epitome of masculine. And I was nervous coming out to him, but when I did, he gave me a hug, said, love you.

And he didn't really think it was a big deal. When I told him, Hey, I need to talk about something. It's serious, to him, me coming out wasn't serious. But he quickly realized that to me, that was the most serious thing I ever said.

DEARING: In one interview you gave, you said that you told him it was serious.

You came out and then he sat there waiting for you to tell him the thing that was serious that you had come to talk to him about. Because he didn't understand that you telling him you were gay was the thing. He was waiting for something else.

O'CALLAGHAN: Yeah, and you know, that was honestly similar to when I came out to my mom, you know I hadn't, I had deliberately pushed them away and when I came out to her she was like, oh, thank God, you're just gay.

I thought, you know, you might have had cancer or something. And like I said, the vast majority of people I came out to, it's not that they didn't care. It just wasn't a big deal to them. They cared because they saw that I was suddenly happier and able to be myself.

DEARING: Ryan O'Callaghan is a retired NFL player.

In 2019, he published his autobiography, My Life on the Line: How the NFL Damn Near Killed Me and Ended Up Saving My Life. Ryan, I want to talk about the NFL now. And I want to ask, so you've been pretty clear that a lot of what puts you down this path was not football. It was in fact your family and the community that you grew up in.

At the same time, I want to ask you, if you were a 14- or 15-year-old thinking about putting those pads on for the first time now, and planning a life in football, do you think football would embrace you differently? Do you think entering football now would be a space that would still allow you to hide or be protective armor, or is it a space that might draw you out to be who you really are?

O'CALLAGHAN: Yeah, I honestly think football nowadays, like I said, a lot's changed in the last dozen years, but I think nowadays, if I was an openly gay man wanting to play football. I wouldn't have a problem. Not once can I remember while in NFL locker room, did I hear aa homophobic slur or anything negative like that.

I also at the same time, never heard anything positive, people talking about their gay brothers or anything like that, but there's been positive examples of players who have come out. Even recently, Carl Nassib, when he was with the Raiders, he played, I believe two years after he came out. And he was welcomed with open arms and the NFL has done quite a bit in the last few years to show that they're an ally.

Can they do more? Yes. In the last year or so, have they maybe done a little less than in the years before? Because of probably political pressure, yes. But I think they've done a good job, and we started to do a good job of creating an environment that's welcoming.

DEARING: Ryan, one last question for you on this.

What about the fans? Both in reaction to you as you began to be public about your truth and how fans today create an environment of exclusion or inclusion for LGBTQ players. And for LGBTQ fans.

O'CALLAGHAN: I can really only speak to my experience. And when I came out publicly in 2017, I did it without sports.

So your previous guests worked without sports. And in that, I made an email and put my email out there and I received literally thousands of emails from fans or people who saw the story. And I was ready for hateful emails or things like that, but that's not what I got. I got a lot of people that I don't know, emailing me to say, hey, I'm proud of you and you're doing a good thing for a lot of people. I even heard from parents who were football fans that, you know, and maybe disowned their child.

There was one specific who disowned their child after they came out, but seeing my story led them to reconsidering what they had chosen to do. There are always going to be people who are not allies. Beyond that, they're just hateful towards the community. But I firmly believe they are a just very loud minority.

DEARING: So Ryan, I have the last question for you. Somewhere there's somebody listening, whether it's a kid or an adult who is afraid to talk to their family, or they are afraid to be out in the world.

And you have a remarkable experience. Talk to them for a minute and based on your life experience, what do you want them to know today?

O'CALLAGHAN: Yeah, I think everyone needs to evaluate their own personal situation. Talking to the closeted person right now, I think you really need to just look at your situation.

And if you do want to come out, no, you don't have to. I can say that more than likely it will be a positive experience. I'm not telling anyone they have to come out, but I think the best way to start is to find this one person in your life who you are pretty certain would be accepting. And just have a conversation with them and let them know that, saying what you're about to say, to them, is a big deal.

And you would appreciate their respect and support and also the privacy, not to go tell other people. And just start there, even if it's not a friend and it's a therapist, they can't tell anyone. And I promise you, you'll feel so much better. Just getting it off your chest and it's a start.

It's a long process. Even today I find myself coming out to people, just the way I present myself. Most wouldn't assume that I'm a gay man. Overall, I would say, really look at the positives. Try to think of the positives, because more than likely it is going to be a positive situation.

And, if you are someone who hasn't always had a positive outlook on the community. And all I can really say is, just be kind, just because someone's gay, it doesn't affect your life. So it really doesn't take any energy to just be kind and say, Hey, I'm happy you're living your life. But it takes a lot of energy to be hateful.

DEARING: Ryan O'Callaghan played right tackle in the NFL for six seasons with the Patriots from '06 to '09 and the Kansas City Chiefs from '09 to 2012. And his book is My Life on the Line: How the NFL Damn Near Killed Me and Ended Up Saving My Life. Ryan, thanks so much for sharing your story.

O'CALLAGHAN: Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

DEARING: And again, if you or someone you love is experiencing a mental health crisis, you can reach out to 988 by text or phone 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Ken Schultz is still with us. He's a contributing writer for OutSports.com. Ken, we started the show talking about Major League Baseball, an amazing story there from Ryan O'Callaghan and the NFL football, your reactions to what you just heard.

SCHULTZ: Yeah, it really is. And O'Callaghan is one of the players who, through telling his story, both paves the way to make it easier for players down the road to feel like that they have the ability to come out, and find the acceptance that he did, when he eventually started sharing his truth with teammates and with his peers in the game.

And also someone who just deserves all the admiration in the world for being able to endure and go through all that and have the strength to tell us his story honestly about it in retrospect.

DEARING: I asked him about fans and his answer was, I can only tell you the experience that I had. We'll pick this up more later in the hour, Ken, but for now, what is your read on where sports fans are in terms of building an inclusive community for LGBTQ friends, family, people sitting in the seats next to them.

SCHULTZ: It increases the difficulty somewhat, because there still is a loud cadre of fans who are anti-gay and anti LGBTQ, and they make themselves known on social media and also sometimes at the ballpark. And I do not believe they're anywhere close to the majority by any means, but because they have volume sometimes on their side, they have the ability to scare both players, to keep them in the closet. And also, and just as importantly, they scare executives and team ownership from doing as Ryan implied, from doing more that would be able to make things easier for players to come out down the road.

DEARING: And do you agree, just in a yes or no, maybe football stepped back a bit this last year?

SCHULTZ: Yes, but that's because most sports have, I think.

Part III

DEARING: We're going to add Christina Kharl, who is sports editor at the San Francisco Chronicle to the conversation now. Christina, welcome.

CHRISTINA KHARL: Hello, Tiziana. So glad to be here.

DEARING: Christina, you've been listening to the conversation. We've started with MLB, with Jarren Duran's homophobic slur against a heckling fan.

We've heard Ryan O'Callaghan tell the story about actually joining the NFL, using football to essentially hide from being gay and not coming out till years after. In the moment we are in now, ae our Major League sports an inclusive, welcoming, supportive place for the LGBTQ community, a work in progress, a place that's moving backward?

What's your assessment, Christina?

KHARL: I'd say aspirationally, it's a work in progress. But unfortunately, I do think, like there's been a chilling effect because of what I'd say were the larger phenomena going on in our society today, where there is an outspoken minority that is pushing back against the idea that LGBTQ people can be out and still entirely effective in the workplace.

And if that happens to be pro sports, that they shouldn't, there should be no negative consequence, that they can just continue to pursue their careers. And, as much progress as I think we saw, as far as out athletes competing. And particularly the 2010s, I definitely feel like we're at a moment where leagues are increasingly a little concerned, or a little frightened of what the future really looks like.

DEARING: So we actually reached out to listeners and said, if you're a member of the LGBTQ community, how are you experiencing Major League Sports? Leah, called us from Madison, Wisconsin. She and her wife are huge sports fans and they're always paying attention to how inclusive the teams are.

LEAH: Something that just bums me out as a sports fan.

Not just as a woman, but as a gay woman in this country, is that feeling the need to have to Google an athlete's name, followed by LGBTQ in order to see whether or not I have to feel strange about supporting this player, or supporting the team, it's really sad. It feels like most things within our culture, it's two steps forward, one step back for us LGBTQ folks.

So it's just something to be vigilant about and something of a bummer.

DEARING: So I want to, there's two pieces of that we can talk about, Christina, but I want to start with the last piece, the two steps forward, one step back. And, you've made reference to it. Ken Schultz, you've already talked about it a little bit, too.

In the step back, we are seeing a nationwide push, especially and specifically on the rights and presence of the trans community in the United States and the cultural fight around that seems to be particularly finding its way into the stands, into the branding of our Major League Sports. I think about Bud Light losing sales after getting a TikTok endorsement from a trans influencer in 2023.

Christina where does the trans community specifically fit? We've talked a lot about the gay community so far on this show. What about trans people?

So we may have lost Christina's sound there. I'm going to just try one more time for Christina. Do we have you there, Christina?

KHARL: Yes, you do. I'm sorry.

DEARING: That's quite all right.

KHARL: No, it is an interesting moment because, trans people effectively just want the same benefits of playing sports. Like we think that sports inculcate all of these values of belonging to a team, pursuing a common goal, achieving your own personal excellence on the field, trans people as kids and as adults want that, too, for themselves. And so, and want to participate in sports is an entirely normal thing that people grow up with and want. And so like the idea of trans inclusion in sports should be this entirely normal thing.

But because, essentially people are both worried about that normalizing influence of sports, that if a trans person can participate, then heavens, we might accept trans people as equals and citizens and people with the same rights as everybody else in this country. And there are some folks who just do not want that and do not, and whether they've accepted a bunch of, essentially argumentable points about whether or not trans athletes, particularly male to female trans athletes, have a competitive advantage or not. And so they project onto every trans athlete, this idea that they're somehow cheating or somehow wrecking sports.

So we end up with this conversation that is really besides the point, that doesn't look at whether or not trans athletes. Look at the evidence of trans athlete participation. And they don't look at the evidence of, and they're not really interested in sports power or inclusion, and they want to make sure that sports, essentially purposefully exclude what is really a pretty tiny minority of Americans who just simply want to participate in the same way as everybody else.

DEARING: So we're speaking with Christina Kharl of the San Francisco Chronicle, Ken Schultz of contributing writer for OutSports.com. Christina, your line was a little bit choppy there at the end. I'm going to send you back into the control room for a second to see if we can strengthen that. I'm going to turn to Ken Schultz for a second.

Ken, the other half of that piece is the business side of things, and we heard, you mentioned it before the break after we spoke with a former NFL player, Ryan O'Callaghan. There are the fans, there are the players, and then there are the owners and the money. And we've talked about the two steps forward, one step back.

I raised the question of boycott backlash to Bud Light. There was push back on Target for its Pride displays. It's now stepped away from that. We know that the National Hockey League now doesn't allow any display of Pride insignia of any kind on its uniforms during a season. Where does the business of sports fit into this?

SCHULTZ: For the most part, the business of sports is living in fear that they're going to become the next Bud Light, the next high-profile case where the right wing does this organized campaign that turns on them and puts them in the boycott crosshair, so to speak. You mentioned the NHL and their response last year to a player named a Russian player named Ivan Provorov, who decided that he was not going to wear the Pride jerseys that the Philadelphia Flyers had created ... and that kind of spurred other players to decide that they were going to do the same.

And the NHL, as you implied, their response, rather than treating this as a homophobic player by homophobic player basis, decided let's just end that promotion altogether. So we don't have to deal with this in the future. That's where most sports owners are at this point. I do also want to add to that, there are small glimmers of, I don't wanna say quite hope. But hope-ish. Things that happen alongside Pride Nights, that in the course of Major League Baseball, to bring it back to baseball for a second, all 29 teams that hosted Pride Nights previously, hosted another one this year. This was despite all the campaigns against entities and corporations that supported Pride, that in and of itself, it's not them taking a stand, but it is them at least saying that we're still going to do this. And that makes me feel slightly encouraged, that bare minimum is going to keep going forward.

DEARING: I do want to note the teams for example, in the NHL, part of the argument was players saying that wearing the jerseys was, went against their religious values, or in the case of some Russian players, that they were concerned they'd run afoul of Russian law, just to note what the position of the league and some of the teams were. I think we have you back with a stronger line, Christina Kharl, still there.

KHARL: Yes.

DEARING: So Christina, here's the other piece that I want to bring into this. And we talked some, with Ryan O'Callaghan from the NFL about the masculinity and the masculine armor that the NFL let Ryan O'Callaghan put on.

And that's been a piece of the subtext in this conversation so far. One of the things that I want to bring forward is the differences in the ability to be out in the professional women's leagues. You look at the WNBA, which is growing in power, in viewership, in seats, in the stands in television contracts, et cetera.

And it's a very different approach to the LGBTQ community, both on the floor and in the stands. Christina, talk about that.

KHARL: I think in both the National Women's Soccer League and WNBA, they've embraced the fact that a significant portion of their fan base is LGBTQ, that a significant number of players are gay.

The fact that you can have somebody like Layshia Clarendon and come out as non-binary, they can be embraced as well. And that fans aren't going to be upset about that, effectively players are accepted on the basis of who they are, and what they can do on the floor. And so the idea that there's anything less than about an LGBTQ athlete in these leagues, couldn't be further from the truth.

I think what's interesting is this projection, when you bring up Ryan's point about masculinity, that projected ideal that the athletes, they're somehow less than. And some of that is, you know, I think there's this inculcated virtue, that it's not masculine to be gay, which is not even close to true, but then also, people who end up talking about gay people in professional sports, like it's just particularly in the NFL.

It's so very weird when, you know, like you could go back to the 60s. And Vince Lombardi embracing having gay players on his team, because they were out to their teammates like Jerry Smith, and Vince Lombardi, like arguably the greatest NFL head coach of all time, doesn't have a problem with a gay player in his team's locker room.

But instead, today would create, we live in this environment where you have people like Tony Dungy working for a network talking about how he thinks that gay players will be a distraction and it's just not. And people pick up on that message instead of looking at the way in which gay athletes have been embraced by their teammates or accepted as gay. And then people just moving on and saying, and that's not something that matters on the field, of what we're all supposed to be doing on the field is playing a football game or playing baseball.

And it's disappointing that these kinds of positive possibility models, like if you go back to events, Lombardi, instead you find, instead far more common reactions like Tony Dungy responding irresponsibly, or Billy Martin and Tommy Lasorda dealing with Glenn Burke being out in the late '70s and early '80s.

And, again, being pretty bigoted and homophobic. And so instead there's consequences that creates on athletes like Ryan. It's still obviously, like I said, maybe going back to what I said at the beginning, aspirationally, you want to see progress, but unfortunately, there are people who still can project their problems with LGBTQ people in public, onto whether or not they could be allowed to participate in sports.

DEARING: So Vince Lombardi, famously New York Giants, Green Bay Packers, Tony Dungy were for a long time with the Indianapolis Colts. And when you mentioned Billy Martin and Tommy Lasorda, of course, that's baseball. As you noted, so turning back to you, Ken Schultz, it's time to look at today and look at tomorrow and what comes next, especially as a fan base gets younger and younger.

And we know Gen Z, for example, just a completely different understanding of LGBTQ inclusivity. One research study I showed, or poll showed that whereas 9% of Boomers self-identify as LGBTQ, it's more than 20% of Gen Z. So to some extent, will times just change and bring sports along with them?

SCHULTZ: That's the biggest hope, that sports are always in some way of reflection of the times that they're in. And that as attitudes and especially as generations change that have more enlightened attitudes towards our community, it's going to become less of a giant story.

I think in terms of relationship with teammates, that an example I can give is that I talked with a Minor League pitcher named Kieran Lovegrove who played from the mid 2010s to the early 2020s. And at the very end of his career, he came out to his teammates as bisexual. And it was just in conversation on a long road trip on a bus trip, that they were talking about Harry Styles and somehow segued into someone asked him if he's into Harry Styles. And he said actually I am, and I'm bi.

And he said that he found the vast majority of his teammates were open, curious, wanted to listen, wanted to hear about his experience. And anyone who had any objection was the one who was shunned rather than the other way around. So if that's the kind of indication, and Anderson Comás, who was a minor leaguer in the White Sox system, came out publicly last year, and was celebrated by the team on social media.

So as that generation changes, that's where players might have the idea that yes, acceptance is going to be more of an automatic or less automatic, but more an option than players in previous generations understood it to be.