Sexuality in Sports

“Queerness is illegible and therefore lost in relation to the straight minds’ mapping of space. Queerness is lost in space or lost in relation to the space of heteronormativity.”

People that are queer face some of the most monumental challenges and obstacles in everyday life. The world that we live in still has not adapted to queer people. Nobody has forgotten the 2015 Orlando shooting, when an American-born man who’d pledged allegiance to ISIS gunned down 49 people at a gay nightclub, which was the deadliest mass shooting in the United States and the nation’s worst terror attack since 9/11. The above quote talks about how queerness is lost compared to the space of heteronormativity. It took me a while to understand what this actually meant, but once I figured it out, the term lost was spot on. If you think about it, queerness is different from race and gender issues. People of color are socially accepted in the world we live in today, however, if a queer or LGBQ person is walking around, they seem to have a lack of or lost identity. It is unfair, and the challenges that these individuals face is prominent in most fields, especially in sports. In the sports broadcasting industry, there are rarely any queer anchors, and if there are, the public rarely knows about it. It is quite possible that the company does not want this information to come out, due to the domination of masculinity in sports. As far as players that are queer in sports, there have been very few due to the backlash that these individuals could face, especially in a locker room setting. In other words, these individuals and athletes are lost, as they cannot be honest and true to themselves. If they are honest with the public, then it could drastically impact their career, as many teams may shy away from them or not be interested in their services at all.