Homosexuality in sports

LGBTQ+ athletes have faced intolerance due to the heteronormativity within the sports culture that is cultivated in schools.

There have been several notable outspoken homosexual athletes, including Sheryl Swoopes,Billie Jean King, and Billy Bean. Since these three athletes, many new prominent athletes have publicly announced their homosexuality such as Michael Sam, Jason Collins, Brittney Griner, and Robbie Rogers. In the 1980s Tom Waddell, an Olympic decathlete, hosted the first Gay Games in San Francisco. Since then many homosexual sporting organizations have been founded along with sporting events that feature homosexual athletes.

While, overall the trend is towards open acceptance, different sports vary in acceptance widely and homosexual athletes still face many challenges. International sports organizations have come under scrutiny for holding competitions in countries where LGBT equality is out of step with their own policies.

Heteronormativity can be seen as the dominant paradigm in sports culture, stemming all the way into children's athletics in school. Heteronormativity describes "the myriad ways in which heterosexuality is produced as a natural, unproblematic, taken-for-granted, ordinary phenomenon." It is defined as a world/ common view of heterosexuality as the normal or preferred sexuality. This way of thinking has been documented as an emphasis on hegemonic masculinity in sports is often taken to the extreme in sports culture.Arnd Krüger has shown that the history of homosexuality in sports in closely linked to the history of sports and goes back until antiquity. The priority of heteronormative thinking in athletics has led to a traditional view in sports culture that is highly intolerant of homosexuality. This homophobic attitude has been documented in adolescent sports especially, as a recent study by Danny Osborne and William E. Wagner, III showed that male adolescents who participated in football were significantly more likely to hold homophobic attitudes than other peers their age.

In a 2009 study on the well being of same-sex-attracted youth in the United States, Lindsey Wilkinson and Jennifer Pearson found that lower self-esteem and higher rates of depression in same-sex attracted youth were correlated with the prevalence of football in high schools. Sociology researchers Sartore and Cunningham also found a similar stigmatization in the view of homosexual coaches, as high school parents were shown to have an unwillingness to allow their children to be coached by a homosexual. They also found a similar attitude from high school athletes themselves toward participating on teams coached by either gay or lesbian coaches. In spite of the apparent prevalence of homophobic thinking in athletic culture, recent scholars have documented an increasing trend toward openly gay athletes in high school and collegiate level sports.

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