Sports Saturday
Can art and athletics be a combustible mix? It was a few weeks ago at the University of Mississippi. In a story reported in the University of Mississippi student newspaper and picked up by The Huffington Post, around 20 members of the University of Mississippi football team disrupted a performance of Moisés Kaufman’s The Laramie Project.
The Laramie Project is an exploration of a Wyoming town’s reaction to the brutal killing of a gay man, Matthew Shepard. The incident and the play have led to important anti-hate crime legislation.
The athletes were apparently attending the play as part of a freshman requirement. According to The Huffington Post,
Director Roray Ledbetter said some members of the audience hurled anti-gay slurs like “fag” at cast members, and described the audience’s reactions as “borderline hate speech.”
As an English professor, I see this as a teachable moment. I can imagine that these football players were acting out their discomfort. Although efforts have been made in recent years to root out homophobia in athletics—Kobe Bryant, for instance, was fined $100,000 for calling a ref a “faggot” two years ago—there is still a long way to go. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these boys, when being trained to rush headlong into pain (which is what football calls for), were taunted as gay if they hesitated. Whether or not their coaches used this as motivation, guys regularly do it to each other. I remember my sons fending off gay slurs when they were in middle school. The slur gets thrown around at that age because boys are just emerging from childhood and feel a need to prove their toughness. Or perhaps more accurately, to hide their vulnerability from others.
If something along these lines was at work in the Mississippi theatrical production, then some of these football players found their own vulnerability touched and were lashing out. Perhaps they needed to prove to each other that they were not being affected by the play. Perhaps some of them are closeted gay and were using their outburst as cover.
In other words, maybe the freshman requirement did its job and got them thinking outside their conventional boxes. One never knows what will happen when young minds are exposed to literature.
I hope their teachers and coaches took advantage of the consciousness raising opportunity.
Incidentally, if we saw homosexuality as the Renaissance did, then it could be a spur to athletic endeavor. In the 17th century, homosexuality was associated with toughness. Antonio in Twelfth Night, for instance, is a great sea fighter and at one point he steps forward to fight a duel for Viola. Imagine a coach barking, “You’ve got to play more gay out there!”