Minor League Porn Star

Apparently it is top news that a minor league baseball player once appeared in a gay porn video while in college in Japan. This got me, and I'm sure many others, thinking about the absence of gay players in professional sports.

A good portion of my discussions about gay exclusion has centered on the military, both in my days in ROTC and now in law school. That's understandable, since Congress' "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy remains one of the few explicitly exclusionary rules against gays that the government sponsors.

Yet I've often wondered why professional sports did not come in for greater scrutiny. Obviously we are not dealing with government sponsored exclusion, but from a moral standpoint we ought to be awfully disturbed by the lack of a single openly gay player in baseball, the NFL, the NHL or the NBA. In fact, perhaps we should be more disturbed. Setting aside the wisdom of "don't ask, don't tell," at least we can point to an explicit doctrine that prevents gays from serving openly. We can debate it, we can attack and defend it, and we can encourage our legislators to vote for or against it. Yet with professional sports, there can't even be a discussion about changing this or that policy, since there's no policy to discuss. It's just a cultural phenomenon.

I mean, does anyone really believe that there are no gay players in any of these leagues? I sure don't. And what does that tell us? Are they afraid of their teammates? Their managers? Their fans?

I will say that I was very impressed by the statements of Tadano's teammates, who seems to have gotten plenty of support. Of course, this tells us little about how they would react if he were actually gay (and not a porn actor), instead of pleading that he is not, and that he simply made a one-time mistake.