The steady advance of homosexual and lesbian acceptance in American popular culture has hit a brick wall at the last bastion of macho homophobia left in the United States.

In the multi-billion-dollar world of professional sports, among the thousands of athletes who play for America’s best-loved teams, there is not a single man who admits to being gay.

“It is an amazing statistic,” said Jim Buzinski, an editor at Outsports.com, a website for gay athletes. “There has never been a male athlete from a major professional team sport who has come out while playing. The closet door is still firmly shut.”

Yet a revived debate about shifting attitudes — spurred largely by Brokeback Mountain’s Oscar-winning story of cowboys doomed by prejudice — has focused new attention on life in US stadium locker rooms and on the athletes believed to be living a lie.

In the past few weeks, two former players from the National Football League have published books describing their agonies as they tried to hide their homosexuality from their team-mates.

Esera Tuaolo, a former defensive player for the Minnesota Vikings, said that when he saw Brokeback Mountain, he “started bawling in the cinema . . . every emotion the guys in that movie went through is something I had to go through”.

Roy Simmons, who played for the New York Giants and the Washington Redskins in the 1980s, admitted that after a busy weekend on the gridiron, he would dress up in drag and prostitute himself on the streets. “My life, man, I wouldn’t wish it on anybody,” he said.

Later this year, America will host the Gay Games, an international athletics event modelled on the Olympics. More than 12,000 gay sportsmen from 70 countries are expected to attend, and gay groups have seized on the event to spur debate about homophobic attitudes in professional sports.

Lance LeCompte, a southern California entrepreneur, has launched the Rugby Guys 2006 calendar, featuring a team of mostly gay players. He also made a behind-the-scenes television documentary about the calendar in the hope of breaking down stereotypes about gays and lesbians in sports. “This seemed like the perfect year to do it,” LeCompte said.

Yet for all the well-publicised breakthroughs in US popular culture — including gay characters on primetime television shows, openly gay talkshow hosts and plenty of popular lesbian stars from the world
of women’s sports — many activists acknowledge that the pressures on male athletes to conform with heterosexual “norms” remain all but insurmountable.

“In sports, being labelled gay is tantamount to career suicide,” said Buzinski. The main problem is not the fans, who have become used to seeing gay characters in most other facets of American life, but the players themselves.

One well-known football player once declared ominously that any gay player on his team “would not make it to the next [game]”. Numerous managers have claimed morale would plummet if players had to share their showers and changing rooms with team-mates who were openly gay.

Lucrative commercial contracts might also be at risk. “If somebody famous came out as gay, all those sports fans who love him, who run around wearing his T-shirts and jerseys, it would be something they’d have to start questioning,” said Billy Bean, the only professional baseball player who has ever admitted being gay. Bean waited until after his retirement before going public in 1999.

Such is the threat to a player’s career that even the faintest rumour of gayness can provoke a drastic response. In 2002, the New York Post printed an item suggesting that a member of the New York Mets baseball team was gay.

The next day a leading Mets player called a press conference and denied that he was gay, even though he had not been named in the article. The player, Mike Piazza, later married a former Playboy magazine playmate of the month.

The love story in Brokeback Mountain began in 1963 and ended in tragedy 20 years later. “Homosexuality was once the love that dare not speak its name, and now it is a staple of television and film,” noted Michael O’Keefe, a sports writer for the New York Daily News. “But when it comes to professional sports, it’s still 1963.”

Gay activists calculate that if the national average is applied to sports, there could be up to 400 professional athletes playing football, baseball, basketball or ice hockey who are currently living secret lives as gay men.

Some believe it will take only a single brave sportsman to break the mould and to bring US sports into line with the rest of America. If a well-known player announced he was gay, said Cyd Ziegler, co-founder of Outsports.com, “it would have an effect on every household in America”.

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