Football Stud Brendon Ayanbadejo Writes Article Telling NFL To Provide Support So First Openly Gay Athlete Can Come Out!!
Ex-Raven Brendon Ayanbadejo continues to fight for same-sex marriage rights in the US.
FOX Sports
BRENDON AYANBADEJO
APR 22, 2013 2:31 PM ET
Brendon Ayanbadejo is a 10-year NFL veteran who last played with the Super Bowl XLVII champion Baltimore Ravens and is a staunch supporter of same-sex marriage rights. In August 2012, Maryland state delegate Emmett Burns Jr. wrote an open letter to Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti requesting Ayanbadejo cease and desist all public support of marriage equality after Ayanbadejo donated Ravens tickets to help fundraise for marriage equality in Maryland. A law allowing same-sex marriages in the state eventually passed in late 2012 and took effect Jan. 1.
While the equality treadmill under most of our feet is moving at a high rate of speed, I would imagine this journey is not traveling fast enough for many Americans whose lives are directly impacted by the possibility of change.
Consider tennis hall of famer Billie Jean King, who was outed in 1981 when her relationship with another woman became public, and Greg Louganis, the four-time Olympic gold medal-winning American diver, who came out some seven years after King.
With more than 55 years combined of public scrutiny of their sexuality, the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which restricts some federal marriage benefits to only opposite-sex couples, and Prop 8, California’s state law restricting same-sex marriage can’t come soon enough for these two American heroes and California residents who have forever shaped the face of their respective sports.
Yet, we still have such a long journey ahead of us. Draconian policies such as “don’t ask, don’t tell” are a thing of the past, and with the quickly approaching U.S. Supreme Court rulings on the repeal of DOMA and Prop 8 in June, it appears as if we are on the precipice of a more progressive and accepting America.
It is quite hard to fathom that, in two years, we have nearly doubled the amount of states that have legalized marriage equality. In this time, New York, Maryland, Maine and Washington have approved same-sex marriage, bringing the total number of states that allow it to nine, as well as the District of Columbia.
Equal marriage rights are on the radar for Illinois, Delaware, Rhode Island and nine other states by the end of 2014. A March 2013 FOX News poll on same-sex marriage shows that 49 percent of Americans believe in same-sex marriage while 46 percent are in opposition. Support is up 32 percent from 2003.
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While LGBTQ Americans can bravely and proudly serve our country in battle and even die protecting our freedom overseas, it is still perfectly legal in 29 states, to fire someone because he or she is a part of the LGBTQ community.
LGBTQ Americans do not, under DOMA, currently have any federal rights. There are so many things wrong with this picture. And, as many of us openly support and fight for equal rights in this community, we are also left asking ourselves questions about why many who identify as LGBT or Q are still so hesitant to join the fight.
Brittney Griner came out on Thursday, saying people should “just be who you are.” But being who you are in the four major professional sports isn’t accepted.
When will a male athlete come out in the NFL, NBA, MLB, or NHL?
Even as it appears American pop culture is ready to accept a gay male athlete, the stratified sporting culture might not be quite as keen on the idea of our favorite NFL player scoring touchdowns on Sundays and celebrating in Chelsea (NYC) or Hillcrest (San Diego) on Sunday nights with his boys after a hard-fought victory.
I certainly wouldn’t have a problem with it.
Corporate America doesn’t, either.
It’s time to plan work and family weddings as the NFL releases the dates and times for this year’s games.
Corporate America is frothing at the mouth, waiting for a gay superstar to take the sporting culture by the reins. Companies such as Levi’s, American Airlines, Google, and Starbucks are huge money makers, but also morality moguls in corporate America, having been rated in the top LGBTQ friendly corporations.
And just like the infamous “Bo knows” marketing campaign by Nike, I could also see a sneaker and apparel giant backing a superstar athlete with a “gay is great” campaign.
Make no mistake, the LGBTQ community’s buying power is something corporate America is keeping its eye on. The overall spending power of this growing demographic is projected to be well over $2 trillion in 2013, by some estimations.
I personally have stopped patronizing all retailers that are not LGBTQ friendly. Not only are these corporations losing out on LGBTQ dollars, but also straight dollars from family and friends of the LGBTQ community.
The most important company yet to weigh in on the issue of gays in sports is the NFL itself.
The NFL is the most popular and most-watched sport in the U.S., capturing some 59 percent of the entire U.S. population as viewers. With 1,696 players on its opening day rosters, the NFL is also the largest professional sports league in North America.
The NHL has 690 players; the NBA has 450 players; and MLB has 750 players total on its 25-man rosters, for a total of 1,890 professional athletes.
The lowest estimations say that about three percent of the population at large is gay. If you extrapolate that number across these 3,586 pro athletes, that would equate to 107 or 108 professional gay athletes, with 50 or 51 of them in the NFL.
Yet to this day we still have not heard of an athlete coming out during his playing career in any of our four professional sports. The NHL has a leg up on the other three leagues because of its alliance with the “You Can Play Foundation” that supports LGBTQ athletes.
The other three leagues have a faint footprint, or none at all, in supporting or aligning with a LGBTQ organization.
What are they waiting for?
If we hope to close one of the last closets in America, I would call upon the NFL to be proactive and align with an LGBTQ organization, something that it has not done publicly yet.
When the NFL does take such action, maybe players will be more at liberty to feel not only that they can be themselves at the workplace, but also that their employer has their best interest at heart and not just the bottom line. I would even argue that profits would increase if there were a gay player on the roster. At the end of the day, I have played with several gay athletes in my tenure with the NFL. I just didn’t know it!
Breaking News:Brendon Ayanbadjeo Says Four NFL Players Could Declare Their Homosexuality Soon.
By Andrew Sharp on Apr 5 2013,
According to former Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo, we could see a gay NFL player “sooner than you think.” There could be as many as four announcements from players around the league, all on the same day.
Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo was released by Baltimore this offseason, and on the heels of comments earlier this week where he suggested that he was cut in part because of his outspoken stance on gay rights and equality issues, Ayanbadejo clarified himself to the Baltimore Sun on Friday. During an hour-long interview he made it clear that he harbors no resentment for the Ravens, and respects them for the support they offered him throughout his career both on and off the field. But that’s not all.
When the conversation turned to his work with gay rights and the question of when we might see an openly gay player in the NFL, Ayanbadejo had this to say:
“I think it will happen sooner than you think,” Ayanbadejo said. “We’re in talks with a handful of players who are considering it. There are up to four players being talked to right now and they’re trying to be organized so they can come out on the same day together. It would make a major splash and take the pressure off one guy. It would be a monumental day if a handful or a few guys come out.”
Ayanbadejo’s release not related to advocacy
The 36-year old linebacker says he was misquoted in a report claiming his release was related to his stance on gay rights. He took to Twitter to defend his former team.
In other words, everyone prepare themselves for the most insane day of the NFL offseason in human history. A day to make the sports world explode, basically.
And it would be awesome.
The one reason to worry about an NFL player coming out as gay would be the inevitable avalanche of horrible jokes, hateful responses, and insane scrutiny, all directed at one human being. Nobody deserves that, and it would be ugly. But as Ayanbadejo says, “If they could share the backlash, it would be more positive.”
In addition to muting the backlash toward any one player, four players coming out in four different cities — AT THE SAME DAMN TIME — would get all kinds of love and support, too, spreading the acceptance around the country, making this a more universal sign of progress in the NFL and the sports world, in general.
“It’s cool. It’s exciting,” says Ayanbadejo of the possibility. “We’re in talks with a few guys who are considering it. The NFL and organizations are already being proactive and open if a player does it and if something negative happens. We’ll see what happens.” Yes we will.
Out Magazine Interview: NFL Stud Chris Kluwe Talks Same Sex Marriage, Gay Rights, & Football Career.
Chris Kluwe: Kick Ass
10.2.2012
BY CYD ZEIGLER
Photography by David Bowman
“Your insults can’t be the standard fuck, shit, bitch — it has to be something that sticks in people’s minds,” says Chris Kluwe, the Minnesota Vikings punter, explaining how to craft a devastating letter to someone whose views you hold reprehensible. “Generally the way you do that is to take a swear word—usually a part of someone’s anatomy — and attach it to something else that it normally wouldn’t go with. When you come up with a good one, you’ll know you have it because you’ll just start giggling to yourself.”
For example, “lustful cockmonster.”
On September 7, you could sense the howls of laughter reverberating across the Internet after Kluwe’sexcoriating letter to Maryland state delegate Emmett C. Burns Jr. was published on the sports fansite Deadspin and quickly went viral. A week earlier, in a letter brimming with self-importance, Burns had told the Baltimore Ravens to “order” linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo to cease advocating for same-sex marriage. Kluwe’s response was a master class in how to take down a pompous and wrong-headed ass.
“I find it inconceivable that you are an elected official of Maryland’s state government,” Kluwe’s letter started, reasonably enough. “Your vitriolic hatred and bigotry make me ashamed and disgusted to think that you are in any way responsible for shaping policy at any level.” Kluwe then went on to dismantle Burns’s position, point by point, culminating in a crescendo of wit and impishness — and that now-fabled coinage. It’s worth running the penultimate paragraph in full, if only because it does such a good job of clarifying the issues:
“I can assure you that gay people getting married will have zero effect on your life. They won’t come into your house and steal your children. They won’t magically turn you into a lustful cockmonster. They won’t even overthrow the government in an orgy of hedonistic debauchery because all of a sudden they have the same legal rights as the other 90 percent of our population — rights like Social Security benefits, child care tax credits, Family and Medical Leave to take care of loved ones, and COBRA healthcare for spouses and children. You know what having these rights will make gays? Full-fledged American citizens just like everyone else, with the freedom to pursue happiness and all that entails. Do the civil-rights struggles of the past 200 years mean absolutely nothing to you?”
Oh, he also called Burns a “narcissistic fromunda stain” — which is just showing off.
With all the attention on Kluwe’s letter, it’s easy to forget that he was, in turn, inspired by another football player, the Ravens’s Ayanbadejo, busy fighting his own corner in Baltimore. In November, voters in both Minnesota and Maryland will be faced with marriage-equality ballot initiatives, so the high-profile stance of Kluwe and Ayanbadejo could have real and profound consequences. The positions of both men not only reflect how quickly opinion is shifting, but also spotlight the need to check our own preconceptions of the sports world as inherently intolerant and homophobic.
“I’ve always relished breaking that stereotype of the dumb jock athlete because while I enjoyed athletics growing up, I also enjoyed reading and video games, and athletic sport is not what defines me as a person,” says Kluwe. “I think as more and more generations start rising through the NFL, a lot of these kids see that it’s OK to be something other than an athlete.”
ESPN radio sportscaster, Jared Max, who came out in 2011, agrees, pointing out that the lifespan of an NFL player is much shorter than most other sports, generating faster turnover. “I strongly believe that goodness is contagious and that others will jump on board as the younger generation begins to populate the NFL,” he says, with some justification given a recent poll by Outsports.com, which identified 28 current NFL players who’ve expressed support for gay rights. For Max, players like Kluwe and Ayanbadejo deserve comparison to earlier taboo-busters like Branch Rickey, who broke through Major League Baseball’s color barrier by signing Jackie Robinson to the Dodgers in 1945.
But for Kluwe, taking a stand on gay rights is as instinctual as planting his foot into a ball. “It’s all about the Golden Rule,” he says. “Treat other people as you want to be treated. It’s that simple. It’s something that needs to be spoken about, and it’s something I can do while fulfilling my job as a football player.”
Growing up in Los Alamitos, Calif., 20 miles south of Los Angeles, Kluwe’s parents preached to their son a mantra of tolerance with a profanity-free lexicon. Neither stuck at the time. As a tween, gay slurs peppered his speech with the same heedlessness as his peers. “Unfortunately, as kids, sometimes you don’t understand what your words can mean because you’re not emotionally mature enough yet,” he says. “As you grow up and start learning about the world, you realize, Hey, some of this stuff is hurtful; I would not want to be treated that way. That’s part of maturing.”
Kluwe’s voracious appetite for reading was also instrumental. He displays an old-fashioned ability to quote Voltaire or Ralph Waldo Emerson and reads so much sci-fi and fantasy that he jokes that Barnes & Noble can’t keep up. On his active Twitter account, he’ll solicit suggestions for his book list. A recent post reads, “This Vonnegut guy, I like the cut of his jib.” A few hours later, he’d already updated it: “Damn. Slaughterhouse 5 makes me want to simultaneously punch and hug the entire human race. The same stupid cycle over and over.”
It’s easy to trace Kluwe, the outspoken gay rights advocate, through his childhood obsessions with gaming and sci-fi. The thrust and parry of video-game discussion boards, he says, helped to hone his debating skills; his love of books expanded his vocabulary. At the same time, his immersion into the worlds of Terry Pratchett and Iain M. Banks — two of his favorite writers — has merely served to accentuate the flaws and injustices of the real world.
“It’s definitely influenced the way I think,” he admits. “You look at all the sci-fi utopias, and, pretty much in every single one, the basic underlying philosophy is that people treat each other the way they want to be treated and there’s freedom to be who you are. What brings these utopias crashing down is the fact that one group tries to take control of another, and I think that’s very applicable to any sort of human or civil rights campaign.”
It’s no surprise that Kluwe is an avid fan of the role-playing game World of Warcraft (his avatar is a troll called Loate), so much so that his Twitter handle is @ChrisWarcraft. Among the things he loves most about such games are the parallels they offer to our culture’s battle over freedom. In World of Warcraft, he becomes a champion against evil oppressive forces. Losing isn’t an option.
While World of Warcraft forums don’t allow much space for dissecting Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Kluwe carved a space for himself by learning how to push the right buttons to get into other gamers’ heads. “I’ve found one of the most devastating ways to get a point across was to mix factual information with clever insults,” he says. “I’ve had a lot of training on how to get people riled up.”
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