Winnin' Ugly vs. Winning Pretty
With the Winter Olympics coming up, let's look at the evidence for gay male representation in figure skating, ice hockey, and mountain climbing.
With the Winter Olympics coming up and the mainstream media in a tizzy over the softcore porn TV gay male porn romantic fantasy for women about two gay ice hockey stars in love, Heated Rivalry, it’s time to review what can be known about sexual orientation in various sports and careers.
Back in the early 1990s, I discovered a major step forward in methodology for sports sociology. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of college graduates have never heard of it in the one-third of a century since. And more than a few these days get very offended by my pointing out its usefulness.
For decades before my discovery, people had been speculating over the sexual orientation of various kinds of athletes.
Were, say, women professional tennis players like Billie-Jean King and Martina Navratilova more likely than average to be lesbians? What about women golfers? What about lady figure skaters like Katarina Witt?
What about male athletes?
My insight around 1993 was that you could come up with a rough average for how gay the male athletes in a sport or other occupation are by counting up how many had died of AIDS.
Before treatments emerged in the 1990s, an HIV infection was close to a death sentence. A famous athlete dying in his 30s or 40s during the 1980s and 1990s attracted a lot of attention. I’m not saying that we have every name of everybody prominent who died of AIDS, but to think that the actual pattern was severely different from the apparent pattern requires a massive conspiracy theory.
For example, to start outside of sports, consider this 2007 article in Dance magazine:
Joseph Carman
August 21, 2007
The article lists 27 nationally (or globally) prominent male dancers or choreographers who died of AIDS, such as Rudolf Nureyev, Alvin Ailey, Robert Joffrey, and Michael Bennett, the creator of A Chorus Line.
And, of direct relevance to next month’s Winter Olympics, here’s a website called Skate Guard by Ryan Stevens that maintains a page dedicated to figure skaters who died of AIDS. It lists 83 male figure skaters who died of AIDS. I don’t know what the denominator should be under that numerator of 83, but both the 1972 and 1976 Olympic gold medalists died from the disease.
Gay males tend to be attracted to sports where the concept of “winning ugly” like the 1983 Chicago White Sox,
is a non-sequitur.
In contrast, most major non-dance sports were reported in the 1990s to have had low single digit death tolls from AIDS.
One idea for figuring out the numerator is to start counting down from #1 athlete in that sport’s history and see how long it takes to get to the best athlete who died of AIDS.
For example, Baseball Reference guesstimates that the best player of all time in terms of career Wins Above Replacement was Babe Ruth at 182.6. Babe was straight.
And the 999th best was Jack McDowell at 27.8. (And McDowell was really good.) Jack is straight.
The best ballplayer known to have died of AIDS was Alan Wiggins at 7.2 career WAR. Wiggins would have been better if he could stay off the heroin. (He appears to have been straight, but a needle junkie. Interestingly, his daughter was a fine WNBA player, but due to being straight, she clashed with the dominant lesbian clique in the WNBA.)
The only other big leaguer to die of AIDS was Glenn Burke, the celebrated inventor of the High Five. But … despite all the encomiums, Burke was a bad ballplayer, the epitome of Looks Good In a Uniform But Can’t Play. Forty-nine years later, I can still recall his 1977 season with the otherwise terrific Dodgers as their Designated Rallykiller. It’s often implied that Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda unfairly traded budding superstar Burke for sleeping with Tommy’s gay son, but the statistical record shows that Burke, with his career WAR of -2.4 (i.e., he cost his teams over two more losses than the average random no-name player they could have picked up from the Triple-A minors) was terrible, and Tommy shouldn’t have played him as much as he did.
So the one gay ballplayer known to have died from AIDS was probably not one of the 10,000 best major league players ever.
I’ve devoted a ridiculous amount of my 67 years to studying baseball, and I’ve heard of one fine ballplayer who was gay, a gentleman who ranks around #400 all-time.
That’s pretty remarkable relative to, say, diving (another dance-like sport), where America’s greatest ever, Greg Louganis, got HIV-infected (but, I’m happy to say, is still alive).
Consider ice hockey. …
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