Protecting the (White Male) Gaze: Homophobia of Sports Talk Radio Goes Unchallenged

Protecting the (White Male) Gaze:

Homophobia of Sports Talk Radio Goes Unchallenged

by David C. Leonard | NewBlackMan

During his ESPN show on Tuesday, Bruce Jacobs described the Los Angeles Sparks and the Phoenix Mercury as “the “Los Angeles Lesbians” and the “Phoenix Dyke-ury.”  He returned to the air the following day to offer the following “apology”: “My comments yesterday were ridiculous, stupid and amateurish.  I apologize for even uttering the comments, whether you heard them or not, whether you were offended or not.” 

To date, little has been made about either his comments or his half-hearted apology that neither apologizes for the spirit of his remarks nor the ideological underpinnings that led to such comments.  His apology does not repudiate his own homophobic stereotypes nor does it challenge the ideological assumptions evident here, but instead apologizes for vocalizing them.  It isn’t the homophobia that warrants the apology, but expressing it on his show.

While Mr. Jacobs needs to be held accountable for his remarks, along with ESPN, which has failed to publicly condemn the comments, it would be a mistake to isolate this rhetoric as that of a “bad apple.”  The homophobia and sexism on display here is reflective of sport talks radio.  As with talk radio in general, sports talk radio emerged as a movement to “restore” the hegemony of white male heterosexism.  The homophobic remarks of Bruce Jacobs represents a systemic and longstanding effort to restore the normalized vision of sports as a space of male dominance. 

Like the efforts to sexualize female athletes, the construction of female athletes as lesbians reaffirms the “normalcy” of sports as a male domain.  According to David Nylund (2004), “With White male masculinity being challenged and decentered by feminism, affirmative action, gay and lesbian movements, and other groups’ quest for social equality, sports talk shows, similar to talk radio in general, have become an attractive venue for embattled White men seeking recreational repose and a nostalgic return to a prefeminist ideal.”  As argued by Trujillo (1994) and quoted in Nylund:

Media coverage of sports reinforces traditional masculinity in at least three ways. It privileges the masculine over the feminine or homosexual image by linking it to a sense of positive cultural values. It depicts the masculine image as “natural” or conventional, while showing alternative images as unconventional or deviant. And it personalizes traditional masculinity by elevating its representatives to places of heroism and denigrating strong females or

homosexuals. (p. 97)

His comments, thus, embody the efforts to silence, surveil, demonize, and ultimately discipline and punish any challenges to the white male heterosexuality of sporting cultures. Those perceived threats to this hegemony are met with efforts to reclaim the sporting space as one of masculinity.  From the ubiquity of images of hypersexual female athletes on various sports websites to the commonality of homophobic, sexist, and racist rhetoric, we see that despite the increased levels of diversity, the hegemony of white male heterosexuality remains a central facet within to contemporary sports culture.

The relative silence about this instance of homophobia (as of writing there has been only 9 articles about Jacobs’ comments) and the culture of homophobia within the sports media is especially telling given the widespread condemnation of various players for homophobic slurs during the 2011.  Others may cite the varied levels of celebrity and the divergent platforms as reasons for why the comments of Kobe Bryant, Joakim Noah, and Wayne Simmonds received ample media attention.  Yet, the comparative silence here reflects a level of comfort in isolating homophobia as a symptom of athlete culture, hip-hop culture and blackness. 

Writing about the politics surrounding Kobe Bryant’s use of an anti-gay slur during the 2010-2011 season, I previously focused on the ways in which a hyper focus on the homophobic utterances of black athletes provided a comforting narrative that reaffirmed white civility (as tolerant and accepting) and black pathology:

The culture and the blackness of the league became a subtextual source of inquiry for the debate about homophobia within the NBA, ultimately exonerating whiteness/American through a scapegoating discourse.  While writing about Don Imus, Michael Awkward is particularly instructive in this case: “Put Simply,” Kobe Bryant “was made to stand in for millions of well-known and faceless” homophobes and other who tacitly protect their heterosexual privilege who GLBT communities and their allies “want desperately to identity, put on trial, and excoriate because of incontrovertible – but to this point often easily dismissed – ‘evidence’ of centuries of anti-gay violence, heterosexism, and homophobia.  With Kobe Bryant, we get a similar reductionist formula, where Bryant and all of his past experiences provide a supposed explanation for his use of this slur. 

The ease to which Bryant was condemned and the perceived self-righteousness reflect the hegemony of the white racial frame.  Bryant’s homophobic slur, his perceived homophobia, his emotional outbursts, and his evidence “childishness” here fit a larger script about black male bodies.  This instance and the claims about uber homophobia within sports culture (usually linked to basketball and football and not say hockey and baseball) and homophobia within the black community thus fit a larger narrative about black dysfunction, pathology and otherness.  “The casual sexism and homophobia reproduce the oppression of straight black men, providing a justification for ‘the denial of manhood to black men within a racialized society,” writes Michael Kimmel in “Toward a Pedagogy of the Oppressor.”  “‘You see,’ one can almost hear the establishment saying ‘those black men are like animals.  Look at how they treat their women!  They don’t deserve to be treated with respect.”  In other words, “the very mechanism that black men thought would restore manhood” – demonizing homosexuals, using anti-gay slurs, asserting and demonstrating traditional male values – “ends up being the pretext on which it is denied.” 

Whereas the media spectacle that ensues in moments involving black athletes legitimizes dominant narratives, the comments from Mr. Jacobs, and the commonplace homophobia of sports talk and talk radio in general does little to substantiate dominant narratives.  Whereas those moments that purportedly provide “evidence of ‘deviance’ for a mainstream public conditioned to think of black people and black men in particular as such”   (Neal, 2005, p. 81), the comments from Mr. Jacobs are rendered invisible as his homophobia and uber masculinity has both normalized within whiteness.  It has been imagined as little more than boys being boys. 

Seen as neither deviance nor a sign of a larger cultural failure, the homophobia that emanates through the radio is acceptable, left without condemnation, as such outrage is saved for the next moment involving a black athlete.

***

David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums. His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis. He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema and the forthcoming After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop (SUNY Press). Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackMan and blogs @ No Tsuris.