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This business of sifting the “good” lesbians from the “bad” by placing us up against a variety of Feel Good Meters is getting very old. Lesbians who want to get married, want to adopt, and want equal rights are all bad; but lesbians in lingerie, lesbians in videos, straight women who play lesbians on TV, and now lesbians with basketballs are all good.

Believe it or not, that’s the good news. In this great nation of double standards and sexism, that’s considered progress. The bad news is, our sports mirror our ugly sexist ideals.

While the WNBA enjoys a large fan base that includes men, women, and children, we all know that it does not enjoy the level of respect that the NBA does. WNBA athletes are just as talented as their male counterparts, and their fans are as devoted to their teams as fans of the Rockets or Knicks. But in the eyes of sports aficionados and die-hard tailgaters from Gillette Stadium to the Staples Center, WNBA players are as insignificant as the fans that admire them.

Why?

As one Lakers fan told me, as we argued over a bar remote during a WNBA game a while ago, “They’re girls, for chrissake! I wanna watch real basketball.”

Male sports fans care about female athletes about as much as they care about male figure skaters. In the wide, wide, wide world of sports, Sheryl Swoopes and women like her are inconsequential and unthreatening. Regardless of how talented female athletes are, male athletes will always be thought of as better and more valuable.

When value is translated into dollars, that philosophy carries even more weight. Corporate sponsors take their cues from consumers of male athletics, not female athletics. Nike, for example isn’t planning to drop Swoopes from its list of endorsers because it’s got little to lose by having a lesbian endorse its products.

It goes without saying that the same doesn’t hold true for gay male athletes. And enough has been written about this since Swoopes’ announcement that I’m not going to waste time re-examining why that’s so. Whether or not Swoopes coming out will encourage gay male athletes to follow, remains to be seen, but one thing’s for sure — the pressure is on.

Gay men in professional sports want this story to go away, and they’ll get their wish. In a few more days, the vast majority of the public will stop talking about this and move on to other things because, let’s face it, there are much more important issues to discuss than Sheryl Swoopes’ sex life.

The gay community would be smart to keep this story alive for a while, though, because Swoopes could usher into a new age of awareness, if we let her.

When I first read that Swoopes doesn’t believe she was born gay, I muttered, “Uh-oh.” Will the gay community attack her, I wondered, or give her comments the thoughtful consideration they deserve? To my disappointment, very little attention has been placed on those words.

The “born gay” versus “gay is a choice” argument is one that I’ve been interested in for years and have written about in the past. The notion that a person can choose to be gay is considered a wacky idea, extremely unpopular within the gay community, because most queers think that they were born gay and that believing otherwise amounts to giving the religious right a gold star for its stance on the issue. But does it?

I’m not so sure. In my mind, choice is power, not a burden; free will is a gift. So I think the idea is worth a conversation, especially if there’s a possibility that on the other side of the conversation is empowerment.

For the record, I believe that I was born gay. However, I chose to be gay in 1994. That might sound like doubletalk, a contradiction, or a fancy way of saying that I’m out, but I don’t see it that way. 1994 was a year in which I took responsibility for my life, not just the really cool parts, but also my entire life.

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