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WNBA Star Sheryl Swoopes Comes Out

Houston Comets player and one of women’s basketball’s biggest stars became the second openly gay player in the WNBA when she came out this week.

In an interview with ESPN magazine that hit stands today, Swoopes explains her motivation for coming out now. “It’s not something that I want to throw in people’s faces,” Swoopes said, but “I’m just at a point in my life where I’m tired of having to pretend to be somebody I’m not. I’m tired of having to hide my feelings about the person I care about. About the person I love.”

Although she doesn’t name her partner in the ESPN interview, she tells The Advocate (in an interview due out shortly), that the woman is former Comets assistant coach Alisa Scott (aka “Scotty”), who resigned from the Comets organization in January after eight seasons, reportedly due to the conflict of interest presented by her relationship with Swoopes. Their seven-year relationship has been an open secret in the WBNA, but never discussed publicly or in the press.

34-year old Swoopes has an 8-year-old son (from a previous marriage that ended in 1998) whom she and Scott are raising together. Asked by the Advocate whether she considers herself lesbian or bisexual, Swoopes says, “I just consider myself a person. I don’t consider myself bisexual. The relationship I’m in right now, I hope, is the relationship I’ll be in for the rest of my life.”

But she is also insistent that her marriage didn’t end because she was gay. “In college I was never with a woman,” she said in a new interview with People magazine. “I had a boyfriend, and the thought of it never crossed my mind. I always had gay friends and we were cool. We hung out. But I didn’t think about women that way. My marriage was beautiful, but we were both young, and we both grew up and went our separate ways. I tried to make it work, but I wasn’t happy anymore.”

Then, she met Scott. “I never really meant for [our relationship] to happen,” Swoopes told the New York Times. “It did, and after a while it got to a point, I am not going to try to fight this anymore…. I was basically living a lie. For the last seven, eight years, I was basically waiting to exhale.”

A graduate of Texas Tech University, Swoopes is a five-time WNBA All-Star who has won three Olympic gold medals and leads the league in MVP titles. She has played for the Comets since 1997, and was one of the first players signed by the WNBA when the league formed in 1996.

Part of the impetus for coming out is a new endorsement deal with lesbian travel company Olivia Travel (the official sponsor of tennis great Martina Navratilova and pro golfer Rosie Jones). In addition to Olivia, Swoopes also has had a major endorsement deal with Nike for several years, which even has a shoe named after her.

When asked by ESPN if she feared losing endorsements from companies like Nike, Swoopes said “I don’t want that to happen. Being gay has nothing to do with the three gold medals or the three MVPs or the four championships I’ve won. I’m still the same person. I’m Sheryl.”

Nike appears to agree: Nike marketing manager Raye Pond told the press shortly after Swoopes’s announcement that the company is happy to have Swoopes as one of its athletes.

Of Swoopes decision to come out publicly, Comets coach Van Chancellor said: “What she does in her personal life is her own decision. I respect everything about Sheryl.” WNBA President Donna Orender said in a statement, “Sheryl’s lifestyle choice is a non-issue for us.”

But WNBA president Orender’s use of the phrase “lifestyle choice” in talking about Swoopes’s coming out is telling.

In 2004, 27-year-old Minnesota Lynx player Michele Van Gorp became the first active WNBA player to come out (former New York Liberty player Sue Wicks came out as a lesbian in 2002 after she had retired). While the Lynx were supportive of Van Gorp, she says she had a more difficult time when she played with the New York Liberty in the 1999 season. “I had a lot of issues in New York in my first year,” she told Minnesota’s Lavender magazine. “The [New York] organization wasn’t very happy that [her partner] Kyleen would come down to [meet] me at the team bus as we were leaving for practice.

“It was actually a big issue,” Van Gorp continue. “Within the organization, it seemed very taboo, and that was hard for me, because it is not something I am afraid of. It is who I am. I don’t try to push it on anyone, but I’m not going to live my life differently because someone else is scared of what society thinks.”

According to many former players and coaches, the league is so terrified of being branded a lesbian organization that there is extreme pressure put on gay players not to come out.

Swoopes is frustrated that a player’s sexuality is even an issue. “The talk about the WNBA being full of lesbians is not true,” Swoopes told ESPN. “There are as many straight women in the league as there are gay. What really irritates me is when people talk about football, baseball and the NBA, you don’t hear all of this talk about the gay guys playing. But when you talk about the WNBA, then it becomes an issue. Sexuality and gender don’t change anyone’s performance on the court.”

But sexuality and gender can determine whether a player even gets to play. This summer, lesbian L.A. Sparks player Latasha Byears was accused of raping a woman at a party, and suspended from the team as soon as the investigation opened, while L.A. Lakers player Kobe Bryant was accused of a similar crime and continues to play. She eventually filed suit against the Sparks, alleging anti-lesbian bias in the organization.

At Penn State, long-time women’s basketball coach Rene Portland was accused recently of harassing and dropping players who she believes are gay when a former player (who actually isn’t gay, but says Portland thought she was) went public. In 1986, Portland told The Chicago Sun-Times that she did not allow lesbians to play for Penn State; since then, non-discrimination laws have been enacted, and she doesn’t say things like that publicly anymore, but her practices don’t seem to have changed.

University of Minnesota sports sociologist Mary Jo Kane, who directs the Tucker Center, which focuses on women in sports, told the Pittsburgh Tribune Review this week that “there are many ways coaches can say something without actually saying the word ‘lesbian’…Rival coaches might say, ‘There are rumors I heard about that team or that coach. We run a different kind of program here. We have values here.’ They talk in code. The problem is not lesbians in sports. It is homophobia.”

It’s not surprising, then, that no other WNBA players have come out since Van Gorp. Until now.

As one of the superstars of the league and arguably its best spokeperson, Swoopes’s decision to come out is a major event in women’s sports. It’s also worth noting that Swoopes is the first black woman in the WNBA to come out, and one of the only openly gay black female athletes in American professional sports.

Swoopes’s revelation has already stepped up the conversation among sports fans and commentators about homophobia in women’s sports, which is a step in the right direction. Swoopes tells The Advocate that she hopes her coming-out “is gonna make a difference to a lot of people out there who want to come out and don’t know how to do it or are afraid.”

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