Fair Play: How LGBT Athletes Are Claiming Their Rightful Place in Sports

208 Pages·2016·1.59 MB·English

by  Cyd Zeigler

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CYD ZEIGLER is one of the world’s foremost experts on LGBT
issues in sports. Along with his Outsports cofounder Jim Buzinski,
Zeigler has written more coming-out stories of LGBT people—in
sports or any other arena—than any journalist in America. These
stories have included former NBA player John Amaechi, for-
mer NFL prospect Wade Davis, NFL hopeful Michael Sam, and
NCAA basketball player Derrick Gordon, in addition to countless
other athletes and coaches in high school, college, and pro sports.
Zeigler also cofounded the Sports Equality Foundation, which
helps fund the cycle of LGBT people coming out and being out in
sports. He appears regularly on ESPN, and in the New York Times
and USA Today, and provides expertise on LGBT sports issues for
countless other media outlets including Sports Illustrated, CNN,
the Los Angeles Times, and NPR. He is a former high school ath-
lete, still holding school track-and-field records twenty-five years

later. A graduate of Stanford University, Zeigler lives in Los Angeles
with his husband and two cats.

FAI R P LAY
HOW LGBT ATHLETES ARE CLAIMING THEIR RIGHTFUL PLACE IN SPORTS
CYD ZEIGLER
BY
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including
mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without
the prior written consent of the publisher.
Published by Akashic Books
©2016 Cyd Zeigler
ISBN: 978-1-61775-447-0, E-ISBN: 978-1-61775-465-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015954114
First printing
Edge of Sports
c/o Akashic Books
Twitter: @AkashicBooks
Facebook: AkashicBooks
E-mail: [email protected]
Website: www.akashicbooks.com
ALSO FROM EDGE OF SPORTS BOOKS
(CURATED BY DAVE ZIRIN)
Chasing Water: Elegy of an Olympian
by Anthony Ervin & Constantine Markides
You Throw Like a Girl
by Don McPherson
(forthcoming)
Unsportsmanlike Conduct:
College Football and the Politics of Rape
by Jessica Luther
(forthcoming)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have been blessed to receive some lovely compliments from
people about the work I’ve done with LGBT athletes and coaches
over the years. My response to that is always the same: I’m doing
my part just like everybody else. 
That’s sometimes taken as feigned humility, but it’s actually a
philosophy of life that stems straight from sports. No athlete or
coach can do anything by herself. It takes an entire team to beat
your rivals and win the day.
This is remarkably true of the LGBT sports movement. We
have only gotten to where we are today—with people finding the
strength to be themselves and their teammates having the heart to
support them—because of countless folks who have contributed
their time, sweat, and voices to the cause.
While this book focuses largely on the last fifteen years, the
work done to get to what you might call the “modern LGBT
sports movement” is the foundation upon which everything has
moved so quickly. Until 2000 there were precious few voices
talking about the need for change.
An incredibly powerful voice for social change, not just for
LGBT athletes but across sports, has been Dave Zirin. It’s because
of Dave that you’re reading this book. Later on I’ll talk about

the role of “allies” in a social justice movement. I don’t know any
straight man (except probably Patrick Burke) who understands
8  FAIR PLAY
this better than Dave, the champion of this book and the person
who got it published (with a nod to Johnny Temple of Akashic
Books who has embraced the project from the first e-mail).
I know my voice would not exist in this movement if it weren’t
for Jim Buzinski. When I first came out in the summer of 1996,
I met Jim weeks later. Then a sports editor for the Long Beach
Press-Telegram, he helped shape my image of gay men as a part
of the sports world, not separate from it. Jim, a lifelong athlete
and sports fan, was a lifeline between my “former” and “future”
selves. Without his friendship and mentorship, we would not have
started Outsports, I would not have written this book, and the
sports world would not be the largely welcoming place it is today
for LGBT people.
It was very early on in our days running Outsports that I
learned of the decades-long work of three women: Pat Griffin,
Helen Carroll, and Sue Rankin. While men have started catching
up in the fight for LGBT equality in sports, these three women
were ahead of the curve demanding equality for us and educating
people in sports on how we can get there. All of them successful
athletes or coaches, they have felt both the heartbreak and heart-
warming success of LGBT sports folks for longer than virtually
anyone else in this movement. The work that comes today stands
on the foundation they helped build.
Yet the father of this movement, the person who publicly gave
birth to the idea that gay people can be successful and accepted
in sports from high school to the pros, is Dave Kopay. A former
NFL running back who played for Vince Lombardi and came out
publicly in 1975 shortly after his retirement, Dave was living a
comfortable life when he decided to step into the light and share
his truth. He didn’t have to, yet at the same time he needed to.

That dynamic, along with his powerful demonstration of courage,
set the benchmark for so many other athletes and nonathletes
CYD ZEIGLER  9
who would come out after him. To call Dave a “trailblazer” lifts
the definition of the word.
There are so many other incredible people who have taught
me life lessons about courage, strength, and the need to lift up
other people. This section of the book could go on for twenty
pages—thankfully, I’m able to talk about many of these folks over
the next dozen chapters.
Yet I’d be remiss without mentioning my husband, Dan
Pinar. For millennia the idea of marrying someone you love (or
are assigned to at birth) has been an assumed societal right or
responsibility. Over the course of the fifteen years covered in this
book, my ability to marry the person I love has transformed. Dan
has been in my life virtually that entire time, never wavering in
his support for the work Jim and I do in lifting up the voices
and spirits of other people. You would not be reading this book
without the support of the most important person in the world to
me—my husband Dan.