I never knew you all had such a pent-up demand to discuss matters gay. Having read through 110 plus comments, I am now more inclined to see genetic correlations — rooted in the human mind rather than the body — with athletic achievement (NB: I don’t agree with all the "genetic" claims in the thread, by any means).
Most of all, I am struck by how few former male athletes have come out of the closet. That would seem to adjust for "the locker room effect" and "the endorsement effect," as explained in my original post. Once an athlete is retired, those factors shouldn’t matter much.
I also noticed that Amaechi signed a book contract about being gay in the NBA. He was a pretty feeble player, and quite nerdy, more here. How large was his book advance? 50K or 100K is not a bad guess. I’ve known plenty of gay guys who would self-identify for much less; the fact that so few former male athletes have done so is striking.
I think you are grossly underestimating just how hard it is to come out as an adult, after many years of being in the closeted. It’s mostly a matter of social esteem, avoiding awkward interactions, etc… not of strictly monetary payoffs.
Nerdy? What a strange description. For nerdy, read well-rounded human being, engaging with the world.
Where by “they conceal their AIDS” you mean “it’s not possible to find out about their AIDS by googling”…
Where by “they conceal their AIDS” you mean “it’s not possible to find out about their AIDS by googling”
Yes. That is what I mean. If we continue with the number fantasy and assume that 1 in 4 men who engaged in male/male sex in the 80′s contracted HIV, then 6 implies that about 1% of the players are gay. There are probably over 10,000 living retired players and 1% is 100 which would mean less than 6% are out of the closet. This does indeed raise doubts about the accuracy of googling. Also feel free to correct my numbers. I am not a sports fan, nor am I particularly well informed about gays. I do have a thing about what the implications of numbers and I didn’t like what steve did with them.
Occam’s Razor suggests that most sports (with the exception of aesthetic dance sports like figure skating) tend to appeal most to the more masculine boys and girls. Thus, the young people of each sex who work the longest and hardest to be good at a sport tend to be more masculine than average. That’s why lesbians are so common in the WNBA, the LPGA, and so forth, and why gay men are less common than average in professional sports. (The famous exception that almost proves the rule by itself is figure skating, which was ravaged by AIDS.)
John Amaechi fits this model perfectly. He didn’t like sports in general, nor basketball in particular, never even tried basketball until he was 17, but the NBA paid him $9.6 million over five seasons because he was a 6’10″ and 270 pound project. He was frank about only being in the game for the money. He has a very high IQ (he’s getting a Ph.D. in child psychology), which let him slide by making the big bucks without putting much mental effort into the game.
For more on how Amaechi validates the general pattern, see:
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2007/02/retired-nba-journeyman-comes-out-of.html
The really interesting test case for my theory that the biggest reason there aren’t many out of the closet retired male jocks is because male homosexuals aren’t much attracted to non-dance sports is golf, which isn’t a team sport, doesn’t have much of a locker room dynamic, and, at the pro level, is populated mostly by loners willing to work endlessly on their swings.
Golf attracts and accomodates lots of homosexuals — they’re just not male homosexuals. The LPGA’s Nabisco Championship in Palm Springs each March is the occasion of one of the largest lesbian gatherings of the year, with 15-20,000 lesbians flying in from around the country. Published estimates on the lesbian fraction of the LPGA range from 20% to a perhap improbable 50%, so call it an order of magnitude more lesbians in pro golf than in the general female popuation. See my article on the Nabisco tournament for more details:
http://www.isteve.com/Golf_Lesbians_Nabisco.htm
So, golf is, if hardly “gay-friendly,” at least genteel and reserved enough to allow a large number of lesbian golfers to pursue their obsession with hitting a ball with a stick.
Nonetheless, gay males are extremely rare in golf. At the pro level, among men, you see no AIDS deaths, no coming-outs, few rumors, lots of second marriages, and lots of children.
At the recreational golfer level, none of the hundreds of strangers I’ve played 18 holes with over the last 35 years have set off my gaydar.
Another way to test this: lots of celebrities are gays and lots of celebrities are dedicated golfers, but the only overlap I’ve ever found in years of looking for evidence of men who fall in both groups is the late Danny Kaye, who was mentioned in a 1960s Dan Jenkins article on avid Hollywood golfers and who, although a husband and a father, is rumored to have had an affair with Laurence Olivier.
To the extent that gay men are underrepresented in pro sports, one contributing factor may be network effects. If I think I might be gay, and I’ve heard rumors that other gay guys are in the school play, I might try out for the play in hopes of meeting them, or at least being in an environment that is relatively welcoming. This might be so even if I have a natural talent or preference for football over theater. Note that this effect can produce the observed result, even without an explanation for why there were initially more gay men in the school play and fewer on the football team.
Of the various theories kicked around here, I find the idea that gay men don’t have the physical or mental talents (for golf, for example) to be wild speculation. More plausible to me is the idea that they don’t have the drive (for various reasons) to succeed at top levels in certain types of sports.
Of the various theories kicked around here, I find the idea that gay men don’t have the physical or mental talents (for golf, for example) to be wild speculation.
Actually I provided science journal references to support this in the last thread.
Jesus, Steve how (and why) did you develop your ignorant stereotypical notion that gay men are not “masculine”? Go to a leather bar or bear bar in SF or NY and try to come away with the notion that gay men cannot be “masculine”. Why are there disproportionately large numbers of gay bars in small towns abutting bases where Marines are stationed? Are the gays in the Marines all feminine sissy faggots?
Why do you want to believe that all gays are limp-wristed lisping sissies who love Broadway and figure skating and work as either hair-dressers or interior designers? Ever consider that this is only one subset of all gays out there? There are plenty of gay truck drivers and accountants who never feel the desire to act like effeminate queens or come out of the closet.
There are more gay athletes than you know about. For example, I knew a guy who played on an NHL team in the 1980s. After plying him with a little liquor he’d happliy regale us with plenty of tales of who was and who wasn’t gay, and it was a bigger number than most would expect (typically, 3 or 4 guys on a 25-man roster.) None of the guys he listed ever “came out” after they retired. And the fact is, most of the players have a “live and let live” attitude as long as the gays don’t act that way in the dressing room. And most of them know better than to “act gay” in the locker room.
For example, there’s a guy who used to play for the Leafs who was commonly known around the league as “Wendy”. Not hard to figure out who I’m talking about. This person was, in no way, effeminate or lispy or limp-wristed and has never came out, even though he’s long been retired.
BTW, Steve, ever hear the phrase “one doth protest too much”?
I found a great study in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology that uses a number of different surveys and datasets to explore the occupational profiles of gay and straight men.
One method, interestingly enough, is using obituaries, both in the gay community and from the New York Times, which captures the elite samples.
For that sample, just like Steve, the author considers AIDS deaths a suitable proxy for identifying the homosexuals. He argues that it is unlikely that people in this sample would have died of dirty needles, that over 40% of the male AIDS death entries listed a male as a companion, that the rest had no listed companion, and for those who died of needles and such, the families explicitly had the Times mention this. Furthermore the AIDS proxy/elite sample data matched survey and gay obituary samples.
From these methods we learn that:
- Gay men (3% of the population) constitute over 50% of hairdressers and librarians, and 20-50% of artists, writers, and performers. (Also here is the Bailey study that estimated over 50% of professional male dancers are gay)
- Gay men are significantly overrepresented in nurturant professions such as teaching, nursing, and serving.
- Up to 73% of gays work in arts and entertainment fields, as opposed to 20% of straight men.
- Gay males are significantly underrepresented in sports (0.4% to 4.0%), law (4.0% to 11.3%), business (3.3% to 22.4%), and military (0.4% to 1.8%) occupations as well as in blue collar fields (9.0% to 49.4%). Typically women are twice as represented in ‘masculine’ fields as gay males. (e.g. 0.8% of women in sports)
This is all also consistent with gay male stated occupational preferences:
Of course this is consistent with atypical gay gender behavior even in early childhood (e.g. no “rough and tumble” play characteristic of boys), which change predictably according to prenatal hormonal events in people and animals. (as I discussed in the last thread)
Thanks, Jason. I did the same study, completely informally, though, when I subscribed to the NY Times in 1993. I read the obituaries everyday of all the men who had died under age 50. The great majority appeared to be homosexuals (e.g., few were married and the obituaries often listed a “longtime companion”). The occupational distribution was very much as this study found, confirming common stereotypes about homosexuals.
I vividly recall, though, reading about a 35-year-old Wall Street leveraged buyout raider who had died leaving a wife and three children behind. “Wow,” I thought, “So maybe this is an example of the closeted married gay macho men that gays are always claiming exist in such vast numbers.” In the last paragraph of the obituary, however, it was revealed that while rock-climbing in Yosemite, he had fallen off Half Dome.
Steve and Jason: It’s really insincere to rebut the worst arguments of your opponents and claim you’ve made your case. Reasonable people in this thread are not arguing that closeted married gay men exist in “vast numbers” — only that they exist in larger numbers than what straight people would know from personal experience.
> “But the typical differences in avocations between gays and straights are not random like the donut shop example.”
This distorts my argument. I am not claiming such differences are random — only that once a critical mass has been reached, the effect can magnify for reasons unrelated to why the initial (smaller) groups formed. This isn’t intended as a complete explanation of why gays are underrepresented or overrepresented in different fields, so no need to characterize it as such.
Several commenters here have challenged the idea that the incidence of AIDS is a useful in determining the number of closeted gay men in the general population. For those who didn’t follow the earlier thread, the problem is that the population of gay men who contract HIV is not representative, due to differences in sexual practices. On the one hand, we have the flamboyant party queen who lives in a gay neighborhood, has a “gay job,” and has hundreds of tricks a year, year after year, and goes bareback (no condoms). On the other hand, we have closeted married preacher Ted Haggard, who out of discretion, apparently restricted himself to a single male partner and took precautions. While there certainly are closeted men who have wild and unsafe sex with large numbers of men, my sense *from personal experience* is that those who are married are more likely to take precautions (condoms, oral only, fewer partners, lower frequency, choosier about partners, etc.). This also keeps them freer of other STDs (e.g., syphilis, gonorrhea) which the wife might notice earlier than HIV.
I haven’t heard a response to this point here.
Regarding the alleged masculinity of the gay leather scene, there’s a saying in the gay community about such hyper-masculine venues:
“They’re all swapping recipes in the back.”
Seriously, there are plenty of masculine gay men. But we are talking averages here, and on average, gay men are more feminine. I’m gay and I can admit it. What’s the big deal?
Joan’s quick caclulations above suggests that out of the closet male jocks are less than 1% as common as they would be if, say, 5% of all male athletes were gay.
Based on her analysis of AIDS deaths, it looks like the 80-20 rule applies to divvying up the causes between (A) fewer gays in pro sports and (B) gays in pro sports staying in the closet. Her calculations suggest that gays in male sports are only about 1/5th as common as in the general population, so that accounts for 80% of the difference. The other 20% of the differnce come from almost all of the gays in big time sports staying in the closet.
Joan did quick and dirty calculations, but they strike me as plausible, and they provide a quantitative framework for thinking about the issue.
“I liked the choreography, but I didn’t care for the costumes.” — Tommy Tune, 6’6″ gay Broadway dance legend, on why he never considered playing basketball while growing up in Texas in the 1950s.
The overall lesson for economists is that, as they expand the purview of economics to all of human behavior, they need to move beyond older models of human motivation, such as profit maximization, that are no longer sufficient for their broader ambitions, and make use of richer models that incorporate a worldly awareness of human diversity.
“Gay men (3% of the population) constitute over 50% of hairdressers and librarians, and 20-50% of artists, writers, and performers. (Also here is the Bailey study that estimated over 50% of professional male dancers are gay)”
Since these are, for the most part, relativly “good” jobs, an interesting question that these estimates raise is why non-gay males do not choose these professions. In a competitive job markest 3% of the population could not capture up to 50% the jobs unless the majority lacked the necessary talent or did not choose to compete for other reasons.
When I 1st saw this on ESPN I thought that this man just wanted to be honest. I just thought that he waited a long time to say it and that made me wonder why he would want to tewll it. I just want to ask him why now????? I would also like to talk to his old teammates and see how they feel about it now not knowing before that he was gay. Im sure that he is not the only player that is gay, so I respect him for coming out to say it but I still think that his timing is bad.
Most pro athletes were obsessively competitive in sports well before puberty — for example, the top two golfers, Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, were both hitting golf balls before they turned two — so I doubt if sorting based on a sophisticated knowledge of sexual orientation employment patterns has all that much to do with it. (The exceptions are mostly people who turned out to be particularly tall or large and were therefore recruited into a game, like 6’10″ John Amaechi, who first tried basketball at 17). Instead, how it works is that some little boys see Ken Griffey Jr. hitting a homer and say, “That’s what I want to do when I grow up!” Others see Brian Boitano twirling around on the ice and say, “That’s what I want to be!”
In general, it’s not that hard to predict which little boys are more likely to grow up to be straight and which ones to be gay. J. Michael Bailey of Northwestern found a 1.2 standard deviation difference between straight men and gay men in their recollections of how sex-typical they were as little boys.
For girls, it’s harder to predict accurately. Most lesbians were tomboys, but most tomboys don’t turn out to be lesbians.
One interesting case was Magic Johnson. The LA Times sports editor admitted years later that rumors had been flying for years that Johnson was bisexual. But when Magic announced his HIV infection and claimed he got it heterosexually, that played into the politically correct storyline that the media had been pushing for a decade that everybody, gay or straight, is equally in danger of catching HIV. So, the LA Times tossed out their plans to run a story on whether Magic was bisexual because it would have muddied the message that HIV threatens everybody equally.
On the other hand, lots of rumors about famous athletes being gay are just politicized wishful thinking (e.g., Sandy Koufax, who has been married twice and currently lives with a lady who once was Laura Bush’s college roommate) or gay sex fantasies: (e.g., hunky Mike Piazza, who has lived with about ten different lingerie models. “Well, that just proves it! He’s trying too hard. Why else would any man have sex with all those Playmates? Huh? Think about it…”)
See Richard Green of UCLA’s long longitudinal of boys identified as effeminate at an early age. About half grew up to be gay, versus only one boy in the non-effeminate control group.
Is this really all that surprising? Don’t you see it around you in the people you grew up with? Don’t gay male comedians joke about their childhood a lot: e.g., “I was the only Boy Scout whose Swiss Army Knife came with a melon-baller.” Well, I guess, as Orwell said, “To see what’s in front of one’s nose requires a constant effort.”
If you know little or nothing of homosexuality, then you will persuade no one with your irrelevant statistics.
The majority of you seem to be discussing “gay” issues without having an understanding of: what being gay actually means (i.e. whether gay thoughts or male/male sexual behaviors constitute one’s “gayness”), who can or cannot be gay, how “gayness” viewed by different cultures (and how culture affects the gay population), where it exists in the world (including the animal kingdom), when it has existed throughout periods of history, or why it exists.
It seems like very few of you sufficiently understand homosexuality in the contexts I’ve just provided to make sound arguments for either side.
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