Gay Marriage and the NHL

NHL agitator Sean Avery has thrust pro sports' relutance to embrace gay people people back into the spotlight.

Sean Avery, quite possibly the NHL's most hated player, has become a champion of gay rights after lending his support to a gay marriage campaign in New York. The firestorm that erupted after NHL agent Todd Reynolds said he was saddened by Avery's views ostensibly bodes well for one of the last refuges of homophobia in North America – professional sports, writes the National Post's Bruce Arthur. “If you administered truth serum to all of hockey, or all of sports, you’d hear far more regressive attitudes towards homosexuality,” he writes. Yet the tides are turning. The son of Toronto Maple Leafs general manager Brian Burke came out to much public acclaim shortly before dying in a car crash last year; defenceman Brent Sopel carried the Stanley Cup in Chicago's Pride parade. And now with Avery, “nobody even cared until [Reynolds] decided to disagree. This is progress.”

Such potential masks the fact that anti-gay epithets are still as common as jock straps and post-game beers in the continent's locker rooms. “The three-letter F-word is thrown around everywhere, even after some athletes have learned to stop employing racially charged slurs,” notes the New York Daily News' Filip Bondy. So it's saddening that pro sports' most vocal proponent for equality is a much-disdained fourth-line player on a mediocre hockey team. As Howard Bragman, a PR adviser who has helped athletes and celebrities come out, tells Bondy, “You can hit your girlfriend, murder somebody, get a DUI, get involved with dogfighting, but you can't be gay.”

And there won't be a tectonic shift in attitudes toward gay rights until an active athlete in one of the four major sports leagues comes out, Deadspin's Barry Petchesky suggests. “Since we don't have a gay hockey player to rally around, fans and media do the next best thing: We find a bad guy and inflate his importance,” says Petchesky. “Unpopular opinions like Reynolds' are fresh meat for those on the periphery of the sport who would lionize an openly gay athlete, if only one existed.” Thus we're reduced to anointing Sean Avery as hockey's Harvey Milk, while we wait for Reynolds' mindset to follow playing without helmets into the sport's dustbin.