King Kaufman's Sports Daily

"We don't try to undermine gay stereotypes": Outsports co-founder Cyd Ziegler Jr. talks about gay athletes, gay allies and the site's new book.

Read more: Sports, Baseball, Gay Culture, Basketball, Homophobia, Football, Ice Hockey, King Kaufman, Sports Daily

Aug. 14, 2007 | "The Outsports Revolution," the first book by the founders and editors of Outsports, the leading gay sports Web site, has a little something for a lot of people.

Gay and sports-phobic? There's advice about how to get over the horrible gym-class memories many gay men share and relate to jock friends and significant others, right down to co-founder Jim Buzinski's recipe for the perfect Super Bowl chili.

Buzinski and Cyd Ziegler Jr. also offer lists of the best gay-themed sports books and movies, discussions of sports fashion -- Speedos good, baggy basketball duds bad, is how they see it -- and serious consideration of some of the issues gay athletes and sports fans face. Plus, at the behest of the publisher, Ziegler says, great bunches of photos of buff dudes at sporting events.

Those shots echo one of the most popular features of the Outsports site, the photo galleries. "The Outsports Revolution" includes a fascinating e-mail exchange between Buzinski and "Timmy," who said he was a closeted professional athlete whose name wasn't anything like Timmy.

Timmy objected to the photo galleries on the site, arguing that they confirm the mainstream's stereotype that "if we're gay, we'll want to 'sexualize' our sport."

He wrote that he realized the galleries of rugby and water polo players hugging and kissing were probably very popular, "but do you honestly expect 'straight america' to take us seriously when this is the first image we're putting out about ourselves?"

"Your concerns, interestingly enough, have virtually never been voiced by the 'mainstream,'" Buzinski wrote back. "We hear these criticisms from time to time, but they mostly come from other gay people ... We get the sense sometimes that we must portray ourselves as celibate monks to satisfy these concerns."

Ziegler echoed that sentiment Monday. "We don't try to undermine gay stereotypes," he said. "We simply try to be who we are."

Ziegler, one-quarter of a four-way tie for first in this column's 2006 Panel o' Experts NFL Preseason Predictions contest -- Buzinski finished second in 2003 -- spoke by phone from New York.

What's the state of the gay sports world in the summer of 2007?

I think it depends on what you mean by that. Gay athletes, the weekend warriors if you will, are doing great. Gay sports have never been bigger. There are tournaments going on around the country every weekend of the year. The opportunities for gay people to get into sports have never been greater.

For the sports fan, and this would be similar for the elite gay athlete, sports have changed a lot. There are gay-friendly voices that are willing to speak and have gotten louder in recent years, certainly in reaction to Tim Hardaway's reaction to John Amaechi's coming out. They certainly made themselves heard. I haven't heard a negative story of an athlete coming out of the closet in high school, professional or collegiate athletics in at least eight years.

But there is still this perception that homophobia is rampant in sports, and as long as that perception exists, that sports are an unfriendly area to be, or at least perceived to be unfriendly, it's there and it affects people. So in that sense, there's a lot of work to be done.

Next page: Former NBA player John Amaechi's coming out "changed the focus"