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Study finds 1 in 3 high school football players gay! Well, no, but it does offer encouraging news about homophobia. Plus: NFL Week 10 picks.

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Nov. 9, 2007 | You may have seen headlines in the last week or two about a study finding that a third of American football players have engaged in gay sex. Does that sound ridiculous? It does to Eric Anderson, and he should know.

He did the study, in which 19 of 47 former high school football players said they had engaged in gay sex.

"The headlines are quite a bit misleading," says Anderson, an American sociologist who teaches at the University of Bath in England and who wrote "In the Game: Gay Athletes and the Cult of Masculinity."

"It's not 'One-third of American football players have been shown to have sex with men.' And it's a qualitative study: It's not designed to reflect a sample; it's not designed to reflect a population at large. What it is, though, is it's yet another piece of my puzzle to show overall that homophobia is on an amazingly rapid decline amongst university-age men, including men who are traditionally quite conservative, quite homophobic in their sex and gender views."

Anderson defined gay sex as activity intended to give sexual pleasure to another man, even if it was part of a three-way sex act involving a woman. So despite the dismissal of the study on various blog comment threads for counting participation in a three-way as gay sex, high-fiving a tag-team partner was not included.

"I'm not trying to say that these men are gay in any way, shape or form," Anderson says. "That isn't the point of this. The point is to simply make the point that homophobia is reducing at an unbelievably rapid rate, and this is one of the multiple benefits that come with that.

"I'm afraid people will get lost in the nitty-gritty of 'He's trying to say a third of football players are gay,'" he says. "No. It's just that, can you imagine this [the former players speaking openly about their experiences with other men] happening in the mid-'80s? No way in hell."

Anderson says he "strategically selected" the 47 men in his study: They were former high school football players who had failed to make their university team and had instead gone into cheerleading, a logical place for ex-football players to land, Anderson says, because it's a sport that can be picked up at a late age without experience and there's a constant man shortage.

Next page: The "one-drop rule" of sexuality is a thing of the past. Plus: NFL Week 10