raincitygirl | (no subject)

legionseagle retweeted this article, noting that anybody who’s been used as an unwitting beard would probably be less judgmental. To summarize, NBA basketballer Jason Collins recently came out. His former fiancee Carolyn Moos gave an interview to a women’s magazine in which she talked about how hurt she’d felt when Collins ended their relationship, and also when she found out he was actually gay.

I see this from a couple of different angles. Being queer myself, obviously I empathize with Collins. It can be very hard to come to terms with your sexuality. I myself didn’t come to terms with it until I was 26 or 27. I don’t think there’s any graceful way to come out. I highly doubt Collins woke up one morning and went, “Now, how can I ruin this woman’s life?” He was probably as miserable as she was. Actually, he was probably even more miserable, because being in the closet really sucks. And hopefully there will be fewer of these situations in future if societal homophobia continues to decrease at current rates. Meaning that hopefully more people will feel able to come out earlier in their lives, before they’ve gotten into long-term opposite-sex relationships that can never make either them or their partner happy.

However, I know of several situations where a man was married to a straight woman, finally came to terms with his sexuality, and ended the marriage, and it invariably ended messily. Divorce is messy almost by definition. Add in a big lie (yeah, the man in question has probably been lying to himself, but he’s probably also been lying to her) and it gets messier. Add in potential infidelity, and it gets messier still. Granted, not all “I’m actually not straight, and I’m leaving you” revelations necessarily involve infidelity, but many do.

Situation #1: An old school friend of my mum’s, we’ll call her A., was married for many years until her husband left her for another man. A. went through a long period of feeling betrayed and abandoned by her husband, and also by the mutual friend who had become her husband’s new male partner. A. and her ex are now on very good terms, and she and her new partner, and her ex and his partner have actually holidayed together several times. But we’re talking twenty years post-divorce here.

Situation #2: A neighbour of my mum’s, we’ll call her B., was left by her husband for another man. B. ended up joining an extremely right-wing and homophobic church that encouraged her belief that her ex-husband was going to hell. To this day they are not on speaking terms. Furthermore, she blocked him from having access to their kids and encouraged *them* to think he was going to hell.

Situation #3: A few years ago, an older man I knew socially talked to me about how he was the “other man” who broke up a marriage back in the early 1970’s. He and his husband are together to this day. He talked with great compassion about what a rough time she went through when her husband left her for another man, and how she didn’t use the courts to keep her ex-husband from getting visitation with their kids. Which, given when this all happened, she probably could’ve done that, instead of allowing her ex and his boyfriend at the time (now his husband) to spend time with the kids.

Situation #4: A few years ago a different man I knew talked about being involved with a support group for men who come out as gay in mid-life. Many of the men who came to the support group were married when they came out, and he was positively irritated by how bitter and angry some of the wives were. As far as he was concerned, as soon as the husband came out, it was the wife’s job to get over it. I don’t know what kind of terms he was on with his own ex-wife, but I’d suspect probably bad terms. I remember at the time thinking how little compassion he seemed to have for women whose worlds had just been rocked.

So, messy all round, but good outcomes to #1 and #3. Eventual good outcomes, anyway. All these women had a lot of anger to work through. And I don’t think de-legitimizing their anger on the grounds that homophobia is bad is especially helpful. Yes, homophobia is a soul-crushing thing. Yes, it took great courage for Jason Collins to come out in public when he works in a very macho sport. Heck, it takes great courage for anyone to come out. But none of that changes the fact that Carolyn Moos has a legitimate grievance against him. It should be possible to be against homophobia and also empathize with Moos’s pain over the messy end of a long term relationship.

All that said, I’m not sure giving a tell-all interview to Cosmopolitan magazine is the *wisest* way to get over a broken heart. Journalists and editors aren’t therapists or friends, they’re in the business of selling content. Maybe she figures by publicizing her side of the story, she’ll achieve emotional closure. Personally, I wouldn’t want a bunch of strangers reading about how my ex-fiance screwed up my life, and either feeling sorry for me, or criticizing me for enabling homophobia. But, you know, to each their own, and at least she didn’t give the article to the Daily Fail. But I don’t think Slate is being entirely fair to Moos. In fact, the Slate article strays close to, “don’t harsh my squee over this historic first by bringing messy reality into it.”

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Given it's a hellish situation all round and we all know that, I think it's worth doing a compare and contrast with Gareth Thomas and specifically that he felt particularly stressed - to the point of suicidal feelings - by what it was doing to his wife, and that he came out to her long before coming out to anyone else and its hitting the press. And I heard the interviews he did when he came out and the dominant theme - apart from the support he'd received from his team-mates - was "gutted for Jemma" "my best friend Jemma" "my childhood sweetheart".

Assuming the Cosmo interview is accurate, this isn't what happened with the other guy:

A MONTH BEFORE I was set to marry the man I loved, he called off the wedding. I had no idea why. He and I had been together for eight years. We had planned to have children, build a family. Nearly four years later, I got my answer. My former fiancé, Jason Collins, a pro basketball player with the Washington Wizards, announced last spring in Sports Illustrated that he is gay.

Jason told me he's gay over the phone on a Monday morning in April, the same day the magazine hit newsstands. However, he didn't mention the article—that came as a surprise when I heard about it from a friend. In his essay, Jason wrote that he'd once been engaged to a woman.

.

So she's got four years of "Am I crazy? Am I crazy?" plus being dropped right into a maelstrom of publicity without warning. Now, obviously going to Cosmo isn't particularly wise, but I can quite see why she felt that the other avenues for getting her feelings acknowledged by anyone had been closed off by Collins without her having any say in the matter, and I can quite understand the sense that exerting agency in a bad way might feel better (possibly temporarily) than the sense that she doesn't deserve to have any agency at all.

And, yes, I think the tone of the Slate article was very much along the lines you've described it, with a side order of "Man up Carolyn and take one for the team."

Edited 2013-07-12 10:19 (UTC)

I hadn't heard of Gareth Thomas before, but he sounds like a mensch. No, there's no graceful way to come out, but he seems to have done his best. I suspect he and his ex-wife will be friends at some point (probably in the very distant future).

The Collins/Moos relationship, by contrast, sounds like it ended with metaphorical blood on the good carpet. If you're going to mention your ex-fiancee in your Sports Illustrated article that's about to be trending on Twitter, it's probably a good idea to mention to said ex-fiancee that you've got an article coming out any moment now and she can expect phone calls from agog journalists. actually, even if he hadn't mentioned her in the article (which he did), he still should've told her about the article. They were together long enough that presumably sports journalists would've already known who she was and how to track her down.

Granted, to be fair to him, it was probably not a fun conversation even without mentioning the article, but there is such a thing as damage limitation. Your ex-fiancee is less likely to trash you to the press if you haven't just dropped her in the deep end with no water wings. It's just a mess all around.

I was very put out when Collins came out when journalists kept saying "And no professional athlete has come out as gay while still playing before" because not merely Martina Navratilova (I think Billie Jean King only came out on retirement) but also Thomas. So what they really meant was "No North American male athlete playing any of football, baseball, basketball or hockey has come out."

Which was a side rant, the main point of this was that Gareth Thomas coming out was a huge deal in the UK and Ireland, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, France and Italy and quite probably Fiji and Samoa, since those are all places where rugby is a very big deal indeed, with all the machismo that implies. He headed the Pink List in 2010.

It also created something of a virtuous circle, actually, because the rugby fans patted themselves on the back for being so much more tolerant than soccer fans, and I think the idea that being not homophobic was a good thing rather than a civic duty in sports watching circles spread reasonably widely.

Edited 2013-07-14 07:45 (UTC)

Also, this in particular in the article got my back up:

In doing so, she’s also wrestled the conversation away from the historic fight against homophobia in sports and onto her own mundane personal problems.

I'm sorry, Slate, did you just accuse someone of derailing for mentioning that person A who is being lauded for doing something historic and important did it in a needlessly shitty way from which the person in question has personally suffered?

And what if it hadn't been just leading impressionable women deliberately up the garden path (which is what Slate seems to think is all they deserve)?

In the case I had in mind when I made the frosty tweet, the individual in question didn't merely exercise deception with regard to his romantic intentions, but he participated in direct discrimination (not offering jobs to otherwise qualified people) on the grounds of sexual orientation. Yes, agreed because of the awful societal pressures on him, but would Slate have also given a free pass had Collins had had two people kicked off the team for "rubbing their preferences in everyone's face"?

Edited 2013-07-12 09:10 (UTC)

I suspect Amanda Hess (the Slate writer in question) would have felt rather differently about these "mundane personal problems" if it had been her own ex-fiance.

I bet she would. Mind you, it seems to have been a day for shitty Slate articles -- there was a horrible one on anti-depressants and one where I ended up tangling with Amanda Marcotte on Twitter where she used the term "Terrorists and their female fans" to direct to her article. I objected on the obvious grounds that it implies "terrorist" is a monogendered noun (and there has actually been quite a lot of work done on different patterns of motivations and actions between male and female terrorists) and I got accused of wanting to label women evil and "hysteria". Actually the article is a banal piece of shoddy unresearched gender essentialist tripe about men in jail having adoring female penpals, which ignores the converse phenomenon, and slaps the terrorist label on blokes as diverse as Tsarnaev (unconvicted as yet, certainly radicalised, query if terrorist as opposed to nihilist), Pistorius (out on bail, if convicted probably domestic violence if anything), Bundy (rapist and serial killer) and Chris Brown (not a murderer, domestic vilence).

So I think Slate was having a dog days of summer edition.