A New Inning, Late in the Game; New York Times, 9/22/12

Frank Bruni, New York Times; A New Inning, Late in the Game: "McClatchy, whose interview with The Times was his first public acknowledgment of his sexual orientation, could do considerable good. He remains well known in baseball — he’s been informally advising the mayor of Sacramento on the city’s interest in having a major league team — and is the chairman of the board of the McClatchy Company, which publishes more than two dozen newspapers, including The Sacramento Bee and The Miami Herald. And pro sports offers a frontier on which there’s considerable good to be done. One reason there has been so much attention lately to statements about homosexuality, supportive and derogatory, from prominent male athletes is that they inhabit a stubborn bastion of reductively defined masculinity, and many impressionable kids take their cues from it. If its heroes make clear that being gay is O.K., the impact could be profound: fewer adolescents and teenagers bullied, fewer young and not-so-young adults leading stressful, painful double lives... I asked one of them, the Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe, about the notion that such a teammate would make the locker room a less comfortable place. “That assumes that a gay person in the locker room is going to find you attractive, which I think is pretty narcissistic,” Kluwe said in a phone interview. “Isn’t that the shallowest kind of thinking: that all of a sudden if a gay guy comes out, he’s going be staring at you?”"