Sheryl Swoopes, 40, was expected to be a reserve this season. But Tulsa injuries have put her in the starting lineup.
Swoopes’ relationship with Scott had been fairly well-known to those in the media who regularly covered women’s basketball. Many of us lauded her decision to publicly acknowledge it. We hoped that it would help the overall climate in athletics, so people were more likely to feel they could be open if they were in a same-sex relationship. Yet when Swoopes’ agent mentioned to me last fall that Swoopes was “in a different situation” now, it wasn’t difficult for me to guess what she was referring to. Swoopes was no longer in a relationship with a woman. She was in a relationship with a man whom she’d known for some time. Swoopes didn’t seem to want to have — for lack of a better way to put it — a “coming out as straight again” interview. She wasn’t renouncing homosexuality or saying she wished she hadn’t said what she did in 2005. But the fact remained that she was no longer in a same-sex relationship. Did this surprise me? Honestly, no. There were things Swoopes said in her initial interview with Granderson that had made me think her relationship then was about what kind of person Scott was and how their lives meshed together, regardless of whether Scott was male or female. One of the things I wrote back then was this: The concept that sexuality is not just two polar opposites — heterosexual and homosexual — but lies on a spectrum, is a theory that has always been grasped to some degree. It came more to the forefront in American culture with Alfred Kinsey’s reports in the late 1940s and 1950s, when he introduced the zero-to-six “scale” and the then-shocking concept that not all people actually know where they are on the scale. Nor does everyone always stay in the same place. I felt that in 2005, Swoopes was relating her own personal experience, not trying to represent a “universal” gay or lesbian experience. Because there is no such thing. Last fall, though, I wasn’t certain what to write about Swoopes’ personal life, or how much she even wanted to discuss it. Once she got engaged to her fiancé, Chris, and returned to the WNBA, it seemed it was time to address it. “If Chris and I had not gotten together, I’m not sure I’d be playing today,” Swoopes told me recently. “I know he has a lot to do with where I am in my life now. “There is nothing I’ve been through in my life that I regret, or that I would go back and change. I feel like everything that happened — personally and professionally — I went through for a reason, and I learned from those things.” There are sure to be gay people who are annoyed at and disappointed with Swoopes. Who feel she has co-opted and trivialized what for many is a sacred, soul-searching, life-altering experience of coming out. I understand that sentiment. But if Swoopes was being true to what she felt in 2005, and she’s also being true to what she feels now … that just sounds like “life happens” to me. In retrospect, maybe she should not have felt compelled to label herself “gay” in 2005. But clearly she felt that was the right thing to do then. People can make their own decisions on what they feel about Swoopes and the entire topic of sexuality — how much it needs to be publicly defined and proclaimed. I’ll take Swoopes at her word that she was happy in 2005, and that she’s happy now.”
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Tulsa Shock’s Sheryl Swoopes is as passionate as ever - ESPN
i mean…what’s wrong with BISEXUALITY? why must it be you’re either gay or straight or a little of something in between?
how about good old confusing and ambiguous BI SExuALITY.
(or pan sexuality, but i prefer bi, because of where i live, how i claimed bi-sexuality when i first came out, and other reasons—but pan sexuality can work as well)—
i like how this writer allowed swoopes that place of ambiguity and refused the power of media to name and define and i also appreciate that swoopes is clear about leaving US to struggle with how to understand her, rather than allowing us to force her to explain herself.
BUT i am also just confused—what the hell is wrong with being bi-sexual? and also—why does coming out as lesbian mean that you are automatically straight if you go with men after you come out?
and why do they put sexuality on a scale—so you can be a little gay or a little straight, but never a little bi-sexual? why are the two “extremes” gay and straight, rather than bi-sexual and questioning? just, UGH.
(via iinventedeverything)
^^^^^^
(via so-treu)