CHICAGO — You’ve probably never heard of Holly Peterson or Jonathan Jean-Pierre. One came out as a lesbian at age 15, when she was playing high school basketball. The other, a college rower, told his teammates last year that he’s gay.
There was little fanfare for either. There were no headlines as there were this past week when NBA player Jason Collins declared that he is gay, making him the first in a major U.S. men’s professional sport to come out.
Some are calling Collins a role model for this up-and-coming generation of gay and lesbian athletes. But in some ways, those young athletes and their supporters also have helped pave the way for pros like Collins.
“Change is coming from the top down, but it’s also coming from the bottom up,” says Ellen Staurowsky, a professor of sport management at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
“It is a movement that’s taken place quietly,” she adds, “on teams, in athletic departments with some coaches and athletes standing up when they needed to … It’s an accumulated movement over many, many decades.”
Awareness of homosexuality in athletics started to grow, slowly, Staurowsky says, in the 1970s on college campuses. Then in the early 1980s, tennis star Billie Jean King was outed, and Martina Navratilova also came out as a lesbian.
