Gay NBA Fan Finds 78 Homophobic Tweets from 37 Active Players
While some were from more than a decade ago, homophobic tweets from 37 active players were revealed by a gay NBA fan, Outsports reports. (Three more players were on a roster when the list was compiled last month, but they are no longer on an NBA team).
"With very few exceptions, all of these messages were sent from the players' accounts from 2009 through 2013, in some cases years before they joined the league."
Outsports adds that while these tweets may not reflect what these players feel about LGBTQ people today, all the tweets were active as of March 4, though some were deleted "after players became aware of this impending story, though Outsports has a screen capture of every tweet)."
The players include CJ McCollum, the president of the National Basketball Players Assn., who tweeted "no homo," as well as�superstar Kevin Durant, who tweeted "shut up fag boy."
"I don't care how long ago it was, it shows the person's character, in my opinion," said�Derrick Gordon, who came out publicly as gay while playing basketball at UMass�and who�now plays professionally in Germany told Outsports. "It's a slap in the face to me, to other people in my community. That's disrespectful. I'm not for people losing their jobs, but words like that can't be tolerated."
It was Chris, a young, gay NBA fan, who discovered the tweets when he began exploring players' social media and found homophobic tweets. "He then spent a weekend going through every NBA roster, searching for problematic keywords in tweets," reports Outsports.
"It was shocking but not surprising," Chris said of the number of homophobic tweets he found. "The culture of homophobia in sports runs very deep, especially in a hyper-masculine league like the NBA."
"Outsports has verified Chris' identity, but he asked for anonymity out of fear of online attacks from fans of the players or teams," the article said.
He discovered "Fag" showed up in 29 tweets, "gay" in 40 (and not complimentary), and the phrase "no homo" in 17. Patrick Beverley�of the�Minnesota Timberwolves, for example, tweeted "fag" 13 times in 2011, and he had been in the league since 2009.
In 2011, Beverly used the term "grinding fag" in a tweet.
Those teams with four players with anti-gay tweets are the Denver Nuggets and Utah Jazz, while the�Chicago Bulls�currently have three players who tweeted homophobic messages. And four of the players on the list — Kevin Durant, Draymond Green, Zach LaVine, and JaVale McGee —�represented the United States�at the�Summer Olympics in Tokyo. That's a third of the U.S. Olympic Team last year.
Green tweeted "shut up fag boy" in 2013.
"Of the 20 NBA teams currently in position for the playoffs, 90% of them have at least one athlete on the list of players who tweeted anti-LGBTQ language or messages (the Celtics and Bucks currently have no one on the list)," adds Outsports.
Most of the tweets got virtually no interaction at the time, which might explain how they have gone unnoticed until now. But one by Kevin Durant did receive much attention in 2009 when he called a player a "fag boi." It received 6,600 likes and wasn't taken down until March 4, after Outsports' report.
Of the 78 homophobic tweets, 70 were sent from 2009 to 2013.
With most being in the past, could there have been a shift in attitude in the past decade?
"Culture as a whole has changed," said�Anthony Nicodemo, a successful high school basketball coach in�New York who came out publicly as gay several years ago. "Our culture as a nation has changed over the last 10 years. And I'm sure if you contacted the majority of those players, they have some regret. Some of them may not even remember they had tweeted that."
Jason Collins, the first active NBA player to come out as gay�in 2013, has noticed a change when he speaks to the league's gay rookies each year.
"What I try to do is unpack that language, and how harmful and hurtful that language is," Collins told Outsports. "I started doing this in 2015, and each year it has gotten a lot better."
"We usually start with a simple question, 'How many of you know someone personally who's in the LGBTQ community?' From 2015 to the last time I spoke to the players, more and more hands go up, and just about every single person in those breakout sessions has a close family member or friend who's a member of the community. I think that just speaks to our country."