FORMER NBA ALL-STAR TIM HARDAWAY IS A HOMOPHOBIC PRICK

From Sports Illustrated courtesy of AlterNet:

On a Miami radio show Wednesday, Hardaway was asked how he would interact with a gay teammate.

"First of all, I wouldn't want him on my team," the former Miami Heat star said. "And second of all, if he was on my team, I would, you know, really distance myself from him because, uh, I don't think that is right. I don't think he should be in the locker room while we are in the locker room."

When show host Dan Le Batard told Hardaway those comments were "flatly homophobic" and "bigotry," the player continued.

"You know, I hate gay people, so I let it be known. I don't like gay people and I don't like to be around gay people," he said. "I'm homophobic. I don't like it. It shouldn't be in the world or in the United States."

Hardaway also said if he did find out that a teammate was gay, he would ask for the player to be removed from the team.

"Something has to give," Hardaway said. "If you have 12 other ballplayers in your locker room that's upset and can't concentrate and always worried about him in the locker room or on the court or whatever, it's going to be hard for your teammates to win and accept him as a teammate."

Later that night, Hardaway apologized during a telephone interview with WSVN-TV in Miami.

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As a stage actor, I've been working closely with gay men for many years, and here's a little secret: gay men generally don't hit on straight men. I mean, there are always exceptions, of course, and sometimes a gay guy might make a mistake, but, almost always, gay men only hit on other gay men. I mean, think about it for like two seconds. Would you really want to be hitting on someone who you know is utterly unattracted to you? Yeah, well, gay people are just like everybody else in that respect, which is one of many, many reasons that homophobia is completely irrational. It's a fear that has virtually no basis in reality.

I've got my own theory about why some straight men are so freaked out by gay gays.

Despite thirty plus years of feminism in this country, we continue to be a fairly patriarchal culture. That is, men continue to hold the lion's share of power in the United States, and people know it. Add to that the idea that, in our patriarchal culture, women, not men, are overwhelmingly understood to be the objects of sexual desire: the bulk of the US mass media environment is dominated by images of the female body, usually presented with a strong sexual undercurrent; men, to a small extent, are sexualized by the media, too, but in no way does this even come close to the way that women are sexualized. So men are the powerful ones, while women are not; women are the sex objects, while men chase after them.

But what happens when the potential is out there for a man to be seen as an object of desire? I think that the mind of the homophobe somehow ties together the secondary social status of women with the concept of sexual objectification. Being potentially seen as an object of sexual desire is tantamount to being squeezed out of the patriarchy, being rendered powerless, and because men are the powerful ones in our society, being robbed of gender identity, and therefore overall identity. Homophobia, then, is an acute identity crisis, which explains the wild irrationality of the homophobe.

Yeah, yeah, it's all very Freudian, I know, but it makes more sense than "it's just not right."

At any rate, Hardaway's unabashed, and unashamed, statements indicate that we continue to have a major problem with homophobia in this country, and perhaps a problem with men feeling powerless, too.

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