1. Sports, Sexuality, and Affect: Coming Out To Play by Negotiating
Homophobia in Homonationalist Times
9,861 words
A dissertation submitted by 75705 to the London School of Economies & Political Science,
in part completion of the requirements for the MSc in Gender, Media and Culture
1 September 2015
“I hereby state that this report is my own work and that all sources used are made explicit in
the text”

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Abstract
This dissertation explores the intersections of homonationalist critique and issues of sexuality
in sport through analyzing the lived of experience of Robbie Rogers, who in May 2013
became the first openly gay man to compete in a top North American professional sports
league. Looking at two texts written by Rogers, I argue that the contemporary application of
homonationalist theory to the realm of elite competitive sport excludes an account of the
everyday lived experiences of gay athletes within the heterosexist and homophobic
mainstream institution of professional sports. I further suggest that a feminist theory of affect
offers a valuable resource for tracing the ambivalent experience of LGBT athletes to
reconsider the potentiality of homonationalism for this particular context. This study engages
in a nuanced approach to feminist theory and politics that encourages critical reflexivity for
understanding the circulation of affect in the relationship between ontology and
epistemology.

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Acknowledgments
This is “Dedicated” to the “One and Only” Mariah Carey for pushing me “Through the
Rain”, the “Breakdown(s)”, and ultimately, helping me “Make It Happen.”
And also, to Kimia Ghavami, Vivian Hua, and Hatty/Harry/Harriet Farnham, whose
guidance, love, support, and laughter has encouraged me through every word of this
dissertation.

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Table of Contents
Introduction ………………………………………………………………………………… 4
Situating This Research Project: Aims and Research Question ……………………... 4
Notes on Methodology and Analytical Framework …………………………………. 5
Limitations, Reflexivity, and Positionality ………………………………………….. 7
Looking Forward …………………………………………………………………….. 9
Literature Review …………………………………………………………………………. 10
1) Sport, Sexuality, and Nation: The Emergence of ‘Sporting Homonationalism’ ... 10
2) Attempts to Survey the Closet: Gender, Sexuality, and Sport ………………….. 14
Analysis ……………………………………………………………………………………. 19
1) Section 1: Mapping Sporting Homonationalism ………………………………... 19
“If you want to play, you should play. You’ll be accepted” ………………. 20
“Embrace the Spotlight” …………………………………………………… 22
The Gay Athlete and Civilizational Politics in Intl Sporting Events …......... 25
2) Section 2: Affect, Ambivalence, and Counter-Hegemonies …………………….. 28
“‘Faggot’ this and ‘faggot’ that” …………………………………………… 28
Trailing Behind the Rest of Society ……………………………………….. 31
“It’s Not Enough” ………………………………………………………….. 32
Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………………… 35
Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………………. 39
Appendix ………………………………………………………………………………….. 47

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Introduction
“Hey look, the little fag can run faster than you boys!”
These are the words my Grade nine gym teacher yelled as I sprinted past the rest of
my all-boys gym class in a two-hundred meter race. While I was no stranger to being the
target of a plethora of homophobic slurs in gym class, this particular instance is striking
because of the way that my identity in the class as a ‘fag’ was deployed to discipline the
ostensibly more ‘masculine’/‘athletic’ boys in the class for not running faster than me.
Andrew Parker’s (1996) research on the significance of boys’ physical education in
constructing notions of masculinity illustrates how homophobic language is conceptualized in
gendered terms whereby a lack of sporting prowess is equated with being ‘non-masculine’, or
effeminate. This painful process of learning to ‘perform’ an acceptable mode of masculinity
to feel accepted and avoid physical and/or emotional harm moved me “into feminism…
precisely by reading the relation between affect and structure” (Ahmed 2004, p. 174). As a
gay long-distance runner, my ongoing ambivalent relationship to sport is structured by my
historical and contemporary encounters with homophobia. In this project, I approach
mainstream sports as a critical cultural and affective site for thinking across the conditions of
possibility at the intersections of sport, sexuality, and gender.
Situating This Research Project: Aims and Research Question
This research project began with my personal interest in following contemporary
mainstream media debates on the subject of sexual diversity in sport. Debates sparked by the
Russian parliament’s decision to criminalize the circulation of “propaganda” depicting non-
traditional sexual relations to minors nine months prior to hosting the 2014 Winter Olympics
in Sochi (Van Rheenen 2014). Russia’s anti-gay law elicited a firestorm of criticism from
Western media outlets, celebrities, and activists for its perceived violation of the Olympic
Charter’s anti-discrimination principle (Lally 2013). The scant academic literature from queer

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feminist sport scholars on the topic of the sexual politics of international sporting events have
thus far employed Jasbir Puar’s (2006) notion of “homonationalism” to critique the
invocation of liberal human rights discourses at these events to demarcate between the
‘liberal’ west and ‘homophobic’ others. 1 Although Lenskyj (2014) acknowledges that the
Sochi Olympics controversy generated an unprecedented level of media and public interest in
the experience of elite LGBT athletes at such international sporting events, the narratives of
these athletes in the media have yet to be substantially analyzed in academic literature.
Addressing this gap in the literature reflects my aim to build upon the current body of
intellectual work that tackles the confluence of homonationalism and sport. By paying
particular attention to the experiences of elite LGBT athletes (who compete at elite
international sporting events), I hope to critically engage in thinking through the theoretical
applicability and translatability of homonationalism to a sporting context. Specifically, the
research question guiding this project is: ‘to what extent is homonationalism a useful analytic
framework for understanding homosexuality in sports contemporarily?’
Notes on Methodology and Analytical Framework
My dissertation intends to explore this research question through a close textual
analysis of two texts written by an openly gay professional athlete. Adopting such a
qualitative approach is crucial for interpreting the social construction of knowledge and
language in my chosen texts (Gunter 1999). Textual analysis is precisely suited to examining
the social and cultural production of meanings, effects, and affects in relation to the
mechanisms, contradictions, and subtleties of written content (Tonkiss 2004).
Selecting my data for this research project involved an extensive review of online
newspaper articles published after the Russian ban on LGBT propaganda that featured the
1 See Davidson 2013; 2014; Lenskyj 2014; Van Rheenen 2014; Hubbard and Wilkinson
2015.

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opinion of an LGBT athlete.2 Unfortunately, my search revealed that many of the interviews
included only a brief ‘sound bite’ from the athlete. While such responses could lend
themselves neatly to a comparative research project on elite athletes’ views, this is not the
aim of my project. What I needed from my object of analysis to answer the research question
was a more detailed response by an openly LGBT athlete that was still actively competing
and incorporated a description of their lived experience in sports.
Around this time, USA Today published an article written by soccer player Robbie
Rogers (the only openly gay male athlete currently playing in one of the five major
professional sports leagues in the U.S.) entitled: “FIFA fails to support gays” (2015).3 In the
one-page article, Rogers (2015) condemns the Fédération Internationale de Football
Association (FIFA) for selecting two anti-LGBT nations (Russia and Qatar) to host the World
Cup. In addition, Rogers recently published his memoir, Coming Out To Play (2014) that
addresses a longstanding cultural silence by opening a public dialogue about how the lived
experience of gay athletes is affected by their immersion within the homophobic and
heterosexist institution of sport. Taken together, Rogers’ texts offer my research project an
innovative site of analysis from which to examine the linkages, but to also question the
potential disjuncture between homonationalism, the LGBT athlete experience, and sporting
homophobia.
Central to my research project is the employment of homonationalism as an analytic
framework to account for the complex and contradictory ways in which the acceptance of
(some) gay and lesbian subjects undergirds U.S. nationalist projects (Puar 2013). Situated
within queer academic scholarship, this project approaches Rogers’ texts with a purpose to
2 Tom Daley (GB), Robbie Rogers (US), Matthew Mitcham (AU), Billie Jean King (US),
Johnny Weir (US), Blake Skjellerup (CA), Greg Louganis (US), Anastasia Bucsis (CA), and
Ari-Pekka Liukkonen (FI) are all openly LGBT athletes who have either spoken to or
been asked by the media about competing in countries with anti-LGBT legislation.
3 See Appendix for full copy of Rogers’ newspaper article.

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assess the presence of homonationalist discourses in this sporting context that may reproduce
certain forms of identities, subjects, and knowledge as intelligible. Moreover, examining
Rogers’ texts requires an understanding that “[s]ubjects may produce particular texts, but
they are operating within the limits of the episteme, the discursive formation, the regime of
truth, of a particular period and culture” (Hall 1997, p. 79). Thus, my analysis draws on
Michel Foucault’s theories of discourse and power/knowledge to examine the ways in which
both homonationalist discourse and possible forms of resistance circulate within these two
texts (Hall 1997). Meaning is not static, but rather is actively produced in the unstable
process of interpretation. As Jenner and Titscher (2000) argue, it is essential for a textual
analysis to be aware of the contestable and dynamic nature of meaning, whereby
interpretations of the relationship between the specific text, its social conditions and
ideologies are open to alternative accounts.
Locating and intervening in these sites of tension can be achieved through an affective
exploration of Rogers’ texts that attends to the ambivalent space he occupies in relation to
dominant practices of heterosexual sporting masculinities. Such a conceptualization offers an
avenue for extending the very little academic research that has been applied to investigating
the conflicting experiences of oppression and belonging of gay sporting men (Anderson and
McCormack 2010). In analyzing the complex imbrication of the personal and the structural,
affect is “valuable precisely to the extent that it is not autonomous” (Hemmings 2005, p.
565). Centering on the nuanced experiences of professional gay athletes (Rogers) underpins
an effort to question and disrupt the universalized conception of homonationalism that
potentially submerges analyses of the specificity of the cultural sphere of sports.
Limitations, Reflexivity, and Positionality
From the outset of this research project, I recognize the ways in which my ongoing
affective relationship with sport (as a white, cis-gender, gay man) and its cultural

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reproduction of masculinities will, in part, frame and influence my interpretation of Rogers’
texts and the subsequent knowledge generated (Jensen 2002). Engaging with affective
politics “requires attention to the ways in which feelings can (re)produce dominant social and
geopolitical hierarchies and exclusions” (Pedwell and Whitehead 2015, p. 120). Placing
Rogers and all-male professional sports at the center of my research inquiry risks reproducing
a falsely universalized discourse of hegemonic masculinity that does not disentangle gender
from sexuality and ignores the intersections of other axes of identity. Discussing this
dominant form of masculinity in sport means acknowledging how women and their
achievements in sport are actively minimized and excluded in such discourses (Vandeberg
1998). As well, for my dissertation and its analysis, sport(s) will refer to the norms and
practices of elite all-male competitive sport in which athletes (like Rogers) are likely to also
compete at international sporting events.
Accordingly, this feminist sports research is engaged in reflexively thinking about the
potential exclusions produced through homonationalist theory. Following from Nikita
Dhawan (2013), my project is limited in its capacity to address the heterosexist violence
experienced by queer athletes in/from the global South with its focus on domination within
Western mainstream sports, athletes, and its corresponding modes of masculinities. This also
means thinking carefully about how to temper my critique of homonationalist theory in sport
with recognizing the courage of gay athletes to come out in a space with such distinct forms
of homophobic violence. Therefore, I am keenly aware of my research’s imperfect approach
to producing alternative knowledge whereby the sexual subaltern cannot speak because
“‘speaking’ itself belongs to an already well-defined structure and history of domination”
(Chow 1994, p. 132).

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Looking Forward
This dissertation will argue that by simultaneously engendering and contesting the
dominant discursive trajectory of homonationalism, Rogers’ texts complicate the
straightforward narratives of belonging that contemporary homonationalist theory claims to
offer LGBT subjects. Prior to the textual analysis of Rogers’ texts, it is necessary to situate
my research at the intersection of academic literature on the sexual (homonationalist) politics
of international sporting events and scholarship on gender, sexuality, and sport related to gay
athletes in particular. Afterwards, I will critically analyze the nuances and contradictions that
emerge in reading Rogers’ texts through both a homonationalist and affective lens. I suggest
that the tensions evoked throughout these readings operate to highlight the exceptionally
complex terrain of sports that cannot be fully captured by a uniform conception and
application of homonationalist theory.

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Literature Review
Sport, Sexuality, and Nation: The Emergence of ‘Sporting Homonationalism’
Jasbir Puar (2006) developed homonationalism (short for ‘homonormative
nationalism’) as a conceptual framework in the post-9/11 context to understand how:
The Orientalist invocation of the ‘terrorist’ is one discursive tactic that disaggregates
US national gays and queers from racial and sexual ‘others’, foregrounding a
collusion between homosexuality and American nationalism that is generated both by
national rhetorics of patriotic inclusion and by gay and queer subjects themselves (p.
48).
Puar’s critique builds on Lisa Duggan’s (2002) theorization of neoliberalism’s sexual politics
that has produced the “homonormative” gay subject, who does “not contest dominant
heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them while promising
the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture
anchored in a domesticity and consumption” (p. 179). By adapting Foucault’s theory of
biopolitics 4 , Puar (2007) analyzes the insidious racialization of progressive U.S. sexual
politics that momentarily sanctions homonormative gay and lesbian identities through the
repudiation of particular queer populations defined by their perverse racial-sexual attributes
and histories. Homonationalist critiques focus critical attention on “how and why
nationalisms change over time and how sexuality is configured within these transformations”
(Binnie 2004, p. 29). Thus, queer writing on homonationalism map the various genealogies
and manifestations of homonationalism that naturalize imaginative geographies of the U.S. as
a heteronormative, multicultural, and gay-friendly nation.
Homonationalist theory has been applied to sport studies research by scholars such as
Judy Davidson (2013, 2014) and Helen Jefferson Lenskyj (2014) to examine the media
coverage and representations of the Gay Games and the Sochi 2014 Olympics in relation to
4 Shift in modern Western political governance to a ‘politics of life’ that is defined by
“the power to decide the point at which life ceases to be politically relevant” (Agamben
1998, p. 142).

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debates over the sexual politics of international sporting events. This work follows critiques
of contemporary sport studies from Mary McDonald (2006), Heather Sykes (2006), and
Samantha King (2009), who have called for the displacement of homophobia as the primary
category for analysis in an effort to interrogate the multiple antagonisms and exclusions
produced through axes of gender, race, and sexuality at both LGBT and mainstream global
athletic events. Notwithstanding a substantial body of work5 that exists on issues of class
relations, race, and age, “the sexual landscape associated with the Olympics and other
sporting mega-events remain under-explored” (Hubbard and Wilkinson 2005, p. 599).
Global sports spectacles, with their “dramatic character, mass popular appeal and
international significance” (Roche 2000, p. 1), have dominated sports research interested in
critically interrogating the linkages between nation, sport, culture, and more recently,
sexuality.6 Elspeth Probyn (2000) has argued that at any sporting event “sex, gender, nation
and capital are spectacularly on display” (p. 14-5). For Alan Tomlinson and Christopher
Young (2006), the high profile media presence and coverage of these globalized sporting
games has stimulated fierce competition amongst nations vying for national pride and
prestige. David Rowe (2003) notes that international sporting competitions are symbolic
entities through which narratives of the nation “are never far below the surface of sports
discourse” (p. 286). Guttman (2002) and Gilroy (2005) further highlight how such events
provide a space for spectators to celebrate belonging to an idealized national self-image
through militaristic discourses that characterize competitions for medals and glory. Sporting
discourses function to continually evoke the nation as both an anchor and rallying point for
reinforcing national differences (MacLean and Field 2014). It is precisely this recognition of
the cultural and symbolic currency of global sporting events that bolsters scholarly interest in
5 See Vanwynsberghe et al. (2013), Kennelly and Watt (2011), and Watt (2013).
6 For an in-depth analysis of the promotion of nationalistic ideology through specific
Olympic games, see Beck (2004) [Berlin 1936], Rowe and Stevenson (2006) [Sydney
2000], Brownell (2012) [Beijing 2008], and Roche (2008) [London 2012].

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sport’s position as “perhaps one of the most powerful and visible symbols of national identity
and nationalism. Moreover, it has long been used to demonstrate the ideological superiority
of a particular system or state” (Jackson and Haigh 2008, p. 351).
With this background, Davidson (2013) coined the term ‘sporting homonationalism’
to consider how events such as the Gay Games and Outgames represent biopolitical
technologies of homonationalism that reproduce discourses of Western sexual
exceptionalism, queer as regulatory, and the ascendency of whiteness. Davidson (2013) cites
the parade of “Athletes from Countries with Penalties for Homosexuality” during the opening
ceremonies of the 2006 Gay Games to provoke a critical discussion of the ways in which
discourses of sexual human rights are utilized unproblematically in such contexts to narrate
global emancipatory progress for LGBT subjects. Davidson’s contestation of regulatory
discourses of homonationalist sexualities within the context of lesbian and gay sport events
has been embraced in research on mainstream global sporting events.
Queer writings on the homonationalist tropes characterizing the media coverage of the
London 2012 and Sochi 2014 Olympics illustrate that “the ideals of sexual diversity
promoted by the Olympic organizers inevitably, albeit inadvertently, positioned certain
nations, and certain populations, as backwards or intolerant” (Hubbard and Wilkinson 2015,
p. 606). Indeed, the Sochi Games represents the first mainstream international sporting event
to incite fervent public interest in the sexual politics of sport and LGBT human rights
(Lenskyj 2014). As more non-Western nations are awarded hosting rights (such as Qatar and
the 2022 FIFA World Cup), anti-imperialist and antiracist critiques will continue to be
necessary in relation to Western instrumentalizations of sexual freedoms surrounding such
competitions. Many sports federations, including the International Olympic Committee (IOC)
and FIFA, suggest that modern sporting events have the potential to be “a vehicle through
which society could be ‘civilized’” (Levermore 2004, p. 22). This civilizational logic has

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positioned gay emancipation and LGBT human rights at the center of debates over
homonationalism in sport.
However, what remains curiously absent in this literature is a critical consideration of
the potentiality and limits of homonationalism as a conceptual frame vis-à-vis international
sporting events and sports more generally. Importantly, this dissertation does not dismiss the
significance of the work by scholars such as Davidson, but rather hopes to reframe
contemporary debates on the homonationalist politics of sport through emphasizing the lived
experiences of professional LGBT athletes. Athletes, whose openness about their sexual
identity, have only been studied in relation to their symbolic nature as representatives of a
sexually progressive nation (Eng 2008).
This paper’s ambivalent approach to homonationalist critique is an extension of Gavin
Brown’s (2012) argument that:
While homonormativity continues to be theorized as uniform and all-encompassing,
sexualities researchers risk losing any sense of the specific geographies of the social,
political, and economic relations that shape gay lives, and overlooking how these
processes and practices are experienced unevenly and in very different ways
depending on their spatial context. (p. 1069)
To avoid falling into the trap of perpetuating the notion of a universal gay experience, this
paper looks to account for moments of tension between homonationalist narratives of
belonging and the culturally specific social dynamics of gender relations and homophobia
within sport. More specifically, this means displacing the nation-state as the primary unit of
analysis to incorporate an analysis of the textured and complex subjectivities of elite LGBT
athletes (Rowe and Lawrence 1996). This engagement with affective politics attends to the
complex interrelationship between ‘the personal’ and ‘the structural’ in thinking through
dominating social hierarchies and exclusions (Pedwell and Whitehead 2015). Within
homonationalist framings, reflecting on the bodily cultural practice of sexuality in sports
marks this dissertation’s attempt to “map the complex and often contradictory social

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dynamics that produce and are, in turn, reproduced within particular sexual cultures, practices
and desires” (Weiss 2011, p. 7).
How, then, may the translatability of homonationalist critiques to sports be disrupted
by the everyday affective experiences of sporting homophobia by gay male athletes?
Motivating this research is a limited body of work that has yet to seriously consider the
implications that the precarious social and cultural position LGBT athletes occupy in sports
has for homonationalist discourses of temporal progress.
Attempts to Survey the Closet: Gender, Sexuality, and Sport
Sport is frequently cited in feminist scholarship as a key cultural site for studying the
social construction of sex, gender, sexuality, and the body (Dworkin and Messner 2002). This
is because organized sport originated in the late nineteenth century as “a male-created
homosocial cultural sphere which provided (white, middle- and upper-class) men with
psychological separation from the perceived ‘feminization’ of society” (Messner 1990, p.
204) and continues to operate as “a primary masculinity-validating experience” (Dubbert
1979, p. 164). As a distinctly sexed arena, an athlete’s participation and performance in sport
is structured by interrelated norms of sex, gender, and sexuality (Eng 2008). Academic
studies of the dynamics of power relations across these axes of identity in sport have
traditionally drawn on Antonio Gramsci’s (1971) theory of hegemony as it manifests in R.W.
Connell’s (1995) work on “hegemonic masculinity.” In the words of Connell (1995):
Hegemonic masculinity can be defined as the configuration of gender practice which
embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy
which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the
subordination of women (p. 77).
Research on masculinities in all-male sport environments has investigated the ways in
which the bodily discipline and the institutional organization of sport functions to naturalize
gender, racial/ethnic, sexual, and class hierarchies (McKay, Messner, and Sabo 2000).

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Feminist sport theorists such as Nancy Theberge (1991) and Jennifer Hargreaves (1987) have
additionally employed Michel Foucault’s (1977, 1978) theories of discipline and technologies
of power to explore the discursive production of gendered bodies through sport regimes,
practices, and institutions. As a cultural bastion of masculinity in Western society, sport has
been used to “reproduce hegemonic masculinity by turning young boys away from qualities
associated with femininity or homosexuality and (attempting) to teach them how to be
masculine, heterosexual men” (Anderson 2002, p. 862). Connell (1987) contends that ideals
of masculinity are “constructed and promoted most systematically through competitive sport”
(p. 84).
This literature has also been heavily influenced by Judith Butler’s argument in
Gender Trouble (1990) that all gender and sexed positions are performative and socially
compelled by regulatory discourses of compulsory heterosexuality. Homophobia and
misogyny work simultaneously to construct a strong cultural dichotomy between masculinity
and femininity through which the fear of homosexual stigmatization leads men to avoid
acting in culturally effeminate ways (Pollack 1998). As a system of active physical discipline
and surveillance, sport provides researchers with an ideal arena to study culturally exalted
performances of masculinity. The acute policing of masculine behavior in sport is described
by Michael Kimmel (1994) who states,
Masculinity must be proved, and no sooner is it proved than it is again questioned and
must be proved again – constant, relentless, unachievable, and ultimately the quest for
proof becomes so meaningless that it takes on the characteristics, as Weber said, of a
sport (p. 122).
Within this proliferating field, this research project will build upon sport studies that
highlights the ongoing homophobia and heterosexism at all levels of organized sports (Clarke
1998; Griffin 1998; Messner 1992).

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Brian Pronger (1990) argues that the well-documented homophobia of competitive
sport operates to prevent the implicit homoeroticism in all-male sport environments from
progressing into explicit sexual expression that would threaten patriarchal heterosexist
hegemony. The omnipresence of homoerotic undercurrents in men’s sport (ex. showering
naked in the locker room) paradoxically represents the source of intense homophobia that
circulates to regulate desire in ways that secure masculine heterosexuality (Pronger 2000).
This ongoing tension between the possibility and prohibition of homosexuality “works as a
primary invisible mechanism in the maintenance of masculinity” (Edwards 2005, p. 64).
Butler (1997) contends that contemporary heteronormative culture is melancholic because
“[i]f we accept the notion that heterosexuality naturalizes itself by insisting on the radical
otherness of homosexuality then heterosexual identity is purchased through a melancholic
incorporation of the love it disavows” (p. 139). Culturally pervasive discourses of
homophobia and heterosexism in sport raise critical questions over how gay athletes mediate
the ongoing attachment of heterosexual masculinity to athleticism and sports. However, as a
consequence of the widespread homophobia in mainstream sport, there is scarce literature
available on issues of homosexuality in all-male professional sports.7
Academic debates over the transformative potential of gay athletes have centered on
“the extent to which, even within conventional and highly institutionalized athletic contexts
there is room for gender play, disruption, or even resistance to hegemonic masculinity”
(McKay, Messner, and Sabo 2000, p. 8). Such thinking reflects a Foucauldian
conceptualization of power as circulating through a net-like organization that offers subjects
the possibility of resisting hegemonic practices of social regulation (Hall 1997). Gay male
athletes pose a potential threat to the heterosexual masculine privilege inscribed in sport in
7 It is worth nothing that the homophobic culture of mainstream sports produced a
separate gay sports movement that has been studied for its attempts to challenge
heterosexism and homophobia in sports (Pronger 1999; 2000; Price and Parker 2003).

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their contradictory embodiment of “the gendered script of being a man through the
physicality involved in sports but [violation of] another masculine script through the
existence of same-sex desires” (Anderson 2002, p. 861).
Initial research conducted on closeted gay male athletes (Hekma 1998) and the
attitudes of heterosexual male athletes (Wolf Wendel, Toma, and Morphew 2001) argued that
the normalization of homophobic language and silence surrounding gay identity and behavior
in sport neutralizes the revolutionary potential of gay athletes. Subsequent research,
conversely, has offered a more temperate estimation. Eric Anderson’s (2002) work has
indicated that even the mere presence of openly gay male athletes in sport signifies the
vulnerability of hegemonic masculinity to contestation. Michael Price and Andrew Parker
(2003) suggest that some gay athletes believe that exceling against their heterosexual peers in
sport is “an avenue through which they [can] override their emergent homosexual identities
and find greater acceptance” (p. 114-5). This segmentation of identity by gay athletes is one
of the assimilationist strategies gay athletes adopt to negotiate the unique circumstances,
social pressure, and fear they face in coming out in mainstream sports (Anderson 2005). The
gay male sporting experience can hence be understood as defined by contradiction and
paradox (Dworkin and Messner 2002). The instability of masculinities in sports can evoke
contradictory emotions and momentary pleasure for men who are regularly subordinated by
dominant masculine ideologies (Robertson 2003). It is useful then, to conceptualize
hegemonic masculinity as “a hybrid bloc that unites practices from diverse masculinities in
order to ensure the reproduction of patriarchy” (Demetriou 2001, p. 337). Heather Sykes
(2006) further contends that for gay athletes, sport is a complex cultural site of both
regulatory processes of boundary maintenance and desire/pleasure. This relational dynamic
forms a perhaps injurious attachment or sense of “cruel optimism” in gay athletes trying to
survive the heterosexist, homophobic conditions of mainstream sports (Berlant 2011).

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Despite the slowly growing number of elite athletes that have publicly declared their
homosexuality, no scholarly research has yet to demonstrate mainstream professional sports
as an overtly welcoming arena for sexual minorities (Caudwell 2011). This project aims to
update the limited scholarship on gay sporting men that has been outlined, “to better
understand the nuance, processes underlying, and varied experiences of oppression”
(Anderson and McCormack 2010, p. 960). This paper cannot simply focus on the material
experiences of gay athletes, but rather, needs to situate the affective attachments to sport
expressed by gay athletes within the context of broader power relations and social narratives
(Hemmings 2005). This contribution demands tracing the affective genealogies of the
everyday experiences of professional gay athletes to develop a critical approach to theorizing
homonationalism and homosexual belonging in sport.

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Analysis
The stories that people tell about their lives should not be regarded as simple
reflections of the teller’s actual experiences, or transparent windows to their inner
private selves that can be rendered visible through dialogue… Stories are both
personal and social at the same time. (Sparkes 1999, p. 20).
The two texts written by Rogers, which I will analyze for this dissertation, share a
common theme: exploring the affective experience of a professional gay athlete struggling
for sexual freedom within the misogynistic, homophobic, and highly competitive world of
international sport. Coming Out to Play (2014) and the USA Today (2015) article offer an
emotionally compelling and rich narrative of Rogers’ lived experience that is premised upon
competing mobilizations of pride and shame in relation to homonationalism, sporting
homophobia, and sexuality (Probyn 2000). A key theme in Rogers’ texts is the way in which
the sense of belonging an LGBT athlete negotiates at both a local and (inter)national level is
shaped by the relationship between personal life and social structures of gender relations
(Connell 2002). These texts provide a productive site of analysis from which to consider the
ambivalences and limitations of applying homonationalist critiques in a sporting context by
locating moments of disjuncture between macro debates on LGBT belonging with the
specific local negotiations of sexual marginalization by LGBT athletes. The process of
building this argument necessitates an analysis that holds the multiple and contradictory
meanings that can be drawn out of Rogers’ texts in tension with one another.
Section 1: Mapping Sporting Homonationalism
In this section, I offer a close reading of Rogers’ two texts to probe for sites in which
homonationalist meanings and knowledge are created and reproduced. This entails bringing
the insights of the literature on homonationalism into conversation with sport studies research
to carve out a conceptual space to question how Rogers’ narrative of the gay athlete
experience may be predicated on or inflected by racial, class, gender, and sexual assumptions

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(Davidson 2014). We could think of Rogers’ pieces as homonationalist in the three following
ways: the privileged emphasis on homophobia, significations of sexual exceptionalism, and
civilizational logic of Western superiority.
“If you want to play, you should play. You’ll be accepted”
With no openly gay men playing professional team sports while growing up, Rogers
(2014) says, “[i]t never occurred to me that I could be gay and play soccer. Never. So the
better I did, the more trapped I felt, like there was no way out, and that this was how my life
was always going to be” (p. 101). The oppositional categorization of homosexuality in sports
(and wider society) as effeminate perpetuates this ideological construction of homosexuality
as antithetical to masculine sporting prowess that Rogers references (Price and Parker 2003).
The inescapable and extreme degree of homophobia in sporting culture left Rogers (2014)
incapable of imagining “what it would be like going back into the locker room or going on
the field once everyone knew I was gay” (p. 171). Rogers’ fear of coming out can be
understood as reflecting the normalization of homophobic language in sports that subjugates
gay athletes as an inferior masculinity in relation to the heterosexual ideal (Anderson 2002).
However, in his USA Today (2015) article, Rogers explains he was wrong to assume coming
out meant his career was over because
Nothing I feared had come to pass… And the outpouring of support I received from
former teammates, friends, coaches, soccer officials and total strangers in the U.S. and
around the world proved to me that the problem was mostly my imagination, not my
sport.
The unilateral focus on sexuality and homophobia in Rogers’ emancipatory coming out story
overlooks the potential exclusions produced through the repositioning of normative white
heterosexual masculinity in sports. To foreground homophobia in lieu of other vectors of
shame is to ignore how homophobia in sports is also racist, misogynistic, classist, and ableist
(Puar 2004).

22. 75705 21
Now playing professional soccer as an openly gay man, Rogers (2014) states that he
does not “want to be treated differently” (p. 202) and that being in the locker room feels
“totally normal. So normal, in fact, that sometimes I step back and think how weird it is”
(2015). Rogers’ (2014) desire to be treated “like one of the guys” (p. 98) reiterates a
homonormative “gay aspiration towards acceptance within existing political, economic and
kinship systems and arrangements” (Bracke 2012, p. 244). Such assimilationist language pre-
empts a critical dialogue about homosexuality in sports by according gay athletes an ‘equal
but different’ status that reinforces heterosexual masculinity as the norm (Puar 2006). A
relentless emphasis on being recognized as normal is constitutive of broader homonormative
and homonationalist narratives of lesbian and gay identity politics. Michael Warner (1999)
argues that the politics of normal respectability in gay organizing coercively shames and
excludes marginal subjects by privileging white, middle-class gender normative subjects.
This politics is “fueled by uninterrogated racial and citizenship privileges and
unacknowledged racism, xenophobia and nationalism in gay, lesbian and queer communities
and organizing” (Davidson 2013, p. 57-8). By presenting himself as a ‘normal’/‘acceptable’
gay athlete that rigidly adheres to the heterosexual masculine norms of elite professional
sport, Rogers’ texts narrativize gay and lesbian identity through a universalizing assumption
of unmarked whiteness.
Rogers’ assimilationist formulation of inclusion invites critical consideration to
expose the intersecting norms of class, race, and sexuality that consolidate white,
homonormative privilege in sport (Brown 2001). For instance, the seemingly neutral
rhetorical tropes of “the closet” and “coming out” that Rogers employs, crystallize
Homosexual identity within a tradition of possessive individualism. Coming out
promises liberation and celebrates a species of individualism in the form of self-
determination. Conceptually and materially, that freedom and self-determination are
premised on the property of whiteness (Perez 2005, p. 177-178).

23. 75705 22
Coming out is articulated as a signifier of cultural progressiveness and maturity, with one
entering the global gay brotherhood (Dhawan 2013). The assumption of a universal gay
agenda of coming out and embracing one’s “true” sexual identity in Rogers’ texts overlooks
the multiplicity of contradictory ways in which same-sex desire may be experienced, but not
culturally understood as ‘gay’ (Epprecht 2004). So when Rogers instructs gay players to
come out and “live an open and honest life” (2014, p. XII), his language implicitly endorses a
particular kind of sexual subjectivity that is aligned with homonationalist forms of being
(Sabsay 2012). Within which, Rogers’ normative performance of gender as a (gay) masculine
athlete is oriented through cohering to privileging heterosexuality as the mainstream practice
of sport (Berlant and Warner 1998). Rather than being strictly counter-hegemonic, Rogers’
repetition of gender norms as a gay athlete is insidiously incorporated into discourses of
hegemonic masculinity as an instrument of patriarchal reproduction (Demetriou 2001).
What is at stake is an opportunity to examine how underpinning celebrations of sexual
diversity in sport posits a pernicious cultural dichotomy between the homosexual other as
white and the racial other as straight (Puar 2007). Within this binary discursive formation,
‘being out’ and the corresponding visibility politics of privilege intersect with classed, raced,
and gendered norms of respectability that delimit which subjects are intelligible as gay (El-
Tayeb 2012). The singular focus of Rogers’ texts in addressing homophobia in sports ignores
the intersections of whiteness, class, ability, and nation that sustain inequitable relations of
power. This in turn violently excludes sexual subalterns in sporting contexts.
“Embrace the Spotlight”
In the aftermath of 9/11, Puar and Raj (2002) illustrate how homonormative narratives
of the U.S. as a site of sexual exceptionalism were bolstered by the inclusion of a gender,
race, and class-specific homosexuality vis-à-vis the production and disciplining of the
‘monster-terrorist-fag’. This sexual exceptionalism of U.S. national identity is constituted

24. 75705 23
through the symbol of terrorist corporealities, where particular “homosexual subjects who
have limited legal rights…gain significant representational currency situated within the
global scene of the war on terror” (Puar 2007, p. 4). The biopolitical formation of the
‘monster-terrorist-fag’ operated in tandem with the media veneration of Mark Bingham as a
gay American patriot hero. 8 The media coverage of Bingham betrayed a cultural anxiety over
homosexuality and its possible link with male effeminacy. This anxiety was managed by
emphasizing Bingham’s athletic prowess as a white, masculine rugby-player in juxtaposition
with negative connotations of homosexuality in depictions of Osama bin Laden as feminized
and perversely queer (King 2009). Bingham offered mainstream American audiences an
acceptable image of a homosexual masculinity that in no way challenged traditional notions
of masculinity and heteronormativity (Fejes 2000). Building on this homonationalist framing,
we can analyze how the “spotlight” Rogers occupies “as the only open gay man in [his]
sport” (2015) positions him as a symbolic trophy of U.S. sexual exceptionalism in sports that
reinforces fantasies of American tolerance of homosexuality.
Rogers acknowledges that his “status as a ‘first’ and/or ‘only’,” has provided him
with “lots of opportunities to make a difference by speaking publicly about [his] experience”
(2014, p. 214). In doing so, Rogers (2014) invokes teleological trajectories of time and
progress to contrast the overtly welcoming sport environment that has embraced himself (and
others like Jason Collins and Michael Sam) with the “much more difficult times” (p. 213)
that confronted past gay and lesbian athletes, such as Justin Fashanu and Billie Jean King.
Contemporary narratives of increasing tolerance and sexual diversity in sport are predicated
upon assumptions that the greater visibility for lesbian and gay athletes has transformed
professional U.S. sport culture (Fejes 2000). This story of the U.S. as a progressive modernity
relies “on a conception of freedom that is understood to emerge through time, and which is
8 Mark Bingham was a passenger on board United Airlines Flight 93 and is believed to
have assisted in retaking the plane from the hijackers.

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temporally progressive in its structure” (Butler 2008, p. 3). Garnering the status of “national
hero”, Rogers represents a symbol of a U.S. national identity that engenders discourses of
homosexual acceptance (Rowe, McKay, and Miller 1998). An integral element of Rogers’
position as an iconic sporting figure is the way “his (masculine) gender identity trumped his
(gay) sexual identity” (King 2009, p. 14) through his participation in soccer. Therefore, the
elevation of Rogers in the public eye is partially shaped by his transgression of normative
associations of gay athletes with feminized and nonaggressive sports (Anderson and
McCormack 2010). Rogers’ culturally exalted performance of masculinity in soccer reifies
unequal gendered relations of power that mark queer, effeminate masculinities as outside the
norm (and by extension, the nation).
Implicit in this process of inscribing LGBT athletes such as Rogers into the fabric of
the U.S. nation is the fracturing between assimilable subjects and queer subcultures that
remain at the margin of the normative public sphere (Ammaturo 2015). As an athletic, white,
gay American citizen, Rogers ostensibly embodies “the sexually exceptional homonational
subject [who] implicitly contributes to and reproduces a new form of racial hatred and
violence by becoming the ‘good’ white bourgeois other to the abject, terrorist enemy who is
the new queer Other” (Davidson 2013, p. 61). Central to the formation of this homonational
subject are the ways in which the language of sexual equality and freedom attached to Rogers
become reified as cultural attributes of the U.S. (Ahmed 2011). The extremism of
homophobia in sport and correspondingly, the U.S., disappears insofar as figures of the ‘good
homosexual’ like Rogers are granted full inclusion within the ‘normal’ social order (Smith
1994). Rogers thus, becomes legible as a visible figuration of the sexually exceptional gay
athlete within the ongoing biopolitical formations of homonationalist discourses that
promotes the U.S. as an authoritative site of civilizational standards.

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The Gay Athlete and Civilizational Politics in International Sporting Events
This final sub-section will specifically analyze Rogers’ USA Today (2015) piece to
map the landscape of sporting homonationalist discourses that currently dominate debates
over the location of international sporting events. The issue for Rogers (2015) is that “[t]he
next two World Cups will be held in two anti-LGBT countries, Russia and Qatar.” Clear in
this wording is an assertion that nations with anti-LGBT laws should not be selected as hosts
for international sporting events. Rogers’ unambiguous condemnation of anti-LGBT host
nations is symptomatic of broader contemporary efforts to naturalize differences between
nations over the extent of sexual freedom afforded to minorities (Binnie 2004). As no nation
has yet to provide full sexual rights and freedoms to minorities and sport continues to be
denounced for its homophobia, it stands to reason that such hypocrisy is minimized by
framing the problem of anti-LGBT host nations within the prevailing civilizational logic of
homonationalism.
In thinking about why professional gay soccer players remain closeted, Rogers
blames FIFA’s decision to hold the World Cup in explicitly anti-LGBT nations. Rogers
(2015) argues that
For any gay soccer player who has hopes of playing for the U.S. National Team at the
World Cup, being open about their sexuality could have real consequences when they
set foot in countries with laws that could land them in jail.
Rogers’ use of “real consequences” is significant for the way it strengthens the dichotomy
between liberal (gay-friendly) and illiberal (homophobic) nations (Ammaturo 2015). This
phrase suggests that gay U.S. soccer players no longer fear homophobia in their own nation,
but rather stay in the closet out of fear of what may happen when they compete at
international sporting events in countries like Russia or Qatar. The subject of the closeted gay
U.S./Western athlete, formed on white, homonormative terms, anchors a historically specific
homonationalist sexual politics of life that justifies state racism (Morgensen 2010).

27. 75705 26
Rogers mobilizes the language of sexual exceptionalism and homonationalism to
mark homophobia as a “sign and symptom of the primitive, of the racial other, of a racial
time that ‘we’ have overcome” (Ahmed 2011, p. 130). Conversely then, a nation’s status as
gay-friendly is desirable through linkages with being “modern, cosmopolitan, developed,
first-world, global north, and most significantly, democratic” (Puar 2011, p. 138). The
production and legitimization of this geopolitical and biopolitical binary between tolerant and
homophobic countries is expressed in debates over international sporting competitions. Such
sport spectacles denote a site of dense affective investment for spectators that legitimate
hierarchies between nations through binary discourses of ‘winners/losers’ and ‘pride/shame’
(Kennedy, Pussard, and Thornton 2006). Through such a narrative, Rogers seemingly
endorses the tenuous nationalistic invitation of particular LGBT subjectivities into ‘us-
versus-them’ rhetoric. Building on Puar (2006), representations of the white, middle-class,
and gender normative gay U.S. athlete may be understood as a “discursive tactic that
disaggregates U.S. national gays and queers from racial and sexual ‘others’” (p. 68). This
potent dichotomy relies on discourses of progress of gay rights through which the modern
West’s symbolic inclusion of gay and lesbian identity employs homophobic, imperialist,
racist, and misogynistic discourses to discipline and civilize ‘Other’ nations (Bracke 2012).
In this way, the figure of the closeted gay U.S. athlete is effectively positioned as part of
broader orientalist and colonial regulatory processes of cultural othering embedded in
western media accounts of international sporting events.
A further crucial element that constitutes a homonationalist interpretation of Rogers’
article is its deployment of liberal human rights discourses to achieve progressive social
change in sports. Rogers (2015) criticizes FIFA for contradicting their goal of promoting
“educational, cultural and humanitarian values” in choosing “two countries that fall far short
when it comes to humanitarian values, not to mention their seriously anti-LGBT values and

28. 75705 27
crushing anti-gay laws” to host the World Cup. The implication being that the treatment and
status of LGBT people in a nation should be incorporated into the criteria for selecting
nations to host international sporting mega-events (Puar 2013). Rogers’ insistence on a
Western “standard of respect for the rights of LGBT persons is… grounded in the liberal
concept of ‘tolerance’ as a cultural and political marker of civilization as oppressed to a
specific conception of backwardness in the context of human rights protection” (Ammaturo
2015, p. 2).
Rogers’ appeal to FIFA to “live those words” and spread humanitarian values through
sport slips into problematic neo-imperialist language. Such homonational tropes of Western
civility and inclusivity in the promotion of global gay rights reinscribe histories of
imperialism where the West is both the civilizer and savior (Hubbard and Wilkinson 2015).
Essential for this civilizing process, then, is a simplistic, homogenous interpellation of Russia
and Qatar as fundamentally inferior and contemptuously homophobic in relation to the
liberal, progressive cosmopolitanism of ‘the West’ (El-Tayeb 2012). The “barbarism” of such
state-sponsored homophobia supports (neo)colonial fantasies of “rescue” vis-à-vis
constructions of the sexually oppressed athletes and citizens from less-enlightened pre-
modern nations. The perceived human rights violations of suffering LGBT people abroad
animates the neo-imperialist figure of the white gay activists who endorses a universal liberal
‘we’ notion of sexual rights that manifests itself as both ignorant and innocent (Haritaworn
2012). Such discourses of universal sexual rights are “themselves located powerfully within
ideas of Western sexual liberation tied to a ‘closet’ binary of openness/equality and
secretiveness/inequality” (Tucker 2009, p. 15). The sexually exceptional, rights-bearing
white, Western gay athlete (Rogers) becomes justified in their attempts to secure rights on
behalf of their oppressed, queer athletic allies of color (Davidson 2014). In so doing, the
language of “freedom, equality, civility, diversity and light become associated with

29. 75705 28
whiteness, as being what white subjects (queer or not queer) will give to others” (Ahmed
2011, p. 131).
In this reading, homonationalism is a seemingly appropriate analytic category to
engage with Rogers’ texts. Sporting contexts and debates over international sporting events
offer a fruitful site to struggle against contemporary gender and sexual politics that converge
with racist, neocolonial projects of domination. However, I want to argue that mobilizing
Rogers’ texts solely as examples of broader cultural discourses of homonationalism
problematically ignores the affective dimensions in Rogers’ work that detail the uniquely
precarious position LGBT athletes occupy in sports.
Section 2: Affect, Ambivalence, and Counter-Hegemonies
A careful textual analysis of Rogers’ texts is interested in the interpretive potential of
the texts to contradict and complicate theorizations of homonationalist critiques in sport
through tracing affective ambivalences on questions of belonging. Affect is conceptualized
here as a lens from which to consider how Rogers negotiates, mediates, and/or contests
homonationalist meanings and discourses (Pedwell 2012). Both within and across the texts,
these affective moments provide an analytic site to make conjectures about the limits of
applying homonationalist critiques to sporting contexts. This paradigm helps situate Rogers’
texts as counterpublic contestations of homonationalism through his ongoing affective
negotiation of homophobia in sports. Let us now look at three instances in which affect plays
through Rogers’ texts.
“‘Faggot’ this and ‘faggot’ that”
Following from Brown’s (2012) critique of homonormative theory in academic
writing, my analysis now shifts to Rogers’ lived experience of sport’s ongoing homophobia.
Of critical concern is teasing out how Rogers’ texts intricately frame the affect of belonging
that shapes the LGBT athlete subject-formation within the pervasive influence of

30. 75705 29
heterosexism and homophobia in sports (Bridel and Rail 2007). Precisely by highlighting the
enduring homophobia that structures the Western athletic milieu, Rogers’ texts alternatively
function to disturb homonationalist fantasies of cultural difference.
Rogers (2014) describes how at all levels of soccer, “[t]here were way more
homophobic remarks than [he] could count” (p. 122). Encounters with the unbridled and
unchallenged sexism and homophobia in sports induced a significant sense of loss and shame
that alienated Rogers from his teammates, coaches, family, and sport itself. Rogers explicitly
acknowledges the traumatic impact of UK football fan culture in discussing how after
stepping “into the hyper-masculine world of UK soccer… notorious for its racism and
homophobia… [he] knew that there was no way [he’d] ever come out if [he] was still playing
soccer” (p. 121). 9 The prevailing affect of gay shame in men’s professional soccer is
tragically illustrated by the life and suicide of the black gay U.K. footballer, Justin Fashanu in
1998 (Caudwell 2011). Rogers’ painful history of attempting to carve out a safe space to
belong amidst rampant sporting homophobia in both the U.S. and the U.K. destabilizes
homonationalism’s geopolitical mapping of homophobia as only existing in the East
(Dhawan 2013).
This unyielding shaming of homosexuality in soccer (and sport more generally) is
precipitated through attempts to sustain a coherent cultural presentation of hegemonic
sporting masculinity as unequivocally heterosexual (Butler 1997). Rogers’ story highlights
the homophobic organization of sport to point to ways in which gay men continue to be
harmed by heterosexism, homophobia, hegemonic masculinities, and femininities (Pronger
1999). In relation to this hegemonic model of sporting masculinity, Rogers inhabits an
ambivalent space of belonging. This is because Rogers’ texts contain an internal uncertainty
9 Although Rogers would return to professional soccer, he came out publicly in what
was originally intended to be a retirement letter on his blog in February 2013.

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with regard to an unconvincing claim that his fear of homosexual stigmatization after coming
out “was mostly [in his] imagination, not [his] sport” (2015).
One could reason that such an assertion by Rogers simultaneously fails to
acknowledge his privileged position as a white, middle-class, gender normative, gay athlete
and does not correspond with his memoir that details the traumatic experience of being a
closeted athlete in such a violently homophobic institution. However, I would also like to
consider the nuanced ways in which Rogers’ claim may suppress an anxious awareness that
the acceptance of his sexuality in the sporting domain is precariously grounded upon his
ongoing performance of the dominant form of sporting masculinity (Bridel and Rail 2007).
Rogers’ potential otherness is no longer elided, but rather is held as central to his position as
an ambivalent figure that troubles the heteronormative boundaries of sport. This reading
draws attention to an affective dissonance in Rogers’ reflexive experience of negotiating the
conditions of intelligibility and belonging available to him within homonationalist discourses
in a homophobic space (Hemmings 2012). Theories of homonationalist critique overlook the
political potential of “those whose pride might be mixed with shame” (Hubbard and
Wilkinson 2015, p. 605). In this reading, Rogers’ embodies the position of a disidentifying
subject who occupies a space between the West and the rest and is working on and against
dominant homonationalist ideology (Muñoz 1999).
Emphasizing ambivalent positionalities marks a new source of discourse that contests
dominant discursive formations of the West as the site of sexual freedom. Whereby Rogers’
ambivalence is characterized by both his honor of being overwhelmingly accepted and his
critical shame directed at the ongoing homophobia that continues to structure sports as
unwelcoming for sexual minorities. Unearthing and exploring this internal hesitation across
Rogers’ texts opens up the possibility of a reading that involves Rogers’ anger towards the
institution of sports.

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Trailing Behind the Rest of Society
In expressing his anger with sporting homophobia, Rogers reworks previously
employed homonationalist conceptions of progress to highlight the presence of homophobia
at home. He disappointingly describes sports as being “so far behind where the rest of society
had progressed in its view about gay people and homophobia that it was still living in the
Stone Age” (2014, p. 125). Rather than affirming the narrative of the U.S. as a progressive
modernity, Rogers appropriates homonationalist discourse to highlight the problem of
homophobia within the nation that disrupts the U.S.’s purported international position of
cultural superiority (Butler 2008). Accounting for this temporal disconnect between sports
and society supports Anderson and McCormack’s (2010) assertion that discrimination against
gay men in sport “is not a simple artifact of the broader culture. Sport produces its own
oppression” (p. 957). Conceptual theorizations of homonationalism as all encompassing leave
little space to appreciate the geographically nuanced context of sports in shaping LGBT lives
(Brown 2012).
In a powerful way, Rogers (2015) further challenges the marginal attention
homonationalist discourses afford to the specificity of homophobia in sports when he asks:
“So why am I still the only one?” His use of the word “still” reiterates a temporal frustration
with the ambivalent space he occupies as the lone openly gay soccer player in an institution
that continues to privilege heterosexuality and its embodied performance of masculinity.
Despite contemporary celebrations of decreasing cultural homophobia in the U.S., the vast
underrepresentation of openly gay professional male athletes affirms, “how their experiences
are governed by dominant (heterosexual, aggressive, competitive) forms of masculinity”
(King 2009, p. 7). In a moving instance of self-reflection, Rogers (2015) divulges the fear and
anxiety he experienced after coming out when thinking about “going back into the locker
room and facing [his] teammates. Given the things [he’d] heard them say over the years.”

33. 75705 32
Rogers’ fear of being rejected and ostracized is indicative of how “coming out in sport is to
acknowledge an identity that challenges the nature of heterosexual masculinity and therefore
challenges the masculinizing institution of sport as a whole” (Anderson 2005, p. 43). The
affective traces of anger and frustration in Rogers’ texts infuse his contradictory employment
of homonationalist discourse in an effort to draw attention to the distinct sense of non-
belonging that haunts non-normative sexual subjects in the historically and contemporarily
heterosexist arena of sports. As it stands, the coherence of homonationalist theory is exposed
and challenged by the complex marginal position occupied by LGBT athletes in Western
nations.
“It’s Not Enough”
Engaging with the affective features of Rogers’ texts reveals the paradoxical position
of a sexual subject caught between homonationalist claims that ‘we’ have moved beyond
homophobia and sport’s institutionalized culture of homophobia and misogyny. For Rogers
(2015), when FIFA allows nations that imprison LGBT people to host international sporting
events, “the message FIFA sends to gay athletes is painfully clear. Not only don’t they have
our backs, our lives don’t matter.” The way Rogers uses words such as ‘our backs’ and ‘our
lives’ conveys an alternative signification of gay athletes as a community that exists as an
invisible ‘other’ in sports. This discursive representation of gay athletes’ ambivalent position
in North American sport troubles homonationalism’s straightforward sense of belonging
afforded to LGBT subjects. In this furious admonishment of FIFA’s actions, Rogers (2015)
suggests that the “primary reason” gay athletes remain closeted is the institutionalized
“atmosphere” of homophobia in soccer that emboldens a culture of fear and silence around
gay identities in professional sport (Anderson 2005). The entangled, dehumanizing sexist and
homophobic social practices of constructing masculinity in sport are dismissed when an
athlete’s gay identity is assumed to be a private matter that has no relevance on the field

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(Griffin 2002). The principal issue being that homonationalism’s geopolitical fantasies of
where homophobia exists in relation to debates over international sporting events may further
repress addressing the ongoing subjugation of professional LGBT athletes in sports itself.
As LGBT invisibility continues to be the norm in professional sport, Lenskyj (2014)
argues “elite athletes recognize how much they have to lose in terms of popularity and
sponsorship if they come out as gay or lesbian” (p. 45). This intense fear of negative
repercussions for professional LGBT athletes is animated by the high degree of personal
sacrifice, hard work, and responsibility placed on top athletes to represent their nation in
international sporting competitions. Homonationalist theory does not account for the extra
social circumstances and risks facing an openly gay athlete at the professional level in terms
of mental health, fear of transgressing cultural notions of sporting masculinity, sponsorship
opportunities, “and whether they are given access to prime playing positions and time”
(Anderson 2005, p. 149). Such immense pressure coupled with the deviance associated with
non-normative sexual identities in a heterosexist and homophobic society renders it “near
impossible for a person to see that openness about her or his sexuality as advantageous to the
highly profiled top athlete” (Eng 2008, p. 120).
Indeed, across Rogers’ texts, he contrasts a frustratingly acute awareness of knowing
“that there were lots of gay people who lived their lives openly” (2014, p. 102) with an
anxious understanding that gay athletes remain closeted “[g]iven how high the stakes are in
professional sports” (2015). This disjuncture underlines how homonationalist celebrations of
LGBT belonging circulate in ways that do not resonate with the emotional and physical
investment that characterizes the relationship between LGBT athletes and sports. Sacrifice
defines the lives of gay male athletes with
enough talent and desire to emulate masculinity enough to make it to the elite levels
of sport [that] requires them to sacrifice health, education, stability, security,
friendship, family, and gender expression for the sake of athletic elitism and the social
merit that accompanies it (Anderson 2005, p. 145).

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The stressful conditions of living for professional gay athletes in homonationalist times
manifest a relational dynamic wherein LGBT athletes remain attached to sport, even when it
disavows them (Berlant 2011). In this vein, sport operates simultaneously as a complex site
of pleasure and oppression for gay athletes (Jarvis 2006).
Overall, this analysis works to capture the affective elements of Rogers’ texts in his
encounters with sporting homophobia that contain contradictory impulses, which threaten the
coherence of homonationalist fantasies of the nation. Moreover, Rogers’ texts points to the
fragility of acceptance for LGBT athletes who are admitted on the basis of an assimilationist
adherence to normative gender sporting performances. This affective lens helps to make
sense of the fundamental ambivalence of LGBT athletes that is central to their struggle within
a paradoxically homonationalist and homophobic culture.

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Conclusion
This dissertation marks an intervention in thinking through the potentiality and limits
of applying homonationalist theory to understand contemporary issues of sexuality in sport. I
explored this issue through analyzing the simultaneous circulation of homonationalist
discourse and affective forms of resistance embedded in Rogers’ two texts. I have argued that
Rogers’ texts present a suspicious account of the perverse contemporary formulation of
sporting homonationalism by focusing precisely upon the affect of non-belonging
experienced by LGBT athletes. Rogers’ texts are engaged in the production of a nuanced
double movement. Where on the one hand, these texts fit neatly within the contemporary
paradigm of homonationalist critiques. These texts arguably represent biopolitical
technologies of homonationalism; framed by an implicit racial normativity that insidiously
“reproduces a virulent new form of queer racial hatred and violence with the production of
another ‘abnormal’ population” (Davidson 2014, p. 372). While on the other hand, the
affective traces in Rogers’ texts hold such critiques accountable for the ways in which
sporting LGBT subjects are shaped by their empirical and affective sense of non-belonging.
This reading focused on the critical imbrications of location, knowledge, and experience to
explore the potential affective dissonance in Rogers’ texts to provide different ways for
feminist sports scholars to re-center the narrative of the LGBT athlete in considering what
processes of homonationalist critique in sports elides (Pedwell and Whitehead 2015). Or as
Clare Hemmings (2012) describes, “in order to know differently we have to feel differently”
(p. 150). As a result, I contend that if feminist critiques of hetero/homonormative nationalist
fantasies continue to theorize homonationalism as a uniform discourse, there exists a sharp
risk of flattening the precise geographies and differential relations that shape gay lives
depending on their spatial contexts.

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Theoretical Implications for Gender and Feminist Theory
In light of studying Rogers’ texts, it is clear that an unqualified deployment of
homonationalism by feminist sports scholars can only provide a partial understanding of the
complex contradictory discursive landscape of sports, sexuality, gender, nation, and race. I
suggest that my analysis of Rogers’ texts is a practical social reflection that opens up a
rethinking of homonationalism that moves to incorporate affect as a resource for engaging
with the relationship between epistemology and ontology (Hemmings 2012). My argument is
therefore, not just theoretical, but also technical in illustrating how to critique
homonationalism through the use of the specific location of LGBT athletes to expose their
complexity. In this sense, this dissertation contributes to broader discussions on sport and
sexuality by providing an affective critique of homonationalism as a theoretical framework.
This dissertation’s critique extends from Butler’s (1997) notion that
for intellectual movements to remain vital, expansive and self-critical, room must be
made for the kind of immanent critique which shows how the presuppositions of one
critical enterprise can operate to forestall the work of another. ... [Which resists
thinking] that critique only and always weakens a movement [and instead]
understand[s] that the democratic and non-dogmatic future of any such movement
depends precisely on its ability to incorporate, without domesticating, challenges from
its own alterities. (p. 1)
An affective lens enables alternative significations of Rogers’ texts that positions LGBT
athletes as noncanonical bodies who trouble homonationalism’s imaginary clash of cultures
that is most evident at international sporting events. For Warner (1993), finding an adequate
theory is far from an idle concern because theory can (and should) be retooled to address
problematic representations of different identity groups as homogenous. Thus, my research
on Rogers’ dissonant experience in sport offers an impetus for critical feminist reflexivity and
praxis in relation to employing homonationalist theories of power/knowledge that have not
yet been able to sufficiently account for the contradictory codes that structure LGBT
belonging in Western sports.

38. 75705 37
Reflections on Further Research
I would like to briefly reiterate my recognition that in choosing to focus on Rogers,
this dissertation is limited in its privileging of Rogers’ visibility that is complicit in
reproducing the “normativity of whiteness in mainstream North American gay culture”
(Muñoz 1999, p. 9) that erases heterogeneous representations of gay athletes. In doing so, I
recommend that further intersectional research into contrasting the affective experience of
LGBT athletes with discourses of homonationalism could incorporate the stories of Michael
Sam and Jason Collins as their object of analysis. Although Rogers may have been the ‘first’,
studying the intimate accounts and media representations of Sam and Collins can extend this
scholarship to generate a more nuanced understanding of the significations of LGBT athletes
of color in all-male professional sports. These analyses could also benefit from integrating
the insights of José Esteban Muñoz’s (1999) work on disidentification to locate the
opposition from and survival tactics of the socially marginalized subject navigating dominant
ideology in sport.
In critiquing problematic theorizations of homonationalism that obfuscate the
ambivalent sense of belonging for LGBT subjects in sport, I want to conclude by
acknowledging the courage of openly LGBT athletes, whose affective relations to sport is
grounded in a belief (like much feminist pedagogy) that struggle can lead to change. Turning
towards homonationalist critique as an object of feminist sports inquiry reinvigorates a
passion and politics of hope that “allows us to feel that what angers us is not inevitable, even
if transformation can sometimes feel impossible” (Ahmed 2004, p. 184). Gender and feminist
theory that treats sport as trivial masks its deeper cultural relevance as an institution like any
other that we cannot escape from and instead, must struggle within it (Dworkin and Messner
2002). My hope is that this study of Rogers’ texts highlights the need for greater reflexivity in

39. 75705 38
gender theory through listening to the pain and anger of others that orients us to alternative
conditions of possibility for feminist activism.

40. 75705 39
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Appendix
Robbie Rogers: FIFA fails to support gays
Robbie Rogers 2:41 p.m. EST January 20, 2015
The next two World Cups will be held in two anti-LGBT countries, Russia and Qatar.
Tw o years ago w henIcame out publicly in a blog post that w ent viral, I just assumed that my life as a professionalsoccer
player w as over. For two reasons.
First, after living my entire life in the closet, I couldn’t imagine I had the emotional w herewithalto deal w ith being in the spotlight
as the only openly gay man in my sport. When you tie yourself in the knot of such a big lie for so long, it undermines your self-
confidence and damages you in w aysthat take a long time to sort out.
I also couldn’t imagine w hat it w ould be like going back into the locker room and facing my teammates. Given the things I’d
heard them say over the years, I had reason to w orrythat I’d be ostracized. That’s almost as bad as being rejected by your
blood family. Well, maybe w orse.
Turns out I w as wrong. My self-imposed retirement lasted a w hole four months. I underestimated my capacity to embrace the
spotlight, especially since I didn’t have to do it alone. Jason Collins and Michael Sam soon joined me. And the outpouring of
support I received fromformer teammates, friends, coaches, soccer officials and totalstrangers in the U.S. and around the
w orld proved to me that the problem w as mostly my imagination, not my sport.
Nothing I feared had come to pass. I now play for the L.A. Galaxy. Last season w e won the Major League Soccer Cup, the
Super Bow lof soccer. While I’m the only openly gay guy in the locker room, it’s totally normal. So normal, in fact, that
sometimes I step backand think how w eirdit is.
A couple of times there have been negative comments from people in the stands, but only a couple of times and only in a
w hisper. Most often if there are comments, it’s fromgay fans w ho are only too happy to cheer on one of their ow n.
So w hy amI still the only one? It’s a question I get all the time. I have no idea how many other gay men are playing in
professionalsoccer, but for howevermany guys w ho are out there hiding, it’s fear that’s keeping them from being themselves.
There’s the personalfear of being rejected by your loved ones — a realistic fear for some. And for others, like me, totally blow n
out of proportion by our ow n imaginations.
But I don’t think that’s the primary reason that my fellow gay players are keeping the closet door locked. Given how high the
stakes are in professionalsports, it’s not enough for closeted players to see w hat it’s been like for me or to hear comments of
LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) fromhigh-profile players, fromcoaches, ownersand even the heads of national
soccer league officials fromaround the w orld.
They’re going to need to hear and see a lot more fromFIFA, the international governing body of soccer, beforethe atmosphere
changes enough for more gay soccer players to stop hiding and simply be themselves.
FIFA is great at lofty rhetoric. They say their goal is improving the game of soccer “constantlyand promot(ing) it globally in the
light of its unifying, educational, cultural and humanitarian values, particularly through youth and development programs.”
Those are w onderfulideals and its how Ithink of my sport and my place in it as a role model to young athletes. But FIFA
doesn’t live those w ords, not when they decide to hold the next tw o World Cups, the most w idely watched sporting eventsin the
w orld, in Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022, tw o countries that fallfar short whenit comes to humanitarian values, not to
mention their seriously anti-LGBTvalues and crushing anti-gay law s.
If actions speaklouder than w ords, then the message FIFA sends to gay athletes is painfully clear. Not only don’t they have our
backs, our lives don’t matter. So for any gay soccer player who has hopes of playing for the U.S. National Team at the World
Cup, being open about their sexuality could have real consequenceswhen they set foot in countries with laws that could land
them in jail.
My first memory of soccer is the 1994 World Cup w ith my dad. We attended the U.S. vs. Colombia game at the Rose Bow l. I
can remember the colors, the smells and all of the excitement w ith tens of thousands of other soccerfansin the stands as w e
cheered on our national team. That experience at the World Cup ignited the fire in me that made me think, “Someday, I’ll play in
the World Cup.”
That seven-year-old’s dreamhas yet to come true (I’ve gotten close). But for all the promising gay athletes out there w ith
soccer dreams of their ow n, FIFA still gives them very good reasons to hide. And that’s not my imagination.
Robbie Rogers(http://www.lagalaxy.com/players/Robbie-rogers)plays Major League Soccer for the Los Angeles Galaxy. He is
the onlyopenly gay male athlete currentlyplaying in one of the five major professionalsportsin the U.S. and is the author of
Coming Out to Play (http://robbiehrogers.com/the-book/).
In addition to its own editorials, USA Today publishes diverse opinions from outsider writers, including our Board of
Contributors (/reporters/boc.html). To read more columns like this, go to the Opinion front page (/opinon/) or sign up for the
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