Varsity Blues

Osborne, D. & Wagner, III, W. E. (2007). Exploring the relationship between homophobia and participation in core sports among high school students. Sociological Perspectives, 50(4), 597-613.

The link goes to the article, via ProQuest, so you need to be logged in to view it.

Osborne and Wagner, in brief, interviewed 1470 public high school students in Philadelphia. The interview consisted of questions asking about their involvement in extracurricular activites, both athletic and nonathletic, and their feelings about gay people and discrimination against them. As the researchers predicted, male students who participated in athletic activities were three times more likely to demonstrate homophobic beliefs than those who were not. Additionally, female students involved in nonathletic activities were half as likely to demonstrate homophobia than those who were not. Male students were also more likely to have homophobic beliefs than female students overall.

It’s difficult for me not to have a “duh” reaction to these findings because they unerringly confirm my assumptions of homophobia among high school athletes. Speaking personally, I went to high school not terribly long ago and, though I wasn’t the victim of any extreme homophobia, I know that the male sports team, and particularly the varsity football team, was known for it’s absurd culture of hyper-masculinity. I also had the joy of four years of mandated physical education classes (thanks, Pennsylvania!), so I have some idea of what kind of talk happens in high school locker rooms despite my noninvolvement in high school athletics. It’s nothing surprising, just your typical derogatory comments.

I guess the study raises the question for me of, why is it assumed that this is part of high school athletic culture? Does assuming it will be there make it easier to ignore or accept it? Homophobia among high school students typically happens between individually, but does it also occur at the institutional level among schools who do not have policies against these sorts of actions? I would say so. I would say it happened at the level of the faculty, at least, at my school since many teacher would outright ignore or offer an indulgent “Now, guys…” in nauseating efforts to ingratiate themselves with the popular students.

I also have a reaction of just what are the effects of this homophobia. If homophobia is more likely to be found among the athletic boys, then, and this is just me making an unfounded conjecture, it’s probably likely to exist disproportionately among the more popular students. And, typically, popular students tend to be those that come from wealthier families; hence, they have greater resources in place to further their education or acquire more influential jobs. Then aren’t we, as a culture, really allowing the students who have the most tangible resources and likely potential enter the world with the greatest amount of homophobia? I realize I probably just made no less than a dozen errors in logic and I have no research to back me up, but it’s disheartening nonetheless for me to think about.

So, now determined to end on an optimistic note on this Friday, at least these teenagers are still teenagers and there is plenty of time for programming interventions to help mitigate this homophobia. Moreover, I’ve neglected to discuss the other major finding of the study that girls in nonathletic activities displayed less homophobia. I think that I can sleep a little better knowing that the students in the yearbook and science club are less homophobic.