At my Facebook page yesterday, a friend teased me about being the “Access Hollywood of the erudite class.”
She has a point. First I promoted my article about how Lance Armstrong deserves to be ignored. Then I reveled in the truly bizarre Manti T’eo story. In particular, I love the fact that it will steal the show from the Armstrong-Oprah Winfrey shenanigans.
But my attitude towards T’eo is very different than my take on Armstrong. As I explained yesterday, Armstrong’s impending celebrity rehabilitation is such a cliché as to bore me stiff. Plus, he doesn’t seem to deserve our sympathy.
But T’eo is another matter altogether. Let me explain why.
There are really only two possibilities here. Either he’s the most gullible person in the world, or he was in on it.
After reading the extensively researched Deadspin article by Timothy Burke and Jack Dickey that broke the story, I find it very unlikely that T’eo is some heartbroken simpleton. Rather, he probably concocted the entire story with the help of a 22 year old named Ronaiah Tuiasosopo.
So $64 question is: Why?
We know why Lance Armstrong developed a needle habit. He wanted to win as many Tours de France as he could. And it worked. He juiced and doped his way to seven titles.
But why did Manti T’eo make up a heart string story about a beautiful, wonderful girlfriend from Stanford who survived a horrific car accident only to die of leukemia shortly thereafter?
Immature college prank that spun out of control? Maybe. If so we can move on.
Mentally ill young man? Maybe. In which case, nothing to see here. Let’s afford him the dignity of trying to regain his mental health without a media circus hounding him.
But I’m betting on choice #3.
Like a number of people, I suspect Manti T’eo is gay, and that his imaginary girlfriend Lennay Marie Kekua was a beard.
Of course the evidence for this is entirely circumstantial, but it is there. Let us consider:
- Exhibit A: Football
T’eo plays the barbaric, gladiatorial sport of American football. I love watching football, but we need to be upfront and honest about culture of the sport. Football is the ultimate expression of machismo in modern America. As such, it leads the way in what we academic types call heteronormativity. That’s fancy pants talk for saying heterosexuality is considered the norm and all other forms of sexuality are either considered abnormal (eg. homosexuality), or are acceptable only in a context that is subservient to male heterosexuality (eg. lesbianism)
American jock culture is of course homphobic as well. But heteronormativity might be more important in explaining why someone like T’eo would remain closeted. Let me give you a quick example of how that works.
Let’s think about race instead of sexuality for a moment.
After becoming the first black Major League baseball player in 1947, Jackie Robinson played with lots of racists. Like homophobia, racism is an awful form of bigotry, but it can be confronted and even overcome under the right circumstances. Of course it w
asn’t easy, but Robinson managed to do it.
However, when white was the norm in the Major Leagues, Robinson and other blacks weren’t even allowed to play. They were abnormal in that context, and so they were simply banned for 67 years.
The bigot hates you. Normative culture erases you.
Of course there’s no official ban on gay football players. In fact, federal law wouldn’t allow that, thankfully. But make no bones about it. There is an unofficial ban. American team sports have no de jure ban on homosexuality, but they have a de facto ban. Something equivalent to Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.
Needless to say, there are gay football players. And gay baseball, basketball, and hockey players as well. But remember: no professional team-sport athlete in the U.S. has ever come out of the closet during his playing career.
None. Ever.
Instead, they typically hide their homosexuality through a variety of beard activities ranging from strip club visits to fake girlfriends.
Manti T’eo’s make believe girlfriend could fit that model.
- Exhibit B: Mormonism
I have no interest whatsoever in going on an anti-Mormon rant. As an atheist, I have no desire to pick on Mormonism as somehow “worse” than Judaism (my childhood religion) or Catholicism or Buddhism or any other institution of supernatural worship.
However, Manti T’eo is Mormon, and that is relevant.
Suffice it to say that homosexuality is expressly forbidden in Mormonism. It’s a violation of church theology. Mormon culture is about as heternormative as it gets. The very phrase “Gay Mormon” is anathema in the literal sense, and so to be a gay Mormon is almost always to be a closeted gay Mormon.
So. Is there any smoking gun to indicate Manti T’eo is gay? Not at all. But if he is gay, it would explain a lot.
And if he is gay, coming out of the closet could make Manti T’eo the most important LGBT icon of this decade.
It would take a tremendous amount of courage. More courage, frankly, than I probably have myself, so I’m really in no position to judge.
But if T’eo did publicly come out of the closet and explain all of the pressures that led him to create and promote an imaginary, martyred girlfriend, he could be this generation’s Rosa Parks.
And he would be this very straight man’s hero.
Update, December 20: Manti T’eo is claiming he was duped. In a 2 hour, off-camera interview with ESPN’s Jeremy Schapp, T’eo claims he was the victim of an elaborate hoax. Call me cynical, but I’m far from being convinced. And if Te’o was in on it at some point, I wouldn’t be surprised if Tuiasosopo is pressured/bribed to take the fall as a way of protecting T’eo’s draft status in April. After all, between salary and endorsements, there’s a lot of money on the line.
Update, January 31: Now Ronaiah Tuiasosopo has gone on Dr. Phil’s show to say he was behind it all because he was in love with T’eo, and that T’eo didn’t know. So perhaps Tuiasosopo’s gay, not T’eo. Though one friend interprets this as they’re both gay. She says of Tuiasosopo: “He’s the boyfriend, he’s sick of being a secret, so he’s sabotaging their arrangement. Kinda like a woman having an affair with a married man. ”
Either way, I’m officially done speculating on people’s sexuality in this affair, which is becoming an unseemly attention grab. My initial column was a response to the popular culture’s insistence on male gay athletes remain closeted. I continue to advocate for an end to that charade.