For 16 years, the former Canadian Olympian hid his homosexuality from his swimming teammates, carefully balancing a double life, worried sick that his secret would come out.
"The fear of rejection is the ultimate overriding factor," says Tewksbury, an Olympic champion and member of the International Swimming Hall of Fame. "That makes it really difficult to make yourself stand out in any way, and certainly in a way that might not be seen so positively by your teammates."
While such fears of rejection are no longer an issue for some in the gay community -- society's tolerance of homosexuality is at an all-time high -- the machismo-driven sports world remains one of the few remaining closets for gay men.
Olympic champion Mark Tewksbury kept his sexuality secret for years because of the homophobia in sports culture. (CP Photo)
In a culture where bragging of debauchery and exploits with groupies is standard locker-room discourse, homosexuality remains a secret gay athletes feel they have to conceal, bury deep, in order to fit in.
Brendan Lemon, editor-in-chief of Out magazine, says he wants his boyfriend to change things.
In his May-issue editorial, Lemon wrote that he was dating a prominent baseball player and encouraged him to go public with his homosexuality. Lemon also vented his frustration at having to keep the relationship very quiet.
"For the past year and a half, I have been having an affair with a pro baseball player from a major-league East Coast franchise, not his team's biggest star but a very recognizable media figure all the same," he wrote.
"During this time, none of my friends has been privy to this liaison, a concealment that has been awkward at times, but nothing in comparison to the manoeuvrings that my ballplayer has had to make. . . .
"There is more than a little irony in the editor of the (U.S.'s) largest-circulation gay magazine skulking around with someone so deep in the closet.
"I have spent many nights, awakened by a 3 a.m. phone call after a West Coast game talking with this guy about his homosexuality and the way it affects his behaviour toward his teammates, and I have concluded that coming out would, on balance, lessen his psychic burden."
Brian Pronger -- an ethics professor at the University of Toronto and the author of Arena of Masculinity, a book which argues that homophobia is embedded in sports culture -- disagrees with Lemon. He says the pressures on the athlete would only add to his problems.
"The sports world is enormously behind the times," says Pronger. "The sports world celebrates manliness, strength, competition, all qualities we attribute to heterosexual masculinity."
For an openly gay player to survive, "he would have to have very highly developed gay community political sense to be toughened," says Pronger.
Only two professional baseball players have ever gone public with their homosexuality: the late Glenn Burke and former San Diego Padres pitcher Billy Bean. Neither could handle playing baseball while keeping their homosexuality a secret.
Burke -- a former outfielder with the Los Angeles Dodgers and Oakland Athletics in the late 1970's and early 80's -- had his career cut short by innuendo and homophobia. He turned to drugs to cope, ended up on the streets and eventually died of complications from AIDS in 1995.
Bean -- who cut his career short in 1995 because of a gay relationship, and warily emerged from the closet two years ago -- believes baseball is still not ready to confront the issue.
"I think it's easy to say those things when you're the editor of a gay and lesbian magazine. But if I were that ball player, I'd have cold sweats right now," Bean, 37, told the New York daily Newsday recently. "I knew my career would end, and I would experience total rejection (if I came out)."
Brad Ausmus, Bean's roommate from 1993 to 1995 with San Diego, agrees with his friend's assessment.
"It probably was in the best interest of his career that he kept quiet," Ausmus said recently. "It would have been a strain."
Tewksbury says many heterosexual athletes would worry that their gay teammate is checking them out in the locker-room, that a line between appropriate behaviour and sexual attraction would be crossed.
"That's part of ignorance, part of total misunderstanding," he says. "That's what keeps people from wanting to actually cross that line and be the one who has to educated an entire team or industry what it means to be gay."
But Tewksbury also thinks that it is possible for a player to come out in the midst of his career. With a strong sense of identity and the ability to handle the extra attention a player could reveal his homosexuality and still continue his career.
"If you're really comfortable in your own skin, you could turn it into a huge advantage, and it could break an enormous barrier," he said. "Things tend to play themselves out largely depending on how you handle the situation."
Professor Pronger says that because of the institutionalization of homophobia in sports, a change in attitudes is necessary before it evaporates the way racial discrimination did.
It would take a fight, someone to withstand the open taunts and pressures of being the first man to declare his homosexuality during his playing career.
"He would certainly be a hero in the gay community," says Pronger, adding that having an athlete to look up to would make it much easier for young people trying to come out and for other homosexuals at all levels of sport.
Pronger says many young homosexual athletes quit sports because of taunts and derogatory comments. Homophobia in minor sports eventually makes its way into the big-leagues.
After the 1999 season, Atlanta Braves reliever John Rocker said in an infamous diatribe that he wouldn't want to ride the subway in New York "next to some queer with AIDS."
In April, Chicago Cubs starter Julian Tavarez was fined after he used profanity and a derogatory term toward homosexuals in a tirade against San Francisco fans.
In February, Philadelphia 76ers star Allen Iverson, the NBA's MVP of the 2000-01 season, was also fined for shouting a derogatory term for gays at some rowdy Indiana fans. Iverson had already been criticized by NBA commissioner David Stern in October for lyrics that were deemed offensive to women and gays on a rap album he cut.
All of which doesn't sway Lemon, who argues that his boyfriend has more to gain by coming out than by maintaining his secret.
"Whatever the potential fallout, for an athlete, as for everyone else, it's less psychically risky to come out, not merely to stop the lying but to lessen the internal stress -- the kind my ballplayer deals with every day."
A point that resonates strongly with Tewksbury.
"The tradeoff in any industry of not being able to be who you are is huge, to pretend to be something you're not and living with the fear that some people might find out who you really are," he says. "And maybe even more so on a ball team that is still surrounded by this very macho culture."
By Shi Davidi
