Homosexuality, Choice, and Michael Sam
By William Saletan
Michael Sam, an outstanding collegiate football player, has come out of the closet. Hes expected to be picked in the third or fourth round of the National Football League draft. Hell be the NFLs first openly gay player.
My colleague Josh Levin makes the case for Sam as a groundbreaker. In Slates Outward blog, Tyler Lopez makes a business case for drafting Sam. But I want to focus on something else: what Sams story tells us about the nature of sexual orientation.
In his ESPN interview, Sam said what a lot of gay men have said about their adolescent years: I knew from a young age that I was attracted to guys. And growing up, I didnt know if it was a phase. He though it might go away. It didnt.
Sams life would have been easier if it had gone away. He didnt grow up in an environment where homosexuality was accepted or tolerated. In the interview, he recalled seeing my older brother killed from a gunshot wound, knowing that my older sister died when she was a baby. A second brother went missing and was later pronounced dead. Two other two brothers have been in and out of jail since eighth grade, currently both in jail. In the interview, Sam reflected:
I could be in jail. I could be dead.
But I made a choice. I made a choice at a young age that I knew that I didnt want to follow that path of my brothers. I knew I didnt want to follow the path where I had to call my mom from jail and say, Can you bail me out? Or running streets or whatever. I knew that I wanted to have some success so my family could be proud of me.
The key words are
I made a choice. Against the grain of everything that had happened in his family, Sam chose a different course. You can question lots of things about Sam: Does he have the size to play lineman in the NFL? Should he be a starter? What you cant question is his will.
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http://www.slate.com/blogs/saletan/2014/02/10/michael_sam_the_first_gay_nfl_player_shows_homosexuality_is_not_a_choice.html?wpisrc=newsletter_jcr:content&mc_cid=64c4b4460b&mc_eid=7a8b58c8c3