Devil's Advocate

I know Jason Collin's coming out is a lovely story for the sports world to sit around and pat each other on the back for how open-minded we all are.  It's making me bored for a couple of reasons:

1.  Gay people come out all the time to their family and friends and have been doing so for a long time.  This takes the same amount of courage - if not more - than Jason Collins coming out to the sports world.  The reason I'm saying this is because what Jason Collins is doing is not especially brave, if you ask me.  In fact, it is exactly as brave as EVERY SINGLE GAY PERSON who has ever come out before.  I mean, it must be 10 times as hard to tell your dad you're gay when you know he won't approve of it, than coming out in 2013 to lauding and cheering from every goddamn sports announcer and athlete on twitter.

2.  What team does Jason Collins play for?  To be honest, I didn't even know he was still in the NBA.  Turns out he is 34 and now a free agent.  It strikes me this would be a much more meaningful story if the player was under contract and an important member of a good or decent team.  Not that anyone can control this issue, but I think it it makes the story significantly less important.  And cynically, I think it makes sense for a team to sign Collins as a marketing move and it makes Collins - an otherwise irrelevant athlete - relevant.  

3.  This doesn't really compare to Jackie Robinson because Robinson was a good and meaningful ballplayer and the vehement public opposition to Robinson being allowed into the game.

4.  Jason Collins stole the thunder from Manti Te'o.  Now that would be a story.  Highly touted linebacker coming out as gay at the beginning of his NFL career.  Would he be accepted?  Would he play?  Would he make it?  As it stands, I'm not sure Jason Collins really risked anything to come out.

5.  Let's be honest:  it was easier for Jason Collins to come out than a lot of other athletes.  The guy went to Harvard Westlake and Stanford.  He comes from an upper middle class environment that easily accepts homosexuality.  If the kid was from the deep South or an inner-city environment, this would be much more difficult.

I bring all this up not as an attack on Collins so much as the story itself and the way it's being talked about.  I think there is a problem in the way Americans take lessons from our own history.  We are taught about the bravery of opposing segregation and Civil Rights and the Greatest Generation fighting Nazis and all this.  In lauding these past acts, we embed a seed in the minds of all Americans of wanting to be involved with something important and world changing.  Thus, all the people who vocally support various gay rights like marriage and happily support people who "come out" like to see themselves as latter day descendants of those who supported Civil Rights and marched and risk their lives for others.  Of course, this is not true.  The cost to supporting Jason Collins is little to none.  It takes no bravery.  It takes no backbone, no sacrifice.  In fact, in many areas, you will be chastised for the opposite.

The perhaps more dangerous attitude is reflected in the admiration for the Greatest Generation.  Who thinks that didn't play a role in the Iraq invasion?  The majority of the country who supported the war thought we were liberating the Iraqis the way we liberated Europe and Asia in WW2.  And I count myself among them.  But Iraq was different.  Liberals compared it to Vietnam and Conservatives compared it to WW2.  Both were wrong -- deeply wrong -- and yet we have no other way of understanding the world.

Back to Soderbergh...this is why narrative matters.