“It was shocking but not surprising,” Chris said of the number of homophobic tweets he found. When “Chris,” a young NBA fan who is gay, saw the tweets, they saddened and angered him. I’m not for people losing their jobs, but words like that can’t be tolerated.” “It’s a slap in the face to me, to other people in my community. “I don’t care how long ago it was, it shows the person’s character, in my opinion,” said Derrick Gordon, who came out publicly as gay while playing basketball at UMass and who now plays professionally in Germany. The players include CJ McCollum, the president of the National Basketball Players Assn., who tweeted “no homo,” as well as superstar Kevin Durant, who tweeted “shut up fag boy.” While they may not reflect how these players feel about LGBTQ people today - we don’t know until they tell us - all the tweets were still active as of March 4 (some have been deleted after players became aware of this impending story, though Outsports has a screen capture of every tweet). With very few exceptions, all of these messages were sent from the players’ accounts from 2009 through 2013, in some cases years before they joined the league.
These comments are among 78 tweets from 36 current and active NBA players on teams that are homophobic in language, nature or even intent (four other players were on a roster when the list was compiled last month, but they are no longer on an NBA team). The words are from more than a decade ago, but they still hurt today.
0 kommentar(er)
