Whoever the gay equivalent of Jackie Robinson will be – and according to some sources, we may get several of them at the same time – he (or they) is almost certainly already playing professional sports, and may well be an established star. Robinson’s history-making Major League Baseball debut in 1947 was enormously dramatic, of course, but lacked that level of shadowy intrigue: No one wondered whether Stan Musial or Ted Williams might abruptly announce that he’d been black the whole time, like the tormented hero of a Faulkner novel. (Although, given the bizarre history of race in America, who really knows? There were a handful of earlier cases when baseball teams tried to “pass” light-skinned African-American players as Native Americans – and that’s a terrific movie idea if I’ve ever heard one.)

Furthermore, as Salon’s Katie McDonough reported on Friday, sports-marketing experts expect the first out gay athlete in a major North American male team sport to reap enormous benefits, in the form of lucrative endorsement deals and a tide of largely positive publicity. No such opportunities existed for Robinson in 1947, when the Brooklyn Dodgers paid him $600 a month — a reasonable middle-class salary at the time, but nothing more. Will that first out gay star also receive hate mail from bigots, and face locker-room snickering and on-field slurs, as Robinson did? Almost certainly – but the bigots will also understand that they need to keep their hatred on the down-low, and that they’re already on the losing side of history.

Solon