OutSports has an article via Outlook Columbus about Ohio State head football coach Jim Tressel who talks about the importance of every player including gay and lesbian athletes.

” …. every part of our team is important and every role has value – no job is too small and no person is irrelevant – that’s a great lesson that transcends into society. When I think of the diversity we’ve had on our team the past few years, it goes way beyond just a racial, sexual or ethnic mix. We’ve had players who had different religions, players who came from different economic backgrounds, players who are parents, who are spouses, who are caring for ailing parents, who are wheelchair bound, who are battling cancer, and on and on. Whatever a young man feels called to express, I hope we will help him do it in a supportive environment. Everybody is important, and maturity is learning to find and appreciate those differences in others.”

I also happened across an extended article today written by Jet Gardner titled “Openly Gay Athletes Break Stereotypes and Serve As Role Models“.

The article which was written at the website Blogcritics back in August of 2009 takes a look at both pro and collegiate athletes such as Brian Sims (pictured) who played for Bloomberg University. Sims is now a successful attorney who is connected with the Philadelphia Bar Association and works with the Pennsylvania Legislature in matters of the discrimination of gays and lesbians.

This is one article you should definitely take the time to read and share with others.

A lesbian activist has acquired the Chicago Cubs–and she says that anti-gay prejudice is the last thing she’s encountered. Rather, she’s had to deal with mundane issues like the state of the facilities: real-world problems, rather than biases emanating from myths and stereotypes. Laura Ricketts, 42, and her family bought the Cubs last year, reports Chicago LGBT paper Windy City Times in a Feb. 24 article. The process involved close scrutiny from the baseball league–but nothing about it was homophobic, Ricketts told the paper. “They wanted to know all the organizations we’re involved with, where we went to school, where we invested and the jobs we’ve had,” she said. “They do a pretty extensive background check. In terms of the LGBT issue, it was never an issue at all.”

The article noted that Ricketts is politically and socially active, involved in board positions with organizations as diverse as Housing Opportunities for Women and Lambda Legal, one of the nation’s premiere legal organizations for LGBT issues. Ricketts suggested that living openly and honestly was the best strategy to countering stereotypes and misperceptions about LGBT people.

Full article at EDGE.

Wayne Hudson Champion Of Gay Rights

Last evening after coming in from work, my job at age 56 where I’m beginning a new career this time in retail at the bottom of the management ladder, I turned on my local ABC affiliate here in Connecticut, WTNH-TV to see the weather forecast for the next storm due to hit our state. At the beginning of the broadcast after the initial weather report on the upcoming storm, one of the lead stories was ABC Broadcasting was going to cut 20% of the staff at ABC News.

With a deep sigh I said to myself, welcome to my world folks.

Those of you who have been a reader of Focus On The Rainbow at Hearst Newspapers have on occasion read when I have described what happened to me now almost four years ago, or would from reading my bio at the blog know my background in broadcasting.

For those of you who don’t and why this news about ABC News has hit home for me, in 2003 at age 50, my dream of going to work for CBS Broadcasting came true some 20 years after my first go round in broadcasting. At the time I didn’t care if I were sweeping floors but I managed to do a bit better than that as the continuity manager for national advertisers at the four station CBS Radio Group in Hartford.

It was a great, although stressful job, and a great company to work for. CBS was a second family for me as big a company as CBS is and one I thought I would work for until such time as I decided to retire. But all that changed for me and 100 plus others on July 12, 2006 in what I call “Black Wednesday at Black Rock“.

Mind you this was before the economy took a dive into the depths of Hell, one which we still have not recovered from. When I told my elderly parents about what happened I said when a company like CBS Broadcasting has to start laying people off because of ever shrinking ad revenue, which of course puts money in the coffers to make the machine run and keep folks working, this country is going to go to hell in a hen basket. And unfortunately I was proved correct.

Since then there have been cutbacks at NBC, Clear Channel and smaller media companies. Radio and TV stations have been sold off, as is the case with CBS Radio and there have been mergers such as Comcast and NBC-Universal, all of which cause more cuts in the workforce.

Just a couple or more weeks ago CBS announced cutting 60 plus jobs in its news division, and from what my contacts at CBS Radio have told me over the past three years, there have been more cuts here and there in the division. To me what is most shocking about the announced cuts at ABC News is not the cutback itself but the number of people who will be, either through buyout or layoff, out of a job.

According to a report by FOX News/The New York Post, In what it calls a “fundamental transformation” of its business, ABC News plans to cut about 20 percent of its workforce — or around 300 people — through buyouts or layoffs, the New York Post reported. 

According to a memo sent to staffers late yesterday afternoon, the repositioning of ABC News will have six components, including combining the weekday and weekend operations of Good Morning America and “World News” and “eliminating redundancies wherever possible.”

“All of us are good reporters,” ABC News President David Westin wrote in the missive. “We can see that our entire society is in the middle of a revolution — a revolution in the ways that people get their news and information. We can have great success in the new world, but only if we embrace what is new, rather than being overwhelmed by it.”

The last significant round of layoffs to hit the division occurred about 10 years ago, when roughly 130 workers were axed. A source familiar with the situation said the upcoming layoffs would be at least twice that number, amounting to about 20 percent of the 1,500 workers at ABC News.

There was for a very long time when the CBS Radio Division was a sacred cow. After all it was through radio that William S. Paley started CBS. And it continued that way until Mel Karmazin was pushed out the Viacom door by Sumner Redstone, who I have the same feeling and contempt for as George Steinbrenner owner of the New York Yankees. It will be a happy day when he kicks the bucket so I can piss on his grave.

And while I have no inside information, don’t be surprised to see cuts at ESPN in the future. As I learned, there are no longer sacred cows.

It was August 13, 1989 when NASCAR driver Tim Richmond died.

For weeks and even months there had been all kind of rumors and speculation about Richmond being sick and what that sickness was. Many said no, no way, when the disease was mentioned. That just didn’t happen in NASCAR circles.

In 1987 he missed the Daytona 500 because of double pneumonia so the press was told. Not long after Richmond left Hendrick Motor Sports was when the real rumors started to kick in about Richmond leading a double life and somehow picking up the dreaded, as it was called then, “gay plague”. “No it can’t be true after all NASCAR drivers are not ….”.

According to an article written by Ed Hinton for ESPN 20 years after Richmond died, Richmond’s family weeks after Richmond had been buried held a news conference in which they confirmed the rumors. Tim Richmond had died of AIDS.

Hinton wrote that at least one in the NASCAR circle, and a broadcaster and doctor at that, knew the truth or at least as much as Richmond was willing to devulge. He confined in Dr. Gerry Punch that he had AIDS.

Punch was then left with the unenviable task of telling, according to Hinton, more than 90 people in the NASCAR circle to get tested for AIDS. You could almost see and hear them standing around the haulers, calculating: “Now she was with Richmond, I know … and then she was with [fill in the blank]. And then he was with [fill in another blank.] And then she was with me — uh — Hey, Doc! I need to ask you about something.”, Hinton wrote.

It’s speculated that Richmond caught the disease sometime in 1986. But as in most if not all cases of those who contract AIDS, a timeline is at best a guess. And because no one with any concrete knowledge of whether Richmond did get infected through heterosexual sex or because he was bi-sexual is talking, in all likelyhood the truth will never be known. Which brings up the point, does it matter ?

Well to those who were or could have been infected and who are still alive, most definitely. And there are those who may be walking around with a ticking time bomb where for one reason or another the HIV virus has not kicked in. Believe me, I have no expertise in medicine, but since the gay plague came into being, people have gone years without knowing they were infected until it was too late.

As any corporation will do just about anything to deny a problem (just look at Toyota) to protect their corporate image, as Hinton wrote, so too did NASCAR, NASCAR very likely knew Richmond had AIDS. Any bleeding injuries he might sustain on the track might put at risk their safety workers, who didn’t wear protective gloves at the time. And ordering the workers to take such precautions might spread a panic.

And so many will say as it were, let sleeping dogs lie, have respect for Richmond’s family and leave the memory of Tim Richmond to what it was. But if you were one of those who had a sexual encounter with Richmond wouldn’t you want to know the truth ? 

Or at least the truth which someone is finally willing to say after all these years. That of course presuming they are still alive to tell it.

In 1980 long before there was SAT radio services and computers, for two weeks in February as the sports director and reporter of two of our local radio stations here in Danbury, Ct, WLAD & WDAQ, I like millions of others watched the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, NY.

For me it was about half a life time ago but without a doubt one of the most memorable periods in my broadcasting career and indeed of my life.

Using an electric typewriter and the sources of the Associated Press, the old fashioned AP wire machine and AP’s new, at the time, audio news service AP Radio which was fed over a telephone hard line, for 14 plus days I did over 70 sports reports mostly dealing with the Olympics.

I used the wire copy for the basis of the reports along with sound bites, or actualities as they were called back then, plus my own recollection of what I watched on TV.

Many names I couldn’t pronounce, even with the help of AP’s phonetic spelling in the wire copy which I rewrote into scripts. Sometimes I would get tongue tied trying to pronounce the names of Russian athletes as well as the names of others from different countries. I would laugh while on-air and say to the listeners ”you know who I’m talking about you watched the games last night”.

Winter Olympics have always had more appeal to me than Summer Olympics as much as I hate the cold and winter, but watching in the cozy warmness of my home I never cared, let those crazy spectators freeze their butts off.

However the 1980 Winter Olympics is one which I would have gladly traded being warm and fuzzy for “oh my God I can’t believe how cold it is “. Myself and the powers that be at the radio station talked briefly about me going to Lake Placid to cover the games. That idea and conversation lasted about five minutes, so I had to use the tools at hand to cover the Olympics as best I could hundreds of miles away in Danbury and in most cases well after the fact in next day sportscasts.

But in a way I’m glad I didn’t go in as much I would not have been as caught up in all the drama which took place during those events, especially the US Hockey Team. True as an on scene reporter it would have been great to personally interview the athletes and offer a personal perspective of being at the games. But I wouldn’t have heard those immortal words by Al Micheal, “do you believe in miracles” and “the impossible dream has come true”.

When both hockey games came to their conclusion, I like many Americans shed a tear or two for these kids and their coach who lived a dream and saw it come true. I still get a lump in my throat and my eyes do water when seeing replays of the coverage of ABC Sports even though I’ve seen it countless times and well know the outcome.

The games took place during the Cold War, but on that Friday night and Sunday as well as during the closing ceremonies of the 1980 Winter Olympics, there were many a warm heart in the United States and indeed around the world for these young Olympians and their coach and staff who rose higher than even they thought they could and beat the odds against them.

The 1980 Winter Olympics were the best Olympic games ….. ever !

I’m sure there were many who had no idea there were such things as gay rodeo or gay RV’ing. Well here’s another eye opener for you. Yes Virginia there is a website for gay and bi NASCAR fans.

Gaytona.Com is both a hoot and takes a serious look at NASCAR, often with on scene reporting by the authors of the website.

There’s no illicit sexual photos, no gay gossip, instead this website is for all the gay and bi guys and gals who get their kicks watching guys steering to the left of center at speeds leaving ordinary car bangers in the dust.

And new for part of this NASCAR season Danica Patrick has joined NASCAR until the IRL season gets underway which will make the lezzies and bi’s (not saying Danica is mind you, no need to call your attorney) put a big smile on their face.

Personally I love Danica and what she has done for the sport (and yes it is !) of auto racing. So check out Gaytona.com sometime, you never know, you may actually come out of the “I’m really a NASCAR fan” closet.

Brings a whole new meaning to “bogedy .. bogedy .. bogedy !”

No he really isn’t ….. sigh !

Oh Danica … thy “heart” throbs for thee !