I figured out some stuff, but I guess other things just take longer.“This is usually the part where I tell people to turn off their phones,” the theater attendant announced to my 7:30 p.m. “No,” I invariably answer, “one psychopath per household is quite enough.” We will celebrate 25 years together next month, and yet his grasp of golf is still best summarized by a long-ago comment when I returned from a particularly dispiriting round notable for its abundance of lost balls and F bombs: “You think you’d have figured it out by now.” I’m often asked if my husband, Michael, plays golf. The two constituencies I cheerfully ignore are those who insist that golf is a narrow, intolerant world, and those who wish it were. There’s also a rump who will glance at this epistle and frothily demand that liberal propaganda be kept out of golf, though experience unfailingly shows such people object only when the views being expressed contradict their own. There are well-intentioned people who insist proclamations about sexuality are unnecessary, but that’s a privilege reserved for those who’ve never been presumed by society to be someone other than who they are. His peers are more likely to care about whether he plays fast. Someday a PGA Tour golfer will come out to the pleasant realization that what was to him a seismic announcement is considered by most everyone else to be barely worth the noting. Golf could use more Snedekers willing to speak up for tolerance. It’s not going to affect my life in any way, shape or form,” he said. “I don’t think a gay golfer is going to be that big of a deal. In an interview with David Feherty a few years ago, Brandt Snedeker said he believed there were gay players on Tour. There are numerous prominent figures in golf with gay children or siblings. Nor am I marooned in some hostile environment like Patrick Reed in a Ryder Cup locker room. The only thing I care to hide in golf is my wretched swing, not the fact that I am gay. That’s entirely their business, but it’s not an approach I mirror.
There are some who, for whatever personal reasons, choose not to be open about their sexuality.
The LPGA Tour has long been a welcoming ward for lesbians, but gay men are entirely invisible on the PGA Tour and only slightly less so in the broader golf universe. Those stuffy blue blazers had never seemed so colorful. Thanks, Tadd Fujikawa, for reminding us that our love of the game unites us all. While the PGA Tour reported the news on its social media with sober detachment, the USGA tweeted this: “The best thing about golf is that it welcomes everyone to play, and play for a lifetime. Last year, Tadd Fujikawa became the first male player of even moderate prominence to announce that he is gay. Signs of a more progressive understanding of who plays golf aren’t limited to Pride Month. This month the PGA of America has been spotlighting gay members, and for several years has stressed that golf’s long-term health and economy demands drawing a more diverse audience. The effort to signal a more welcoming environment is increasingly, if slowly, evident in golf too. Golf also has diversity not so readily apparent to the naked eye.ĭuring Pride Month, it seems as though every company and industry in the land is displaying rainbow colors, marketing that one suspects is often motivated as much by sales as solidarity. A visit to most golf facilities will reveal people separated by race, gender and umpteen other differences but united by a passion for the game. The familiar rap against golf is that expressions of diversity in our game are limited to wearing unconventional shades of khaki, that it’s a buttoned-up, hidebound world that stubbornly remains the preserve of white, male, affluent, conservative, Christian, heterosexual, country club Republicans with woeful fashion sense.Īdmittedly, you can throw a pebble on the PGA Tour and hit someone who ticks all of those boxes - and you wouldn’t have to aim carefully - but like all stereotypes it fails to fully reflect a more nuanced reality.