The Bloggity Blog

“I think forget sports … I think we’re in a society now that people do come out,” he said.

There’s no doubt there have been gay players in the NHL before and that there are some today. But they obviously don’t feel comfortable coming out publicly in a league that still has a well-earned reputation for being an “old boys’ club.”

About 25 years ago, Tom Harrington was a CBC sports reporter and host of the Sports Journal magazine show. He was researching a story about an NHL player who was gay while working with a go-between who ran a support group in Toronto that helped professional and amateur athletes who were gay. Harrington was told there was a “prominent” NHL player who had been thinking about coming out.

During the next year-and-a-half, Harrington said he worked with his go-between trying to convince the NHL player to do an interview, but the player was “extremely reluctant and afraid he’d be exposed.” Harrington tried to arrange a phone interview or a meeting with the player, who asked if his voice could be disguised in a phone call in case Harrington recognized him. Harrington promised the go-between he would never reveal the player’s identity unless he permitted it.

“It was a step closer to the beginning of something, but it was also a window into just how terrified he was, and it said a lot about the culture at the time in professional male sports, where players didn’t feel they could even take the initial step to come out, let alone reveal themselves,” Harrington said in a phone interview Tuesday.

Harrington said the player eventually decided not to come out, saying he was too scared of the impact it would have on his family, hockey career and his life after hockey.

“I remember saying at the time (to the go-between): ‘You know, there are a lot of people who would be very supportive of him. There would be businesses lining up to sponsor him to have him as a spokesperson. I’m telling you, there’s an untapped market for someone like this … the Jackie Robinson of gays in sports.’ But, ultimately, it failed.

“I never knew who the player was and to this day I still don’t know who it was,” added Harrington, who retired last year after almost 44 years at CBC.

Yes humans evolved to live here too, but if we're entertaining the idea that an all powerful deity created the earth for any particular species, it's definitely gotta be something from the ocean.

Because, yes, listening to a story and reading a story use mostly the same parts of the brain. Yes, listening to the audiobook counts as "having read" a book. Yes, oral storytelling has a long, glorious tradition and many cultures maintained their histories through oral history or oral + art history, having never developed a true written language, and their oral stories and histories are just as valid and rich as written literature.

We still can't call listening in the absence of reading "literacy."

The term literacy needs to stay restricted to the written word, to the ability to access and engage with written texts, because we need to be able to talk about illiteracy. We need to be able to identify when a society is failing to teach children to read, and if we start saying that listening to stories is literacy, we lose the ability to describe those systemic failures.

Blind folks have been knee-deep in this debate for a long time. Schools struggle to provide resources to teach students Braille and enforcing the teaching of Braille to low-vision and blind children is a constant uphill battle. A school tried to argue that one girl didn't need to learn Braille because she could read 96-point font. Go check what that is. The new prevalence of audiobooks and TTS is a huge threat to Braille literacy because it provides institutions with another excuse to not provide Braille education or Braille texts.

That matters. Braille-literate blind and low-vision people have a 90% employment rate. For those who don't know Braille, it's 30%. Braille literacy is linked to higher academic success in all fields.

Moving outside the world of Braille, literacy of any kind matters. Being able to read text has a massive impact on a person's ability to access information, education, and employment. Being able to talk about the inability to read text matters, because that's how we're able to hold systems accountable.