I grew up playing a lot of hockey. There was a point where I was on the ice eight times a week for practices and games. Playing on the high school team and on the AA team, I must have played with hundreds of different people and personally knew maybe a thousand hockey players. And yet, as far as I can remember, never met one gay player.

Granted I was a teenager living in the country. It wasn’t easy for anyone to come out of the closet at that age or in a rural setting but it still never occurred to me that there wasn’t one homosexual. Not one. Former minor league hockey player Justin Bourne asks a question in his column in USA Today that I probably should have thought of  before someone else pointed it out to me:

The lack of a homosexual presence in hockey must mean one of two things: either homosexual men don’t play the game or they don’t feel comfortable admitting it — in which case I, and my brethren, were offending some teammates with our close-mindedness, and furthering what must have been unsettled feelings of fear and general exclusion.

For us as a culture, that means another two things. That either we need scientists doing research on professional hockey players ASAP, because apparently there’s a link between our sport and sexuality. Or, much more realistically, we need to alter the culture of hockey, because homosexuals are being forced to play entire careers masquerading as people they’re not.

And it’s not for lack of rumours that there are no openly gay players in the NHL. I remember hearing a long time ago that Stephane Richer was dating franco-rock star Roch Voisine. Upon looking up that old rumour at outsports.com, a website dedicated to homosexuality in sports, I discovered many other rumours including Wendel Clark and a story about Glen Anderson’s gay lover being found dead in his pool. I wouldn’t give any credence to internet bulletin board backtalk but it makes one wonder about how difficult a hockey player’s career would be if he was openly homosexual. That’s why Bourne thinks it’s time to change course:

We need to make a change now, because kids who move away from home to play junior hockey at 16 or 17 are still impressionable. If they don’t encounter a good role model, the seeds are sown for a person, who after trying to fit in, thinks it’s OK to drink, treat women a certain way and use homosexuality as a punchline.

Good point. Thinking back to all the gay slurs I heard (and repressing all those I was the source of), it’s time to stop shying away from this controversial topic and confronting it head on. It pains me to think that there might be people out there that want to play hockey but can’t because of something completely irrelevant to their ability to play the sport. Hey, even Don Cherry approves of same sex marriage. Do you seriously want to be less politically correct than Don Cherry?

I’ll be in the Molson Ex section of the Bell Centre tonight for the Habs-Thrashers matchup. I’ll twitter if I hear any slurs and the outcome when I tell them to take it back.

(Hat tip to DrugMonkey)