Aaron Hernandez Suicide

musicprnt
Tue, 25 Apr 2017 13:50:09 +0000

@zoosermom is right about that, the world that AH was very much part of as an adult was the world he grew up in, and it was one tinged with gang violence and a community that is not exactly positive towards LGBT people, and he could have been a lot more afraid of his ‘streed cred’ than his professional sports career if this came out, we will probably never know.

Pro sports is very jekyll and hyde, while they have made efforts to be supportive of LGBT people, for example threatening to pull events from cities with laws they see as discriminatory, it also is not so easy to change a culture. There are obviously gay athletes and many players know they have teammates who are gay, but it is also very much a kind of "don’t ask don’t tell’ kind of situation from everything I have heard through the grapevine and read so a player may be out to some players, but not others and that doesn’t surprise me. Take a look at the background of pro players, and you see a lot of guys who come from backgrounds and places where there is still significant resistance to gays, whether it be religious or cultural, lot of players are minority or come from the more rural areas of this country or other backgrounds where being gay is not that accepted and it shows in that there aren’t many openly gay players when likely every team has someone who is gay (at least football and baseball, basketball rosters are small enough it is likely some teams don’t have any gay players).

I will add that trying to pin Aaron Hernandez and his actions simply on fear of being outed might be simplistic, but that doesn’t change the culture that he grew up in and was around or that fear of being outed could be a very strong reason, or one of the reasons, that he might kill someone. There is something of an irony with the Hernandez story, if the bi/gay angle is true, that he had had a kid with a woman supposedly his ‘fiancee’ out of wedlock, never married her, that once was considered a major sin, a sign of someone being immoral, etc, yet that is these days considered normal, is no big deal to teammates,fellow players and the world at large whereas being gay or bi is something that could be worth killing someone over to keep quiet over in that same community.