Column: Kiss Cam controversy has no place today
Published Sept. 28, 2010
A few weeks ago the St. Louis Rams began their most recent quest to ascend from annual top-five draft selection to double-digits, welcoming the Arizona Cardinals to the Edward Jones Dome. The two teams’ pillowfight unfolded without much incident. Sam Bradford stumbled once or twice but otherwise showed promise, Derek Anderson sucked as few others consistently can, and the Cardinals ended up the victors, 17-13. Business as usual in the NFC West.
But the natural course of things was for a moment peripherally interrupted. The stadium Kiss Cam began and eventually highlighted a pair of male Cardinals fans, insinuating the two were gay and naturally should display their Arizona Cardinal gayness for the other 65,000 on hand.
The two guys apparently squirmed for a minute, didn’t kiss and were booed. I’m not entirely sure of the recommended course of action when the bully of everyone’s youth is suddenly an NFL stadium camera operator, and the juvenile taunts of everyone’s youth are suddenly the boos of 60 thousand plus, magnifying playground ridicule of long ago to grand-scale public derision for the simple crime of wearing a different color jersey, but I’m fairly certain they handled it as well as you conceivably can.
It was aggressive idiocy on the part of both the Rams’ in-house camera crew and the thousands who booed, for the unacceptable elevating of naïve junior high gay jokes to a public, adult setting and the vocal support given, respectively. You feel for those two Cardinals fans. They first lose Kurt Warner to “Dancing With The Stars,” ready themselves to endure the Derek Anderson Era, which will most assuredly suck a great deal, come to terms with it, decide to travel all the way from Phoenix to witness their exceedingly average football team take on the comically below-average Rams, only to end up the butt of a dumb “Cardinal fans are gay!” joke that probably would’ve drawn crickets from even the raunchiest group of seventh-graders.
Things didn’t end there. This incident serving as their springboard, a gay rights group took to Busch Stadium the next week with hopes of getting two members of their group onto the Kiss Cam during a Cardinals game. The plan didn’t work; they were overlooked. But you credit them for the effort. You wouldn’t think this would be noteworthy or even a minor controversy in 2010, considering it’s very much a legal and acceptable thing to both be gay and to kiss while being gay in… well… everywhere. So, again, you really wouldn’t think this would be noteworthy or even a minor controversy.
But it became just that, I suppose. An AOL Fanhouse columnist named David Whitley, who, in a wonderfully convincing turn as “Guy Who Is Legitimately Afraid of Gay People Poorly Masking His Homophobia” poorly masked his homophobia in a column questioning the necessary aspects of a gay kiss on the kiss cam. Of course it’s unnecessary to deliberately highlight gays on the kiss cam. It’s a non-issue. If they’re on it, they’re on it. If not, we move on. It’s 2010 and that’s how equality works. You don’t worry about it. The fact that there are still people who are upset or scared by the notion of homosexuals being afforded the basic right to express themselves in public –- via however stupid a medium, i.e. a stadium kiss cam –- is heartbreaking. It’s an incredibly bizarre alternate universe created here: where supporting the Arizona Cardinals constitutes homosexuality, where columnists condemn being gay in public, and where Derek Anderson is a starting NFL quarterback. Where are we?