#kdfhgsafjdkg those middle two paragraphs are so long sorry

[chadlesbianjasontodd]

Whyyy are you stalking players and going through their followings like a damn puck bunny blog smh embarrassing. Morgan didn’t say anything verbally to offend the gays why is this still a thing, half the league supports trump and fucked up politics, you’re just bringing in the typical white man-ness that comes with the league to try and beef up a situation that was already debunked.

did someone put all of my jokes about how people react to us being upset at a homophobic slur in a blender? did you go through the comments of everyone i blocked on twitter in the last two days and splice all of them together?? sincerely how did you manage to perfectly encapsulate every homophobic straight leafs fan reaction in an anon ask this short

anyway there’s a post ive been meaning to put out for a while now that’s gotten more relevant in the past two days, about public figures and reputation and why you’re not going to be seeing any “is this tv show my friend” takes from me. this seems like a good place to attach it.

you see stuff going around about how pro athletes’ jobs are just to play a sport, nothing else; i don’t think that’s true. being an nhl player or an nba player or an nfl player includes being a public figure, which means a certain level of appearing palatable to people who don’t know you. it is part of their job to look good in public, and it’s more than wearing a suit and signing autographs: it includes crafting an image of themselves that appeals to fans and sponsors. happily for them, there are people whose entire job it is to tell them what to say to reporters, what not to say to reporters, what they should and shouldn’t put on the internet, not to send any nudes, all that. a lot of what gets people in media trouble is being bad at the basic ‘don’t be a dick on the internet’ stuff that most of us do already, but if you want to actually get along well (and maybe have some privacy) you’ve gotta do more than that. you’ve gotta have a public face.

crosby just keeps everything locked down tight, which is an attitude i respect. ovechkin and even seguin these days have done well enough at crafting a media personality that people’s first or even second thought generally isn’t ‘he’s a big putin fan’ or ‘he’s a homophobe who’s bffs with that rapist patrick kane’. you look at ovechkin and you go what a wild guy! he’s hilarious! i love him! & seguin’s loveable rogue fratboy act has worked absolute wonders for him. then you have people like pierre-edouard bellemare, who are less famous and less grandiose about it but do a good job: bellemare stays quiet except for postgame interviews, uses his public twitter once in a while to promote charity work he does and that’s it. counterexample alex tuch is real bad at this (and hes a bad guy) but i’ve talked about him before so i’ll save it.

some sports organizations don’t think that an athlete being known as an abuser, a racist, a homophobe, is enough of a hit to their reputation to particularly care when their employees do such things; nevertheless, having a good name is part of an athlete’s job.

what athletes or actors or other celebrities think to themselves, what they do at home, what their family is like, who they’re dating – that’s not part of their job and it’s not my business. i don’t know these people! i don’t want to know them!

but what they attach to their public name. the way that they act towards people. that’s important and i do want to know. see, i have a certain amount of respect for people who are willing to fake it in public – they might be garbage human beings inside their own heads, but as long as they act right, then good for them. if they respect us all enough to put in the effort of lying, that matters. but when they don’t act right, or when they attach the unhappy truth to their name and their public reputation – when, for example, they yell a homophobic slur into a microphone during a hockey game, or they follow north america’s most famous professional misogynist with their official twitter account – that is my business, yeah. it’s everybody’s business.

does it matter whether or not it was rielly? no. not really. we know they’re all like this, however nice and rainbow tape they act during the month of june. so when it comes up like this we need to jump on it as hard as we can. once they’ve been scared into acting right, they can think whatever they want.

(also: anon, i’m not publishing your second ask bc i don’t want to expose people to more of this zero-calories homophobia lite nonesense than we’ve all already had to see, but if you say ‘homosexuals’ like a lutheran minister from indiana one more time i’m gonna show up at your house and i’m gonna bring a lot of derek jarman films with me)