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Having a Gay Old Time For 12 years Jeff Rawlins played golf at least four times a week with a group of friends in South Webster, Ohio, a town of about 800 near the Kentucky and West Virginia borders. Once a year they would even take a road trip to Myrtle Beach, S.C., where, after playing all day, they would hit the bars at night. "We'd all go to the strip clubs," Rawlins says. "You had to go with the flow, be one of the boys." Then one day, six years ago, he left town without a word to his buddies. At 34, Rawlins had finally come out of the closet, and he knew he would no longer feel comfortable in South Webster. He was certain his golfing friends wouldn't understand. Not long before another golfer in town, a businessman, had revealed that he was a homosexual. His group got rid of him. "They found a reason," Rawlins says. "Just about ruined his life." The businessman gave Rawlins some advice. "He said to me, 'Jeff, when you come out, you have to get out. Leave.' I knew what would happen. My mom said, 'I wish you were dead.' It wasn't a shock. I was packed and ready to go." Today Rawlins is eyeing a delicate chip for birdie on the 2nd hole at Cooks Creek Golf Club, a course that sits near the Scioto River, in the flatlands south of Columbus, on land once farmed by the family of PGA Tour veteran John Cook. Rawlins is a stocky 5'10", with a face that's usually creased by a smile, even when he's reliving a miserable time in his life. "If one person says something negative--'Did you see that queer?' stuff like that--then everybody does," he says. "It was easier to keep my doggone mouth shut and hope someday I could move." In Columbus, which is a couple of hours north of South Webster, Rawlins worked as a security guard. "I was talked about for a while back home," he says, "but I still have some good friends down there. I've been back a couple of times." Asked if he ever sees his old golfing pals, he shakes his head, "Nah." His chip tickles the cup and he taps in for par. Rawlins is off to a good start in the first outing of the year of the Rainbow Golf League, one of many such organizations in the U.S. Gays are almost invisible in a sport noted for its conservative politics and religious beliefs. There is not a single open homosexual on the PGA Tour, and the issue of gays in golf has scarcely been discussed in the eight years since CBS announcer Ben Wright caused an uproar by claiming that lesbians hurt the women's game. These days, the biggest debates over progressive thinking in the game are between Hootie and Martha, and Annika and Vijay, and they're limited to gender. Although more than 200 golfers competed at the 2002 Gay Games, in Australia, the National Minority Golf Foundation is unaware of even one study on gay participation in the sport. Gays are the great silent minority in golf. "You can't hide the fact that you're African-American or a woman, but you can pretend to be straight," says David Ray, a Columbus high school teacher who met his partner, Jay Huston, at a Rainbow Golf League outing four years ago. "We look like anyone else, and we don't advertise." "Yeah," Huston says with a poker face, "David and I are so butch that no one ever catches on to us." Gay golf organizations are slowly growing in number and profile. Stonewall Golfers was founded three years ago in Palm Springs, Calif., home of the LPGA's Kraft Nabisco Championship, which has long been known as Lesbian Spring Break. Stonewall's 50 members play every week and the group was recently recognized, for handicap purposes, by the Southern California Golf Association, the first gay club to be so accredited in the state. Jan Stapel, the Stonewall Golfers' president, also organized the Rainbow Challenge, a pink-jacket Masters for gay golfers held at Tahquitz Creek Golf Resort in Palm Springs over the Memorial Day weekend. While the largest gay golf group in the U.S. is believed to be Lambda Links, in Washington, D.C., there are similar organizations in Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Texas and elsewhere in California and Ohio. The Rainbow Golf League in Columbus was started in 1997 by Bryon Speakman and has a membership of 30 as its seventh season begins. "Columbus is a great town for gay sports," says Speakman, an impeccably groomed 34-year-old lawyer. "There's gay volleyball, even gay darts, so I figured a golf league could go well. I enjoyed playing with my dad and my friends, but I wanted to play with some gay people too." He was hanging out one day with his friend Fred Rector, when Rector spotted Speakman's clubs in the trunk of his car. "I thought, Oh, my God! Another fag who plays golf!" Rector recalls. They placed an ad in a gay newspaper seeking other golfers and got 28 responses. "Golf isn't a dirty word among gays here," Rector says. After this informal round at Cooks Creek, league members will meet on Friday afternoons for nine holes at Mentel Memorial, a public course in Columbus, under their newly elected director, Jim Riedel. Riedel, 35, is a ringer for Phil Mickelson, down to the polite aw-shucks demeanor, the Titleist driver and the thirst for minutiae. (When Riedel took up pool, he read a physics book to learn how spherical objects react against one another.) As he takes a few practice swings on the 1st tee at Cooks, Riedel cheerfully recites all of the predictable gibes about gay golfers: comments about balls and shafts, weak wrists and ladies' tees, Bendover Hogan. "We've heard 'em all," he says. League regulars added a few of their own. "We had members of the transgendered community in the league, so that spawned all sorts of jokes about a new purple tee between the men's and the ladies'," he says before ripping a drive 260 yards down the middle. Riedel protects the privacy of the Rainbow League's membership as fiercely as Hootie Johnson does Augusta National's. "We publish our scores in the local gay newspaper, but some people don't want their names published for fear of losing their jobs," Riedel says. Members must sign a release before their scores are made public. Riedel says his cautious approach is about self-preservation. Similarly, he sometimes wonders about e-mails he gets through the league website (rainbowgolf.org) from strangers hoping to tee it up when they visit town. Says Riedel, "Is it a wacko or someone who only wants to play golf?" Riedel and his partner of eight years, Stephen Weed, play more than 100 rounds together annually, but one in Las Vegas sticks out. "We never introduce ourselves as lovers when we're paired with other golfers," says Weed, a soft-spoken, 39-year-old business consultant, but their playing partners in Vegas caught on that Riedel and Weed were not a casual weekend twosome. "The conversation died, and we became separate twosomes," Riedel says. As the awkward round ended, one of the strangers began singing, "I just met a boy named Maria." "Did you chime in?" Speakman asks. "Nah," Riedel says, "but I was glad I beat him." Sherrill Howard, a league member for three years, usually encounters a more traditional prejudice--the notion that women are slow and can't play well--when she steps onto the tee with her partner, Janet Lucas. "We get more comments like, 'Oh, we're playing with girls!' than the idea that we might be lesbians," she says. "So Janet lets me drive first." Riedel nods and says, "Sherrill hits the ball a long way." But as league regulars have discovered on at least two occasions, hostility toward gay golfers can go beyond altered tunes from West Side Story. Two years ago the Rainbow League played its matches at Split Rock Golf Club, a public course in the Columbus suburb of Orient. The season passed without incident until the penultimate outing, when the last group on the course was jeered by another foursome with taunts of "Speed it up, faggots!" and "Play from the ladies' tees, fags!" Afterward, the offenders followed league members into the clubhouse and made similar comments. "They got more brave as the distance between us increased in the parking lot, where 'f------fags!' was yelled as we got into our cars," Riedel says. "We ignored them and left peacefully." The league played its last scheduled round at the course and never returned, though Riedel insists that management was always professional. Still, Weed says, "Everyone was uncomfortable after that." More recently, the Rainbow League gathered at Thornapple Country Club in nearby Galloway, until the discomfiting glares became too much and members began overhearing the word fag. "The clubhouse seemed to tighten up," says Weed. Again, there was no issue with club officials and the league hoped to return this season, but Thornapple was unable to accommodate Rainbow's large number of golfers. "They weren't antagonistic," says Howard. "We were extended the courtesies." "They want dollars," says Speakman. "As long as they're full, they don't care who it is." While the Rainbow League does not announce itself as a gay organization, it doesn't hide the fact either. It is certainly not obvious, even if members do joke about playing in drag from the ladies' tees with stage names like Sandy Trapp and Birdie Four. "There's no one in our group who is, for want of a better word, a flamer," says Speakman. "We're pretty good about maintaining a serious attitude," Howard says, pointing out that groups of heterosexual golfers can be far more disruptive. "Alcohol isn't a factor with us. That isn't true of some other leagues. Their consumption can be quite extensive." "Hey, I have a beer out there!" Speakman says. "Yeah, but six over four holes?" replies Riedel. Howard gently pokes fun at Riedel's concerns about a hostile environment: "Poor Jim, he wants to put on his Carmen Miranda headdress and spikes!" It's that kind of relaxed attitude that draws people to the Rainbow League. "I wanted to play with like-minded people," says Brian Chandler, an African-American with a 10 handicap who will continue to make some league appearances this year despite having moved to Cincinnati. For Rachael Buchanan, who took up golf only three years ago and now shoots in the mid-90s, playing with gays and lesbians means avoiding a situation that arises frequently outside the league. "When I get to the 1st tee, I assess the group I'm going to be playing with and if they look like rednecks, I'll wait for another group," she says, drawing hard on a cigarette. "I know it's a stereotype, but..." Sometimes the players' intuition is put to less serious use, as when members engage in gossipy speculation about the sexual orientation of well-known pros. The chatter usually devolves into mere wishful thinking. Topping the I-wish-he-were-gay list is Adam Scott, the handsome young Australian. But even these exchanges conclude with an acknowledgment of the less-rosy reality. "Golf will be one of the last sports with an openly gay person," Riedel says. Members of the Rainbow League come from a whole range of professions, but nearly all of the players share an interest beyond sexual orientation and golf: a passion for Buckeyes football. Weed's father, Tad, played for legendary Ohio State coach Woody Hayes and still has nightmares about missing practice. On the drive to Cooks Creek, Weed and Riedel show their level of fanaticism by reliving the Buckeyes' upset win over Miami in January's Fiesta Bowl. National championship fever struck everyone, gay and straight, they say, adding that a performance of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America played to a crowd of only seven theatergoers in Columbus the night of the game. "We breathe college football here," Riedel says. "It brings the community together. We have something to talk about." In fact, the talk during the round at Cooks is standard fare: family, sports, work. The players are models of old-fashioned, Buckeye-lovin', Midwestern gay family values. The four groups who tee off--the entire league won't meet until the following week's formal season opener--are not even divided by handicaps, which run the gamut from nearly scratch to head-scratching. The most gleeful participant is Chris O'Leary, a Happy Gilmore type with a swing only a boyfriend could love. He once holed an improbable four-iron shot for eagle, and they still talk about the squeal heard 'round the course. "They convinced me I was good enough to play, so here I am," he says. "He wins Miss Congeniality every year," says Rector, whose own patented hook is known as the Full AFLAC. "We don't get too serious; golf's frustrating enough," says Ray after almost driving the green at the 289-yard 11th hole. On the back nine Ray scrambles for par from everywhere and shoots the low round of the day, a seven-over 79. Playing in the same group, Lucas breaks 100 for the first time at Cooks Creek and celebrates with a Juli Inkster-inspired dance. In this laid-back atmosphere Rawlins has again found himself among friends on the golf course, even if he doesn't play nearly as often as he did back in South Webster. "I really don't know too many people in Columbus, so I joined the league," he says as he lines up a lengthy putt for birdie on the 3rd hole. "My game is getting worse, though." On cue, his putt comes up 10 feet short. "Sissy," says one of his playing partners. Rawlins smiles, then pours his par-saver into the heart of the cup. |
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