Major League All-Star Suspended After Homophobic Outburst
Latent homophobia meets toxic masculinity on the baseball diamond.
On August 12th, an All-Star player for the Boston Red Sox was given a two game suspension without pay.
His crime? Hurling a hateful, homophobic slur at a fan.
27-year-old Jarren Duran told reporters that the fan had been “… heckling me the entire game and I said something I shouldn’t have said.”
What Duran “shouldn’t have said” was: “Shut up, you f — -ing fa — -t!”
Duran expressed contrition about his “mistake,” telling the Associated Press… “I’m sorry for my actions and I’m going to work on being better.”
This apology sounds real and sincere.
All well and good. Right?
But, still…
I can’t help but wonder why, in what Duran called “the heat of the moment,” out of all the insults in the English language, this is the one that spewed so thoughtlessly out of his mouth.
He didn’t call the heckler an “a” hole, or a dickhead, or a moron. Instead, the first (and presumably the most hurtful) thing he could think of turned out to be a totally unambiguous epithet, something bullies use to demean and diminish men…
