Outsports featured in New York Times

Our congratulations to Jim and Cyd from Outsports on the excellent article on Outsports.com that has just appeared in the New York Times. Here's an extract:

LOS ANGELES — In the past couple of weeks, a Web site called Outsports.com has written about a Brigham Young athlete who abided by the university’s honor code despite his homosexuality, published an essay from a gay basketball player at a Catholic girls school in California, and featured the Miami (Ohio) hockey team a year after the death of the openly gay student manager Brendan Burke, a son of Toronto Maple Leafs General Manager Brian Burke.

Outsports previously tracked the travails of two college coaches who said they were fired because of their sexual orientation, broke the story of George Washington University’s transgender basketball player, and interviewed at length the gay rugby star Gareth Thomas.

And on Super Bowl Sunday, Outsports offered both analysis — including a pregame “Super Bowl for the clueless” segment — and opinion, including a wrap-up segment on “hot players of the game.”

“The core of what we do is cover the nexus of gays and sports,” said Cyd Zeigler, one of the Web site’s two founders. “And there is no competition.”

The fact that Outsports could still seem so distinctive a couple of decades into the age of the Internet— with its endless assortment of blogs, Web sites, chat groups and more —says something about the enduring taboo of being a gay athlete.

But if rare, Outsports remains plenty busy. It is not about outing athletes, the site’s founders say, but supporting them, and it attracts hundreds of thousands of eyeballs every month. Over the years it has published an array of breaking news stories and first-person essays, sometimes written anonymously, often not.

In February 2010, for instance, Andrew McIntosh, a lacrosse player at Oneonta College in New York, wrote about his anguish over the decision to tell his friends that he is gay. Outsports provided the forum.

“There’s nothing as revolutionary as Outsports,” McIntosh said in a telephone interview from Fresno, Calif., where he is teaching and coaching lacrosse. “It offers a venue for athletes who have come out, or who are closeted, to get to know others, to not feel alone.”

Zeigler and Jim Buzinski, the site’s other founder, are the site’s only two employees. Theirs remains the only substantial Web site devoted to the widening intersection of sports and gay issues, offering a blend of blog posts, breaking news, photo galleries and commentary.

Keep reading HERE, where you'll find some commentary on the site from Gay Games Ambassador David Kopay.