Meanwhile, I was starting to realize there was another topic that would cause me problems at Baylor: my sexuality. Many people have asked me why I went to Baylor, a private Baptist university, if I knew I was gay. After all, the student handbook has a policy against homosexuality (as well as premarital sex between straight people). The most direct answer I can offer is this: I had zero knowledge of the policy. My parents didn’t know about it either. My dad worried in general about me, because he seemed convinced that being openly gay would hurt my basketball career. But nobody on the Baylor coaching staff, and certainly not Kim, alerted me to this important piece of information about the school. Keep in mind, I chose Baylor because of basketball. Also, as I have learned all too well, the world of women’s college basketball is a homophobic and hypocritical place: it’s not like anyone was going to sit me down and say, “Brittney, we know you’re a lesbian, so we want to give you a heads-up about our school’s policy on homosexuality.” The coaches at Baylor weren’t going to do anything to discourage me from coming to play for their program. But equally important, these words—lesbian, homosexual—make a lot of people within women’s basketball squirm, including all those gay players and coaches in the closet. People want to dance around the subject, pretend it doesn’t exist, instead of having open conversations about it.
Here’s what I did know: Baylor had an awesome program, it was close to my home, and Kim was a great coach, someone whose personality I thought I could relate to because I had put up with my dad’s brand of discipline for so long. There was a lot about Baylor I didn’t know, but worrying about the policies and rules of the overall administration felt like worrying about the government in another country. How would that affect me?
Turns out, it would affect me a lot.
THE FIRST TIME I KISSED a girl—like, a real kiss—was my freshman year of high school. In sixth grade, one of my friends and I shared a little peck, just playing around the way kids do, but it’s not like either one of us really knew if we were gay. In ninth grade, I knew. There was a girl who lived right around the corner in our neighborhood—she was a few years older than me—and she offered to braid my hair one day. We hit it off and started hanging out sometimes. I remember there being an energy, a connection between us, but I didn’t know she felt the same way until this one afternoon, on the way over to her house after school, when we stopped at the store to pick up a few snacks. We were both standing in the aisle, deciding what chips to buy, when she just turned and kissed me on the lips. I didn’t know what to say, so I stated the obvious: “You just kissed me.” She nodded and smiled. A second later, I leaned in and kissed her again, so she would know for sure that I was not opposed to what was happening. After that, I started spending more time at her house, in her room. I was fifteen by then, but my dad was still paranoid about me going anywhere, so I would sneak over there or tell my mom I was “going to get my hair braided.” I’m pretty sure she knew something was up, because I would get my hair done like three times a week.
That was the first time somebody rocked my world. But my friend moved away later that year, and I started dating different girls, nothing serious. I was a bit of a player in high school. I didn’t want to get too involved with anyone because I knew it wouldn’t last once I got to college. I was a teenager. It’s not like I was going to be with someone for years and years and have this fairy-tale ending with the white picket fence.
My first serious relationship began the summer I got to Baylor. This girl had seen me play in the state championship game my senior year, and she messaged me afterward on Facebook. She told me she was going to Baylor that fall, too, and gave me her number so maybe we could meet up and be friends. Normally I wouldn’t have responded to something like that, but this time I did, and we started texting, then e-mailing and talking on the phone a lot over the next few months. She sent me some pictures of herself, and I was definitely intrigued. But we never met in person until I got to Waco. We made a plan to spend some time together before classes started. We had agreed to meet face-to-face in the parking lot outside the Ferrell Center, and I was waiting for her, all nervous, leaning against my Dodge Magnum, trying to position myself so I would look as cool as possible. She drove up in her silver Pontiac, and when she stepped out of her car, I saw she was even more beautiful than she looked in the pictures. I think I actually gulped. She had long dark hair, warm brown eyes, and a big smile; she was real natural looking, not a lot of makeup. She gave me a long, lingering hug, and we clicked right away. We spent a lot of time together those next few weeks and months. She would wait for me after games, at the Ferrell Center, and hang out with me at the dorm. My teammates all knew. Lots of people knew, because they’d see us walking together on campus all the time. It was obvious we were a thing.
But like a lot of relationships that burn hot at the beginning, ours ended in flames. Toward the end of freshman year, I found out she was cheating on me, and things got pretty crazy for a while. We broke up, got back together, broke up again, got together again—on and off, on and off—all the way into the fall of sophomore year, until I finally ended it for good. It was just way too much drama, even for me. I was trying to figure out how to reduce the drama in my life, but I was so used to it with my dad, I think I tolerated more of it than some other people might. Also, who doesn’t have drama in college? Isn’t that part of the learning process, too?
Maybe that’s why my next relationship was mostly long distance. I started dating a woman I had met in high school through one of my AAU teammates. She went to college in Atlanta but would come to Baylor every month or two, and we were together until the middle of my senior year. The good part: less drama. The bad part: less quality time. We got to the point where it seemed like we were together almost out of convenience, like neither of us had the desire to improve the relationship or to call it off, either. Eventually we parted ways, just made a clean break (a lot cleaner than my previous breakup), and I decided to chill for a while.
At least, that was the plan. I met my next girlfriend, Cherelle, through a good mutual friend at Baylor. We were all part of the same circle, and Cherelle would invite everybody over to dinner on a regular basis. I really liked talking to her because she was a good listener, thoughtful, smart, somebody who seemed mature and strong. I would tell her about the issues I was having with my girlfriend in Atlanta, how we didn’t really seem to connect anymore, and Cherelle could relate because she was on the verge of a breakup herself. She was someone I came to trust more and more over time. And then one day the little lightbulb went off over my head, and I realized I had strong feelings for her. I said to myself, Ah! I like my friend! She made me work hard to win her over (we’ll get to that later), but we eventually started dating toward the end of my senior year, and her presence in my life was a welcome bright spot when so much was swirling around me.
All of which is to say, I was in relationships for most of my time at Baylor. And I was doing all the typical things that people in relationships do, like going to the movies and out to dinner, sending little shout-outs on social media. It was tame stuff. But I was at a conservative school, and I was one of the more recognizable students on campus, so I ran into some problems. The first “incident” was at the beginning of my sophomore year, during preseason training, before we officially started on-court basketball practice. I sent out a tweet to my girlfriend in Atlanta, something sweet, saying I missed her. That same night, I retweeted a post from an LGBT group that I followed. They had sent out a message—something along the lines of “No More Hate” or “Love One Another for Who You Are”—and I sent it to my followers as well. I didn’t give it much thought at the time, because it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary on Twitter, but Kim called me into her office the next day. She was sitting behind her desk, and as we were making small talk, I really had no clue why I was there.
“I’m going to need you to take down those messages you posted last night,” she said eventually. She described the tweets as “not ap
propriate” and implied that someone in the compliance office had alerted her. (Every athletic program has a compliance office, to try to make sure coaches and players are following school and NCAA rules.) Kim didn’t make it seem like this was up for discussion; I needed to take down the tweets. “We just can’t have that stuff out there,” I remember her saying. So I shrugged and said fine, okay. And that was basically it.
I went home and immediately deleted the tweets. But the more I thought about it, the angrier I got. Screw that. Why can’t I say what I want? Then I decided to take things a step further: I changed my screen name, and I blocked everyone in the Baylor program from my account. (I used to keep my Twitter and Instagram accounts private, to avoid the trolls.) Keep in mind, it wasn’t like I was sending outrageous messages. I wasn’t being stupid or over the top. For someone to actually understand who I was talking to, or what I was talking about, they would have to be paying close attention. It wasn’t until my senior year, when I had a public account, that I started dropping more hints, and even then, I was careful about what I wrote.
That meeting in Kim’s office was the first time (but not the last time) I got the impression she was worried her program would look bad if people knew she had gay players. And I was confused by that. At the beginning of each season, and then again at various points throughout the year, Kim would give us the same speech: “Keep your business behind closed doors. I don’t care what y’all do on your own time, but don’t tell the whole world everything about it.” I actually agreed with Kim, up to a certain point—until I realized my “business” was viewed differently. After the Twitter incident, I took a look at what some of my straight teammates were saying on their Facebook and Twitter pages, and they were sending messages to their boyfriends or retweeting love quotes or horoscopes or relationship advice. So how come they didn’t have to keep their business behind closed doors? Why was I doing something wrong?
DURING MY SOPHOMORE YEAR, I stayed in Waco more often than I did as a freshman. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t still running away from something. That year I lived off campus, sharing an apartment with a guy on the track team named Patrick. Being out of the dorm was cool, and I had no shortage of people to hang out with and have a good time. But all too often, there were things happening that dragged me down. Looking back now, I believe I was battling depression that year. The hits just kept on coming, and I was still learning how to handle all my churning emotions. I would see my therapist to talk it out, try to release some of the angst, but there were times it felt like my second skin.
I had gotten my first tattoo during my senior year of high school, just before graduation. My aunt (she wasn’t actually my biological aunt, but a friend of the family) took me to the tattoo parlor as a graduation present. When I walked into the shop, I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted, so I flipped through a book to see different examples. I stopped at this image of a crown, except the drawing had a skull and some other decorations at the top. I didn’t want anything except the crown. I pointed to that tattoo and said, “Let’s do this.” Then, a second later: “And let’s put a basketball on the top!”
I got it on the back of my left shoulder, and the tattoo artist included my initials. I didn’t tell my dad, obviously, because he hates tattoos, but he ended up seeing it on graduation day, as I was walking around the house getting ready. My high school had a rule that all female graduates must wear dresses under their gowns, because apparently the administration didn’t get the memo that it’s the twenty-first century and some girls would rather go naked than wear a dress. My mom had picked one out for me; it was like a really long tube top, and I felt like I couldn’t breathe in it. Anyway, before I had a chance to cover up, my dad happened to catch a glimpse of me in the hall and said, “What the hell is that thing on your shoulder? How long you had that? You gonna mark up your whole damn body?” (Come to think of it, that is another advantage of being tall: more space to get creative with the ink.)
I got my next two tattoos, a matching pair, during my freshman year at Baylor. I was in the weight room one day, and I saw one of the track athletes had stars tattooed onto his calves. They looked cool, and I decided I wanted something like that, so I got them on the front of my shoulders—one red star on either side of my collarbone. My first tattoos were inspired by mostly good emotions; I was just enjoying the moment and feeling compelled by certain images.
That wasn’t the case with the tattoo I got my sophomore year at Baylor: two skulls, one laughing, one crying. I wanted something that reflected the conflicting emotions I felt, the pressure of having to act one way in public, then going home and breaking down. (I had intended to go back to the tattoo parlor and get the words “Laugh now, cry later” inscribed next to the skulls, but I never did. It seemed obvious enough already.) I just always felt like certain people wanted to pretend that a big part of me—my sexual identity—didn’t exist. Mostly that feeling came from my dad, but a number of incidents happened at Baylor that made me think Kim would prefer not to deal with it either.
The day after Valentine’s Day, Kim called me into her office. Things were going well for me with basketball; I had put the Jordan Barncastle incident behind me (even if Big 12 fans reminded me of it every time we played on the road), and I was a team captain. On the court, I felt as strong as I’d ever been. So I figured Kim just wanted to check in with me, like she did sometimes, or talk about the upcoming stretch of games. But instead, she told me she was disappointed in my behavior. I had gone out to dinner with my girlfriend the night before, and somehow it got back to Kim that I was gaying it up in public. That’s not the term she used, of course, but apparently someone didn’t think it looked good that I was out with another woman, sitting at a table for two, on Valentine’s Day. Maybe I touched my girlfriend’s hand at one point, or leaned in to tell her something. Maybe we were walking too close together as we were leaving. Who knows? Kim didn’t get specific, so I can only imagine what she heard. I’m sure it all sounded like the makings of a soft-core porn film. “Big Girl, you just have to keep your business behind closed doors,” she told me. “All eyes are on you. You’re not an ordinary student. You’re the face of this program. You can’t be seen doing that.”
I just sat there and listened, the thoughts echoing in my head: Am I doing something wrong? Is that what Kim is trying to say? That day at practice, some of my straight teammates (I wasn’t the only gay player on the squad) were talking about the nice dinners they had with their boyfriends the night before. But none of them got called into Kim’s office. And none of them had to answer for going to the movies with their significant others, the way I did when someone e-mailed Kim to say I kissed my girlfriend inside the theater during a midnight show. This anonymous person was upset because supposedly there was a kid in there. Let me repeat: it was a midnight show. Shouldn’t that kid be in bed? Also, it’s not like I was slobbering all over my girlfriend. I said as much to Kim, and I think she believed me. But she just said the same thing she always said: “Keep it behind closed doors.”
THAT WINTER, I MET SOME students who were gay, and they invited me to a meeting, while making it clear that if word got out about the meeting, we would get kicked out of the space. “What do you mean, kicked out?” I asked, because I was still clueless about Baylor’s official policy regarding homosexuality.
“We’re not allowed to get together to talk about this stuff,” one of the students told me. I honestly thought he was being dramatic. I knew Baylor was a religious school, so I figured meetings among gay students were probably something people didn’t want to publicize by plastering flyers all over the place. If I had actually known about the policy at the time, the secretive nature of the meeting would have made more sense to me. Anyway, I went with two of my teammates, and when the three of us walked in, I could tell that people were surprised and excited to see us. There were about twenty students in the room, and our presence seemed to validate what they were doing, give them hope that if athletes were on boa
rd, maybe they could change some things. We sat in the back and just listened as they talked about being openly gay at Baylor. The vibe wasn’t “Fight the Power!” It was more about finding ways to be true to yourself while also being aware of your surroundings. My teammates and I didn’t stay too long, maybe thirty minutes, because I was still in my little rebel stage at the time, and I remember wishing the conversation had more edge. My attitude was kind of like, “Screw this—I’m not going to be quiet about who I am.”
It was only later that year, when I finally learned about Baylor’s written stance on gays, that I fully appreciated what those students were trying to do, and the risk they were taking just by having that meeting. I also began to realize athletes had an extra layer of protection, although one that came with its own set of handcuffs. I was on my way to class one day when I saw that someone had written “Love Being Gay” across the Baylor University sign in front of the school’s main entrance. That is awesome, I thought, and then took a picture of myself standing in front of it, smiling big. But when I showed the picture to a gay friend of mine later that day, her reaction wasn’t what I expected. She looked concerned, and she told me a pro-gay group had tagged the campus overnight, spray-painting messages like “Love” and “Pride” on signs and posters. “BG, you have to delete that pic,” she said. “You can’t show it to anyone.”
I was baffled. “Why not?” Then she mentioned the policy, and I said, “Whoa, wait . . . what?” So she spelled it out for me, and my confusion quickly turned to anger.
“Fuck that policy,” I said. “What’s the point of it anyway? Why have something on the books if you’re going to look the other way when it comes to someone like me?”
In My Skin Page 10