Doblin: Outing gay Olympians is a dangerous idea

Shepard, 21, was beaten and tied to a fence post in rural Wyoming. Gunn, 15, was stabbed at the corner of Market and Broad in downtown Newark. Carson, 32, was shot in the head directly across from a trendy hot-dog stand in the heart of Greenwich Village.

All three were killed because they were gay.

Far away, in places like Syria, that same brutality — brutality based solely on a person’s sexual orientation — is reflected in videos taken by ISIS showing gay men being thrown from tall buildings and then stoned by the crowds waiting below.

Russian President Vladimir Putin himself has been a proponent of anti-gay policies, but the 2014 Olympic winter games held in Sochi were enveloped in a sort of protective bubble after Putin promised that no athlete or visitor would face discrimination or danger.

Bubbles do not last, however.

Consider a nasty story that ran last week on The Daily Beast website. The actual words of Nico Hines, the author, about Olympians using social media at the Rio games to hook up for sex should be dismissed out of hand, but the fact that his piece hit the light of day should never be forgotten.

Hines — a married man with a child — experimented with several apps that purportedly made sex available to their users, then declared that a gay site had proved to be the most successful. And Hines didn’t stop there. His article did everything but name several Olympic athletes as participants in the app — citing their weights, heights, nationalities and specific sports and, in some cases, indicating if they had won a medal. Anyone who wanted to could easily identify them with a small amount of research.

Clearly, Hines and The Daily Beast crossed a line. Not only did they violate these athletes’ privacy, they put the lives of some of them in danger. Indeed, the fact that one athlete came from a “notoriously homophobic country” was in the story.

The Daily Beast reacted at first to the resulting Internet furor by amending the article and rebranding it. Eventually, common sense prevailed and it took the whole thing down, replacing it with an apology. The editor’s note in part reads: “The article was not intended to do harm or degrade members of the LGBT community, but intent doesn’t matter, impact does.”

But the impact of Hines’ words can never be erased. You can’t put a fired bullet back in a gun or take a knife out of a body and have a wound disappear.

I doubt many people have heard about Hines’ article. It did not come up on my radar until I received a copy of a statement from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association that said, “[The Daily Beast’s] reporting was unethical, extremely careless of individual privacy and potentially dangerous to the athletes.”

Once I began searching for more information, I found the outrage flowing from the Internet, from journalists, gay activists, athletes, straight and gay — and from average people who had read the original article. Still, this story has not gone viral. More people were talking Wednesday about whether American swimmer Ryan Lochte is telling the truth about being robbed at gunpoint in Rio than they were about the fate of several outed Olympic athletes.

So while there is much blame to affix to The Daily Beast, there also has to be more global conversation about the dangers that gay people face to prevent these kinds of things from happening again. In Western culture, there is a growing complacency, a feeling that gay people can do whatever they want. That is not true. And in too many places across the globe, being gay remains a possible death sentence.

Gay athletes who have come out of the closet, from tennis superstar Martina Navratilova to basketball player Jason Collins, cleared a path for more gay athletes to declare their sexual orientation. But you only have to look at how few gay trailblazers there are in American sports to see how difficult that process still is. In America, gay athletes may lose out on a high-profile career. In Syria, they may end up being tossed off a tall building.

The Daily Beast isn’t the big story here, though it is downright scary that supposedly smart people couldn’t see that the lives of some athletes might be endangered because of what was being published. The bigger story is that while The Daily Beast crossed a line, too few of us paid attention. And if we did, we may have been more outraged by the story than by the homophobia in the nations these athletes represent in Rio.

Maybe not knowing the names somehow makes it less offensive. Maybe that is how The Daily Beast article passed muster in the first place. Maybe that is why there is no viral story about how dangerous it still is to be gay.

Maybe names make it real.

Matthew Shepard.

Sakia Gunn.

Mark Carson.

Alfred P. Doblin is the editorial page editor |of The Record. Contact him at doblin@northjersey.com. Follow AlfredPDoblin on Twitter.