The blessing and curse of progress is that you cannot choose your heroes, no matter how long you wait for them to emerge.
There had not been any, until a few weeks ago, and suddenly there are two. Sort of. Finding meaning in the big picture is easy — it is progress, and it is moving fast. But if you insist on finding that singular moment, that Jackie-Robinson-breaks-the-color-barrier-moment, this cause is not for you.
Whatever movie gets made years from now will be far more complicated than “42.”
Some advocates might have wished for one big-name athlete to make the bold pronouncement and open the doors for all others to walk through with little fanfare. Instead, progress — while coming faster than anyone could have predicted only a year ago — is moving in incremental, hopscotch spurts.
On Sunday night, the soccer player Robbie Rogers became the first openly gay male athlete to play a major (sort of) North American team sport. Rogers, 26, took the field as a substitute for Major League Soccer’s Los Angeles Galaxy, more than three months after coming out, and received a hearty standing ovation. He played the final 13 minutes in the Galaxy’s 4-0 victory over the Seattle Sounders.
Just a few weeks earlier, in an essay in Sports Illustrated, the N.B.A. veteran Jason Collins became the first active (sort of) athlete in a major North American team sport to declare that he was gay. The N.B.A. is decidedly more major than Major League Soccer, but it is not certain that Collins, 34, will play again. He will be a free agent this summer and hopes to make a roster in the fall.
Rogers and Collins deserve all the plaudits that they will continue to receive for taking a brave plunge into the unknown. Pioneering is not for the timid. For other men who remain agonizingly unsure if they can be themselves, from millionaire athletes to confused teenagers, Rogers and Collins are showing them a path toward openness and acceptance.
But most people who do not closely follow soccer or basketball have never heard of Robbie Rogers or Jason Collins. That takes nothing away from the athletes, but it probably takes something away from these moments.
Rogers plays in a sports league that might be the fifth-most popular in the United States, one that sits at least a rung below the best soccer leagues in the world.
Collins is eight years past his best season, statistically, when he averaged 6.4 points and 6.1 rebounds for the Nets. There are roughly 400 active N.B.A. players, and he may not play among them next season.
A little more than two years ago, a conversation with Cyd Zeigler and Jim Buzinski, the co-founders of Outsports, a Web site with a focus on gays in sports, led to a playful debate. If you could choose any N.F.L. player to be the first to come out, whom would it be?
One said Peyton Manning; with his vast popularity, such a revelation would be as attention-grabbing as anything imaginable. The other said linebacker James Harrison, then with the Steelers, because his perceived ferociousness would batter stereotypes.
The more likely situation, all admitted, would involve someone with far less name recognition. You cannot choose your heroes. The moment chooses them.
It turned out that the first did not come from the N.F.L., after all, despite its having more players than any other league, dozens of whom are likely to be gay, if societal statistics can be applied to football players.
Baseball? Hockey? Not yet. They, too, will come.
Those who have responded to the announcements of Collins and Rogers by saying that their sexuality is no big deal, that it should be kept a secret and not be news at all, do not understand. It is a big deal — to the men declaring it, to the people who love them, to the countless masses who instantly, if silently, feel a swell of pride and little less fear and worry. It is why so many have recently declared that Collins and Rogers are their favorite players, even if they have never watched them play.
Unless you are one of those people, you cannot fully appreciate the significance.
But even significance is a matter of degrees. What is the next step worthy of widespread attention, the kind afforded to Collins and Rogers and those who come before them, in retirement but early in life, like the football player David Kopay and the basketball player John Amaechi?
There will be the first openly gay active players in Major League Baseball, the N.F.L. and the N.H.L. There will be more in the N.B.A., M.LS. and other professional leagues. The question will be how much it matters whether they are third-stringers or All-Stars, backup catchers or Super Bowl quarterbacks. Has the biggest news been made?
To those brave enough to make such a declaration, it does not matter what sport they play and at what level they play it. But, to the rest of us, it probably does. Such is the way of this particular kind of progress.
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