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- Category:
- Soap Box
- Author:
- Phil Scott
- Posted:
- Wednesday, 3 September 2008
When Australia’s Olympians returned from Beijing, Kevin Rudd met them at the airport and said it was time to start training for 2012. He’s like the teacher who tells you on the last day of term to rewrite your essay over the holidays. Give us a break!
Instead, he could have said: “Parliament sits this week, and the first matter on my agenda is the removal of all discrimination against homosexuals, including the marriage ban. We treat gays as second-class citizens, but Matthew Mitcham proves they are first class in every way.”
I’ll say. What did Mitcham do after he won gold? Did he turn to his partner Lachlan Fletcher and ram a beer glass into the guy’s face? No, because Mitcham’s a diver, not a footballer. Matt kissed his mother, then kissed his partner. Awesome, dude.
The young athlete was behind in the competition. Chinese favourite Zhou Luxin was diving as if his life depended on it, which it probably did. Then came the 10-metre event where Mitcham executed the highest scoring dive in the history of the Games, securing the first gold for an Australian diver since Dick Eve in 1924. (Dick Eve? Sounds even better than New Year’s Eve.)
So, the underdog became the champion. Australia set the standard. It’s the perfect mainstream media story in every way … except one. How did the media handle it?
Channel Seven showed the mum/boyfriend kiss footage, vox-popped Lachlan and discussed Matt’s sexuality in an interview. Later, recapping the story, they concentrated solely on the grab about how he first thought he’d won silver.
I understand Channel 2 chopped the kissing footage just as Matt was turning to pash Lachlan. The ABC used to be known as Aunty and she’s working hard to retain that fusty image.
America’s NBC — the No Bloody Clue network — was outright hostile. I guess their lowest common denominator is even lower than ours.
The Herald and The Australian both embraced the g-word. The Telegraph not only ignored it but actually played down Mitcham’s triumph altogether. On Monday 25 August, when the Herald published the Matt/Lachlan kiss, the Tele ran a raunchy pic of Stephanie Rice tearing open swimmer Kenrick Monk’s shirt and feeling his (fabulous) abs. The Olympics are 100 percent straight was the inference. Pathetic, as usual.
Two quotes. From a reader of Brisbane’s Courier-Mail: “Is it really that important to mention that Matthew is ‘openly homosexual’? I found this highly offensive. If you think that his sexual preferences are something that need to be mentioned … then I am seriously concerned about what ‘news’ from The Courier-Mail is becoming.” Truthful, perhaps?
From my online collaborator Mark Dickson: “If we’re lucky, we have a golden boy role model that might just tip the balance to wider acceptance for the whole community.”
Is Matthew Mitcham’s gayness a big deal? His dive is the real achievement, no doubt, but the day the Tele publishes a shot of Matt feeling Kenrick’s abs we’ll be making progress.
Tags: Matthew Mitcham, star spangled banter
September 4th, 2008 @ 3:23 pm
“America’s NBC — the No Bloody Clue network — was outright hostile. I guess their lowest common denominator is even lower than ours.”
Not really so. What is the evidence of ‘hostility’? NBC focused its coverage of the 10m platform event on the two young American divers. The network showed Matthew’s last five dives and his post-dive reactions, and its announcers gave him great credit as a diver and a person - but, regrettably (in my view), not as a gay person. This was most likely due to a lack of preparation, a lack of courage, or a certain misplaced sensitivity - but not hostility. In fact, on the NBC Olympics website there is a half-hour video of the 10m final with lots of coverage of Matthew and separate video of the medal ceremony and post-awards celebration including the part where he climbs into the stands to kiss Lachlan and his mom.
The my ulterior motive for posting here is to urge you Oz folks to do some follow-up on Matt and his extraordinary achievement. Don’t chase the guy down on his well-earned holiday; in fact I pray that everyone gives him some space and lets him savour his achievement, choose his own opportunities and live his life.
But what about doing a profile of Chava Sobrino? I get the impression that he played an important role in Matt’s return to diving and his extraordinary success. Or showing a fuller version of the video interview that was excerpted for the AussieBum ad? Until some new stuff comes along, I’ll have to keep replaying the videos and re-reading the old articles about that magic Saturday in Beijing.
September 5th, 2008 @ 3:45 am
In their television broadcast, NBC never cut to Mitcham’s partner in the crowd during the event, something they almost invariably did with other winning athletes. Is that because he was not American? Maybe. As the only out gay athlete in the Games, Mitcham’s story stood outside nationalistic boundaries- if the networks decided to go with it. To relegate all reference to his sexuality to the website along with all the other specialist trivia was to bury it.
‘Hostile’ may be too strong a term; ‘dismissive’ is not.
September 5th, 2008 @ 2:21 pm
I think it was because he was not American and was really not (by the mainstream U.S. media) expected to win a medal, especially gold. He came on at the very end - surprising even himself. And the American networks are extraordinarily insular - coverage of foreign athletes is minimal except to the extent they are major personalities in their sports of identified foes of american medal favorites. Almost all the family-reaction footage was for families of American athletes. The NBC coverage was tape-delayed and condensed to show the last 5 dives of the two American divers and the others who finished in the top four. In order to have shown Lachlan, they would have had to identify him in advance and assign a camera to locate and film him after one of the dives, or find a shot of him in one of their general shots of all those crazy yellow people and somehow edit it into the coverage. I slo-mo’d through the NBC and Eurosports crowd shots (during the diving) and could not pick Lachlan out. I would still not say dismissive - more likely clueless or cowardly, depending on how conscious they were of what they were (not) doing.
That said, NBC did miss an extraordinary opportunity to do the right thing.
Now, where’s the rest of that AussieBum inteview!?