Shane Crawford: Exposed

Photo Source: Hawthorn Football Club 

In an interview recently with Roland Rocchiccioli in Melbourne Weekly Magazine, AFL Hawthorn Football Club Captain Shane Crawford set tongues wagging again about his sexuality. Now, most of you will know that I am hardly the stereotypical Aussie footy fan who worships his footy religiously. Never mind the fact that I also don’t barrack for the Hawks (Carn the Cats!) and probably wouldn’t be able to tell you who’s who in footy. So what’s this, you ask, Andrew posting something about some footy player? Well, it’s neither the football nor the footy player that I’m interested in. It’s his sexuality that has piqued my interest. More specifically, it’s the way he’s gone on about his sexuality that’s piqued my interest. To be quite honest, it wouldn’t interest me the least bit which side of the team Shane Crawford batted for, or whether he batted for both!

When Roland asked about his sexuality, he said, “You never know - you just never know.” “I can't say one way or the other because it mightn't be the case. A couple of years down the track I might just say, 'Right, I'm going to have a go at this'.” And in the Shane Crawford: Exposed documentary that nearly didn’t go on air on Channel Nine on Wednesday night, Shane candidly shared that when he and his girlfriend Olivia broke up and Olivia asked him if it was because he was gay, he had to reassure her that he wasn’t but also said that it wasn’t out of the question.

Now, you seriously didn’t believe I’d write an entire post about Shane Crawford’s sexuality, did you? Well, the ambiguity about his sexuality actually made me think of another woman’s story that I came across some time ago on Sed Contra. It was aptly entitled ‘Self-Defined Lesbian Shaken by Sudden Heterosexuality’. I mean, these days, we are increasingly confronted by stories or rumours of ‘straight’ celebrities, friends and relatives being gay. And we often applaud their courage in coming out of the closet and offer our sympathetic ears to listen to the struggles that they’ve had to go through. But yet what happens when gay people ‘discover’ that they are perhaps more straight than gay? Hmm. But back to this self-proclaimed ‘devout lesbian’ who was shaken by her sudden heterosexuality.

She wrote to the Washington Blade, a self-defined gay newspaper, asking for advice: “I was a devout lesbian for two decades and, basically, still consider myself to be a dyke. I never thought I’d consider dating a man again, and am shocked to find myself in love with one. I won’t bore you with the details, but earlier this year, my now-deceased collie had numerous health problems, and I fell for her very kind male veterinarian. My life now feels like a made-for-TV movie. All of my friends and family are angry and disappointed with me - even my mother, who begged me to “try to change” when I came out to her (as a lesbian) 20 years ago. I still feel like the same person. In fact, I’m mostly attracted to women, not men. I just happened to meet the one man in the world who’s an exception for me. My friends tell me that I can’t call myself a lesbian anymore. They’ve even suggested that I might prefer to watch “The B-Word,” but I don’t feel particularly bisexual. What do you think?”

Then there was this other story which appeared in Gay City News in early 2003 (Read article here). David Bianco, a gay man and founder of Q Syndicate – the company that provides more content to the gay press than anyone (or so the article claims) – caused a sensation when he ‘came out’ and announced that for Jewish religious reasons he would change the way he was going to express his sexuality – to the point where he hopes, “God willing”, to one day start a family with a woman. When asked if that meant he was now bisexual, he replied, “I no longer identify as gay because it doesn’t feel like the label that best describes me. I’ll take ‘bisexual’ if I have to have a label. I’d just as soon do without one.”

These people's stories remind me that sexuality isn’t always necessarily a neat ‘either/or’ category. And that people’s sexuality and sexual identities don’t always fit nicely and neatly into the categories that the general society and, indeed, also those within the Church, would like to box people into.


 

Kinsey’s Heterosexual-Homosexual Rating Scale, for example, proposes that human sexuality is more of a continuum rather than a dichotomy, with a person who has exclusively heterosexual desires and attractions scoring a 0 and someone with exclusively homosexual desires and attractions scoring a 6. The majority of the population would therefore, as one would infer from this continuum model, fall towards the ‘exclusively heterosexual’ end of the scale, and with smaller percentages of the population falling either around the ‘exclusively homosexual’ end and/or around the middle bands.

In the book ‘Dual Attraction: Understanding Bisexuality’, the authors Martin Weinberg, Colin Williams and Douglas Pryor argue that “sexual identity is not set in stone; that because patterns of sexual behaviour evolve according to personal circumstances, our sexual identity may not remain fixed throughout our lives. The focus of our desire may change, and these variations can be considered simply part of the complex continuum of human sexual response.” They also argue that “all people initially learn the desirable aspects of both genders and can produce gendered pleasure in both directions.” In other words, what they’re suggesting is that humans are born not hardwired with a specific sexuality but with the potential to go either way.

Now, don’t get me wrong, though. Let me explain that this doesn’t mean that I don’t believe God was involved in the engineering and choreographing of human sexuality in the beginning. On the contrary, as a Christian, I believe he was intimately involved in our creation. I also believe that he knew exactly what he was doing when he created the two genders, male and female, and decreed in his original blueprint that these two shall become as one flesh. At the same time, I also believe that even though God hasn’t thrown out his original blueprint, he nevertheless knows fully well that we are also a product of our genes, environment, and experiences and that he is nonetheless able and willing to meet us all in whichever state we end up finding ourselves in - and that he has a special place in his heart for all those who do not belong or fit into the ‘norms’ of society.

And as for Shane Crawford, I think he finally bowed to pressure to end the speculation and confirmed in the tabloids the other day that he wasn’t gay (Read article here).