WNBA star Brittney Griner has a new memoir on the shelves and she’s not too kind to the alma mater that helped get her into the pros. In fact, she pretty much describes it as a living hell.
Griner became a serious contender on the college circuit as a player for Baylor University, the private Baptist university in Waco, Texas. She wrote in her new book In My Skin: My Life On and Off The Basketball Court that the university welcomed her to the school with open arms, even though they knew she was gay before she enrolled and joined the team. She also never tried to hide that fact during her time as a Lady Bear. In fact, her coach Kim Mulkey assured her that her sexual preference would not be a problem, despite the fact that the school openly discourages any such lifestyle in its in handbooks and student literature. Unfortunately, that turned out to be an empty promise.
“I would love to be an ambassador for Baylor, to show my school pride but it’s hard to do that,” she wrote in her book. “I’ve spent too much of my life being made to feel like there’s something wrong with me. And no matter how much support I felt as a basketball player at Baylor, it still doesn’t erase all the pain I felt there.”
She claims that people would report her activities to the coach. She recounted an incident in which someone spotted her kissing another woman in a movie theater and the coach ordered her to keep her displays of affection in private. She also said she was consistently reminded to keep “her business” out of public view on and off campus.
“The more I think about it, the more I feel like the people who run the school want it both ways: they want to keep the policy, so they can keep selling themselves as a Christian university, but they are more than happy to benefit from the success of their gay athletes. That is, as long as those gay athletes don’t talk about being gay.”
It probably shouldn’t come as any surprise that a fiercely Christian school would enforce such policies or not want homosexuals on their campus. We figured that out long before Griner published her book. Take a look at Baylor’s actual basketball uniforms. No self-respecting gay person would be caught dead in an outfit with a “glo-stick” motif.
