Football Drama

This past week, The University of Mississippi’s theater department opened its production of The Laramie Project to an audience of students—including some of the school’s football players whose theater professor had required them to attend the play.

The evening could have been an opportunity for students on and off stage to come together and learn from a terrible tragedy. Instead, it became a tragedy in and of itself.

During the performance some audience members, including members of the football team, began yelling out anti-LGBT slurs. Junior theater major Garrison Gibbons told the Daily Mississippian, “I am the only gay person on the cast. … I played a gay character in the show, and to be ridiculed like that was something that really made me realize that some people at Ole Miss and in Mississippi still can’t accept me for who I am.” 

While the football players were eventually told to apologize to the cast of the play, Department of Theater Arts Interim Chair Rene Pulliam told the Daily Mississippian she isn’t convinced the players knew what they were apologizing for.

Why did these student athletes feel they could behave this way? It may have something to do with the fact that this happened in the South where football players are often seen as demi-gods, shielded from the consequences of their actions. But as director and theater faculty member Rory Ledbetter told the Daily Mississippian, this was also a display of the larger epidemic that is homophobia. “Further education on all of this needs to be brought to light,” he said.

That education starts by teaching young students this type of behavior is not acceptable.

A few days ago, on the other side of the country, a football coach was teaching this exact lesson to his young players. The varsity football coach at Union High School in Roosevelt, Utah, suspended the entire team from the field after he found out about incidents of cyberbullying.

In order to be allowed back on the team, players had to attend character education classes and participate in community service. Coach Matt Labrum told the Deseret News that he intended for his football program to help mold these young men into community leaders. When he saw that wasn’t happening, disbanding the team was his only option.

Perhaps if the football players at the University of Mississippi had had a coach like Matt Labrum at some point in their lives, this hate incident would never have happened.

Annah Kelley is new media content manager at Teaching Tolerance.