An Investigation of the relationship between college athletes’ ethnicity and sexual-orientation attitudes

Homophobic attitudes and intolerance of gay/lesbian athletes, while most often forbidden by university policy, may still exist within intercollegiate athletic departments. Against this backdrop, this study examines attitudes toward sexual orientation from a sample of Division I & III university athletes (N = 397) from four universities in the Southeastern United States. The study’s primary research questions were: a) Utilizing ethnicity as the independent variable, what are the sampled male athletes’ attitudes toward sexual orientations? and b) Is there a relationship between male college athletes’ ethnicity and their sexual-orientation attitudes? This article, using the frameworks of Social-Script and Critical-Race Theories, discusses the study’s results’ and its significance for university athletic administrators, faculty, and college athletes.