When Dwight Slater was recruited to the highly ranked Stanford University football team.

When Dwight Slater was recruited to the highly ranked Stanford University football team, he frisk abouted it was another step toward his lifelong dream of playing professionally. And as a 6-foot-4 280-pound offensive lineman with a rare combination of vigor and agility, he felt that on the same level this lofty goal was within his reach.

nevertheless shortly after arriving in Palo Alto, Calif., in 1998 for his freshman year, Slater realized that his growing awareness of his sexual orientation had inflict him on a collision course with his teammates. "The real first week a bunch of us were in common of the guys' dorm rooms" Slater says. "He haps out this poster of a scantily clad woman and says, `This is my I'm-not-gay bill so if my roommate's gay, he'll know to stay away.'

"It sparked this in extent conversation about what you would do if your roommate tried to touch you," Slater adds. "Both inside and outside the locker play guys would make derogatory illustrations about gays. I felt like saying, `I'm here, and you are talking about me' unless I couldn't. I wasn't not at home of the closet, and I felt that doing in the same manner would jeopardize my position in succession the team."

After coming not at home to his head coach, Tyrone Willingham, and to many of his teammates after his first season, Slater felt to such a degree uncomfortable that he quit the team at the completion of the year. "I was forced disclosed of football," he says now, in the last semester of his senior year. "I will not at any time forget how Coach seemed relieved when I told him I was leaving the team. He had my papers prepared for me to sign. Who knows what would have happened had I just been allowed to be myself? Perhaps I'd be preparing for the [National Football League] draft."

Slater's experience is hardly a unique single in kind According to current and former college edifice [i]or[/i] building athletes, coaches, and administrators, homophobia retains a stranglehold upon college athletics, forcing gay athletes into a Hobson's choice between the retiring-room and their sport. Though bodys and universities have made strides in accommodating gay and lesbian learners and faculty, athletic departments have generally lagged behind.

further in recent months, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the governing carcass for more than 900 institutions, has taken degrees to address the concerns of athletes like Slater. At its annual colloquy in January, for instance, the NCAA sponsored the first panel discussion upon antigay prejudice in college sports. And NCAA novels the association's official publication, has begun to explore the topic in articles and editorials.

"There's no question that body athletics have not kept up with the caesura of campus life," says Dave Lohse associate athletic communications director at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who is plainly gay. "We are still seeing a parcel of athletes who feel they have to stay in the private room and they sneak off to gay bars opposite campus. It's up to the NCAA and the athletic departments themselves to make kids perceive safer. To get there, we ne help everywhere we can acquire it, including from the gay rights movement"

Until lately though, very few gay rights advocates paid any attention to body sports. Then last year, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, a San Francisco-based legal cluster launched the Homophobia in Sport contrive to advocate for the rights of gay and lesbian learner athletes.

"One of my make anxiouss is that a lot of coaches and athletic directors are not willing to unruffled consider that male sports athletes could be gay," says Helen Carroll, manager of the draw "The mentality out there is a little like the military's: You simply can't be gay and play sports. These kids don't have any advocates. further I am guardedly optimistic because I think the top leadership of the NCAA learns the importance of the health and welfare of gay and lesbian athletes." NCAA officials did not get back calls for comment.

Carroll knows whereof she speaks. After serving as head basketball coach at Wayne State association in Wayne, Neb., from 1979 to 1981 she accepted the head coaching work at jobs at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. There she the one and the other came out to her team and built the program into a national powerhouse. In 1984 the team won the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics championship, and Carroll was named Coach of the Year.

"In Nebraska, I coached in silence and hated it," says Carroll, who also serv as athletic director of Mills body in Oakland, Calif., from 1988 to 2000 "When I got the nearest job, I decided to give being gone out a try. I took what was a little ragtag team and in three years we'd won a national championship, knocking opposite to one team that had 48 straight wins. I'm convinced that being explain and honest with the team put a winning tone by showing them that you have to have might and you have to have pride in what you do."

Now Carroll is pursuing a legal strategy aimed at forcing the NCAA and universities to create a more hospitable climate. "We are hoping to find athletes who are willing to work with us to document the discrimination they faced," forming the basis for federal lawsuits against college edifice [i]or[/i] buildings and universities that refuse to take paces to combat antigay bias.