That does not mean last week's media frenzy on gays in sports moved us closer to that point. Only Brendan Lemon, editor in chief of Out magazine, knows for sure what his agenda was in going public with his contention that he has been in a relationship with a well-known baseball player the past year and a half. Could it be he's just trying to boost circulation?

Or maybe a baseball columnist friend of mine has it right: "It's like that joke where the guy is on a deserted island with the supermodel. In this case, the guy is sleeping with a big-time athlete who's good-looking, and he is pissed because no one knows about it. He wants to be able to tell his friends who his lover is. He probably does it now, and no one believes him."

Or maybe Lemon had nothing but good intentions. Maybe he really believes that the lover he says he has just needs a push -- even if it's a strangely timed push. (Coming out at this time of the season would be 100 times more difficult than, say, early in spring training or just after winning the World Series.) Personally, as someone who covered four baseball seasons for the San Francisco Chronicle and two World Series for Salon, and spent many months researching a 1998 New Republic piece on gays in big-time male team sports, I choose to believe this last interpretation, odd timing and odd reasoning notwithstanding.

It really doesn't matter. The point is that something has to change sooner or later. Too many sports stars live in fear of having their sex lives made public. Too many sports fans make too many ludicrous assumptions about who plays the games they love. A star ballplayer will come out -- though not on a magazine's timetable, it seems certain -- and that will unleash a full-scale national media convulsion. I say: Bring it on.

And I say that knowing, in a way that Lemon clearly doesn't, just how bad the convulsion will be.

It's an open secret among sports insiders that there have been all-star-caliber gay athletes playing in each of the four major U.S. sports in recent years, including baseball. Lemon's article has inspired coast-to-coast guessing games about which rumored gay major leaguer is his supposed boyfriend. Working on the New Republic piece, I got a tip from a gay friend that a certain East Coast star -- maybe even Lemon's boyfriend, if his story is legit -- was a regular at a gay bar in town. A visit to the gay bar left little doubt that the story was true. The star's picture was on a ledge above the bar. Several people there had stories about the star that passed a beat writer's bullshit tests.

And then there was the star's reaction when asked about the place. Never mind that on the day in question he was wearing short shorts of a sort ballplayers just don't normally wear. We were having an animated discussion about bars in town, and when I happened to mention the gay bar where I'd seen his photo -- with no statement about what kind of bar it was -- he gave me a sudden blank look and mumbled that he'd never heard of the place. I didn't believe him, but I was in no position to push.

Of course, several sports stars have come out after their playing careers ended, most notably Dave Kopay, a former running back for the San Francisco 49ers and Washington Redskins, among other teams, and baseball journeyman Billy Bean. But no major male athlete has come out during his playing days. Tennis stars Martina Navratilova and Billie Jean King have been out as lesbians for years, and Frenchwoman Amelie Mauresmo is also out, and on the way up in her career. But lesbianism for myriad complex reasons has always been in a different cultural category than male homosexuality.

"Once you make the decision to speak out, there's no looking back," Kopay told me this week. Kopay came out in the Washington Star in 1975. His book, "The David Kopay Story," published in 1977, will be reissued later this year with a new introduction by Robert Lipsyte of the New York Times.

"There should be some player" who decides to come out while still active, Kopay said. "College and professional sports is probably the last Neanderthal area in society that really needs to be shaken up and be forced to look at [itself], especially when you get into as much wife battering and violence as you see in professional sports."

Kopay's right, of course. But nobody should minimize the firestorm that would ensue if an active player came out -- and Brendan Lemon clearly does.

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