After more than a decade as a leader in the sports world, recently retired British rugby star Ben Cohen is now investing his energy and leadership into his other longtime passion — tackling homophobia.
Upon his May retirement from rugby, the World Cup winner launched the Ben Cohen StandUp Foundation, which works to raise awareness of anti-LGBT bullying and generate funds for agencies seeking to combat bullying around the globe.
Cohen, who has long been an ally voice for LGBT equality, said he’s received a wholly positive response to his efforts both from his U.K. and U.S. fans.
“I haven’t had any negative feedback at all, which is fantastic and needed,” he said. “The foundation’s been very well-received.”
Cohen, 33, has spent the last several months on a global tour promoting the tenets of his organization, and made a stop Monday at the University of Pennsylvania with ally American wrestler Hudson Taylor to speak about alleviating homophobia in educational and sports settings.
Penn junior Jason Magnes, a member of the university’s tennis team and chair of Penn Athletes and Allies Tackling Homophobia, which helped organize this week’s event, said he has seen that education and open discussions are the best means to achieving LGBT acceptance in the sports world.
“I’ve seen progress on my own team from when I first came out because people didn’t know how to respond initially and now it’s such an accepting environment,” Magnes said. “People really aren’t used to having gay people in sports, so we need to get them talking about it. I talk to people on my team about my relationships and they see that they’re not much different from their relationships with girls, and those small things make them realize that we’re really not that much different. So I think it’s all about exposure and getting more out gay athletes out there as role models for younger kids.”
Throughout his six years of antibullying advocacy, Cohen said he has been personally touched by stories of bullying of all stripes from kids throughout the globe.
“There was one boy who got bullied so bad at school that he tried to commit suicide by hanging himself with his Harry Potter scarf. I love Harry Potter and that just really hit home for me to have this child trying to kill himself with this scarf,” Cohen said, noting that the attempt was unsuccessful but the boy’s struggles continued. “He tried to run away from what he had to deal with at school and turned a lot of it in on himself and it created a lot of anxiety and even internal bleeding. He eventually finished school but he had a lot of trouble finding a job because of the mental-health problems he has now. And you know the whole reason he was bullied? Red hair.”
His work has also given him the opportunity to meet with bullies themselves, some of whom have turned their ways around, he said.
While he said a lot of the motivation to bully stems from the “core values” passed down to children from their parents and guardians, he’s also seen kids from seemingly stable backgrounds become aggressors.
As the father of young twin girls, Cohen said, the pervasiveness of bullying strikes a chord for him.
“It makes me really angry. Bullying would make anyone angry, but when you have kids, I think it makes you even angrier,” he said. “Having kids is a whole new love, a different type of love. I wish I could just wrap them up and protect them their entire lives.”
The schoolyard bullying that goes unchecked can resurface later in life, Cohen said, noting the professional sports world has recently seen its fair share of name-calling.
A member of the Philadelphia Eagles and possibly one of the Flyers were recently caught using antigay slurs, the same word dropped by Kobe Bryant.
“When you play a sport, you go into this zone and this mode where you’re in a different place. You need that arrogance and you need to be self-centered, but when you go from game mode to the real world, you’ve got to click that off,” Cohen said. “With the Kobe incident, I’m far from condoning what he said, but he was caught up in the moment of the sport and what came out? ‘Fucking faggot.’ And we need to look at where that stems from, because it’s the playgrounds, the schools, the neighborhoods when we’re growing up. But when you’re a leader, whether for sports or something else, growing up you need to be taught that you’re a role model and that comes with a responsibility. If you’ve got one person, 10 people or 50 million people looking up to you, you need to set an example, and a lot of sportsmen and women fail when it comes to that performance.”
Despite the slur Bryant dropped, Cohen noted he’s such a high-profile player that the incident thankfully focused attention on the issue of anti-LGBT sentiments and encouraged discussions about homophobia.
That conversation would likely be furthered if a current professional American athlete came out.
On that front, Cohen said the question isn’t whether the American sports world is ready for a gay athlete, but rather if that athlete is prepared to be gay in the American sports world.
“That person needs to be ready to say, ‘You know what, I’m gay. Deal with it.’ I’ve had a lot of conversations with sportsmen and women about when the correct time to do that is, and it’s all up to the person because there are a lot of pros and cons to coming out. If you’re not open, that’s a lot of sacrifice in your career. Personally, I think that an openly gay player who comes out at the top of their game is going to do so much better than someone who comes out and it becomes another object they have to fight to become the best player in the world. Very, very wrongly, if an athlete is perceived to be different, whether they’re gay or not, it can knock them off course because people won’t necessarily be focusing on their talent. But, if they’re at the top of their game and already have that respect, I don’t think people will focus on their orientation as much.”
Encouraging respect for people of all orientations and identities is one of the basic principles of the StandUp Foundation, Cohen said.
So far, the nonprofit has focused on developing its brand, enlisting the support of four of the world’s largest companies in promoting the organization’s logo and mission.
“Things have been happening so quickly, every week, and I’m just amazed,” Cohen said of the rapid success of StandUp. “We’re at a massive tipping point right now in terms of homophobia and bullying; so the timing is perfect — and I’m not really superstitious, but I think that, with the way that this has come together, things really happen for a reason.”
For more information, visit www.standupfoundation.com.
Jen Colletta can be reached at [email protected].