ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author offers discussion of sexualities and sport. He aims to consider some examples of increasing access and participation, and deals with evidence of ever-present social divisions in society and sports that have a negative impact on sexually diverse individuals and communities. The author discusses the importance of language and definition in the production of sexual subjectivity. Countries that boast gender and sexual egalitarianism are not exempt from the brutalities that occur in public spaces and involve individual lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender campaigners and activists. The social divisions that contain sexualities in many societies and in sport tend to operate on the level of language, definition and the human rights of LGB people. Some long-standing social divisions in some Western nations have been dissolved and there are notable shifts to increasing the visibility of LGB athletes, albeit centred upon sexuality as same-sex attraction and concomitant legal rights.
