Two deaths

 A couple of men passed from this earth too soon this week, and they had two things in common. 

One was basketball. The other were their demons.

This bears some explaining.

Brandon Clarke, one of the men, was just 29 years old when police found him dead from an apparent drug overdose in California. Clarke was a reserve forward for the Memphis Grizzlies of the NBA, an apparently joyous young man whose bright life, and career, had been darkened by one injury after another.

At some point, again apparently, the drugs got their hooks in him. The story is an old and bloody one: A young man succumbing to a demon whose appetite is never sated, and whose legacy of death and ruin stretches to infinity.

And the other man?

His name was Jason Collins, and he, too, was once an NBA player, and still young in the way we measure such things. He was just 47 when the brain cancer he'd been battling for a year killed him, well short of his full complement of years.

And his demon?

Its name is bigotry, and it belongs not to Collins but to those who pass along its sting. Yet it is as old and bloody as Brandon Clarke's, and every bit as potent, given that it hangs out these days in the corridors of power where laws are passed and our meanest impulses no longer skulk in the shadows.

Jason Collins, see, was the first openly gay player in the NBA. Came out 13 years ago in Sports Illustrated, before Pride Months and rainbow flags and the pushback that has made anti-gay prejudice almost chic in America's more reactionary precincts.

You see it most nakedly in the hard-right states, where "Don't Say Gay" laws prohibit educators from so much as breathing the word "LGBTQ+" in a classroom -- even high school classrooms where students struggling with their sexuality already feel isolated and shunned. You see it anywhere a rainbow crosswalk gets painted over, or a rainbow flag is declared verboten, or anti-gay pronouncements are heralded as Christian virtue.

This is not, I believe, the prevailing zeitgeist in this country, founded as it was on the principle of individual freedom. But it's no outlier, either. That's because the bigots hold the levers of power at the highest levels, and thus own the loudest megaphone.

It's OK now, they all but say, to talk about gays and transgenders the way the German Reich talked about Jews in the 1930s -- i.e., as threats to a wholesome and vibrant nation. It's regarded as noble, or at least admirable, to push for laws aimed at effectively shoving the LGBTQ+ community back into the closet where (the narrative goes) it belongs.

In 2013, Jason Collins said "Aw, HELL, no" to that sort of poison. One wonders if, at the end of his life, he felt any dismay that the gay/trans community still had to keep saying it in 2026.

And if perhaps, just perhaps, it is even harder to do so now.