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On the surface, intercollegiate athletics provides a notable example of creating community across difference. Although students involved in sports like football, basketball, and track at Division I institutions constitute a much more diverse group than students on campuses as a whole, community seems especially strong on these teams. On these teams, students from a vast array of backgrounds integrate into a coherent whole where factors such as race and socioeconomic status assume much less meaning compared to what individuals can contribute to the team (Wolf-Wendel, Toma, & Morphew, 2001). However, another form of diversity, sexual orientation, remains a potentially divisive issue in athletics. Indeed, student-athletes, coaches, and administrators in athletics are often homophobic and heterosexist. We examined how and why those in athletics at five NCAA Division I universities accept some forms of diversity so readily, but remain closed and even hostile to issues of difference related to sexual orientation. Sexual orientation is a socially constructed phenomenon, the meaning of which is constantly changing (Nussbaum, 1997; Tierney, 1997). In other words, American society has chosen to differentiate and label people based on whether they are intimate with same sex or different sex partners, and has endowed these distinctions with stereotypes that may or may not be salient to those being labeled, either now or in the future. We present the views of" others," namely coaches, student-athletes, and athletics administrators on homosexuality in general—and gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals in athletics in particular—as constructed at a …