A's tweet dawns age of enlightenment

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For a lot of athletes, Twitter has been a forum for hazardous indiscretion. Last week, the A's Brandon McCarthy made the best of the social network's 140-character allotment.

After a game in Anaheim, the pitcher tweeted: "They put two guys on the 'Kiss Cam' tonight. What hilarity!! (by hilarity I mean offensive homophobia). Enough with this stupid trend."

The comment might have made history. It's hard to tell. The Baseball Encyclopedia doesn't keep track of players' spontaneous statements about inherently antigay humor. But McCarthy's insight was certainly rare.

The wisdom of this 28-year-old's tweet shouldn't elude MLB and other leagues that indulge in "Kiss Cam" cheesiness. A couple of years ago, a group of gay fans in St. Louis publicly expressed their discomfort about an NFL game in which the camera homed in on two apparently straight men, and the two made disgusted faces over the suggestion that they kiss.

McCarthy pointed out the joke is usually telegraphed by placing the two guys at the end of the routine. There is no way it's an attempt to include gay and lesbian couples in the frivolity of "Kiss Cam."

"There's that stupid, little comedic value of it if you don't really think about what it implies," he said Tuesday. "It kind of got old on that level. Then I actually started thinking about why we were supposed to be laughing, and it bugged me."

McCarthy considers it incongruous for MLB teams to sponsor "It Gets Better" antihate campaigns and not banish this brand of humor.

"The whole thing bugs me on a non-homophobic level, because it's awkward," he said. "... I just hate it."

The homophobic laughter, however, pushed him to say something. McCarthy said he received a lot of appreciative feedback via Twitter. No one from MLB, he said, has made a remark on the tweet.

"If there are gay people who are coming to a game and seeing something like that, you can't assume they're comfortable with it," he said. "If you're even making a small group of people ... feel like outcasts, then you're going against what makes your model successful."