Gay Son or THOT Daughter? The Problem with NBA Player Michael Porter Jr.'s Answer
- Saint Trey Wooden
- 21 hours ago
- 4 min read
Sports | Entertainment News
Michael Porter Jr.'s Homophobia Isn't Just Ignorance– It's Violence In Disguise.
Brooklyn Nets forward Michael Porter Jr. has never been mistaken for a philosopher. But in a recent livestream with rapper and streamer PlaqueBoyMax, he revealed the kind of everyday ignorance that feels less like harmless banter and more like a sharpened knife disguised as a joke.
Asked whether he'd prefer a gay son or what the streets calls a "THOT" daughter, Porter said both scenarios would "hurt a n****a heart." He rejected either possibility outright.
On the surface, it reads like another celebrity caught saying something foolish on a livestream. But scratch beneath the bravado, and you'll find something far more insidious, which is the collision of homophobia, slut-shaming and toxic masculinity that continues to write the interior lives of far too many Black men.
When Porter laughed off the question with "that's just Missouri," it wasn't an innocent cultural work, rather - it was a confession. A confession that manhood in his world is a brittle performance, one where fatherhood is not about love but about property. To have a son who is gay or a daughter who embraces her sexuality is cast not as an expression of humanity to Porter, but as a personal wound—an affront to his legacy.
bell hooks, in The Will To Change, writes that "patriarchy teaches men to equate their worth with dominance, control, and ownership." "Love," she argues, "is impossible in such a framework because it requires vulnerability, accountability, and care."
Porter's comments echo this old poison, which is a belief that children must be extensions of a man's ego rather than full, autonomous beings.
Homophobia among Black men, particularly in public figures, often emerges from this anxiety around legacy. The fear isn't just of queerness, it's of queerness undoing the myth of continuity.
"What will people think if my son is gay?" becomes the refrain. But the real question Porter should wrestle with is – what kind of man fears being loved by a child who simply reflects truth back at him?
The idea that queerness "hurts" a father reveals less about LGBTQ people and more about the emotional paralysis of men trapped in patriarchy. Instead of welcoming his hypothetical son's existence, Porter centers himself, his fragile comfort, and his so-called "heartbreak." This is not fatherhood, this is narcissism in drag.
Porter's rejection of a "THOT" daughter is equally telling. Misogyny here is the shadow twin of his homophobia. Where sons are expected to be strong, stoic, and straight, daughters are expected to be pure, modest, and respectable. Both fantasies collapse when children dare to live outside the suffocating script. And both, again, are about the man's reputation, not the child's freedom.
Slut shaming functions as a control mechanism, disciplining woman into silence about their desires while rewarding men for conquest. It's the same poisoned logic that frames gay men as a threat to masculinity and trans women as proof of moral decay. For Porter, it seems, the worst sin a child could commit is refusing to be an ornament for his ego.
Porter is not the first NBA player to reveal this contradiction. While the league office paints rainbows on logos for Pride Month, locker rooms remain greeting grounds for homophobia disguised as humor. That Porter can casually admit to hearing about "wild stories" of teammates sleeping with men or trans women shows how queerness is both ever-present and ever–denied in professional basketball.
The front offices may drape themselves in the language of inclusion, but players like Porter remind us that inclusion without accountability is a little more than branding.
Before Michael Porter Jr. even thinks about fathering a child, he should study some bell hooks. He should learn that love is not control, that parenthood is not ownership, and that masculinity need not be built on domination. He should learn that his child's queerness, or their unapologetic sexuality, would not be a wound but an invitation to expand his understanding of love.
Because the truth is, if queerness or desire "hurts" him, the injury is not in his child but in his own unhealed spirit. And no child, gay, straight, trans, liberated, or otherwise, should ever be asked to patch the holes in a man too proud to do his own work.
Michael Porter Jr.'s comments are not simply a bad joke. They are a reminder of how deep toxic masculinity runs, how casually men weaponize homophobia and misogyny, and how urgently we need new visions of fatherhood and of manhood.
If Porter truly believes a gay son or sexually liberated daughter would "hurt," then he is already unfit for fatherhood. And maybe the best lesson he could learn for himself, for his community, and for the game he plays – is that love is not about protecting his pride, rather it is about showing up, fully, and without condition.
Until then, perhaps the only child Porter Jr. should be trusted with is the one he still refuses to raise, which is the wounded boy inside himself.