That's not the world we live in

No, it shouldn’t be a big deal when a public figure or athlete comes out, but I think it still is.

 

That’s why I thought some of the reaction to Carl Nassib of the Raiders coming out as the only gay player in the NFL was weird. A lot of articles I read seemed to be of the “NFL player is gay, not much to see here, it’s 2021, moving on” variety. Defector, a sports website I like that’s usually pretty good about these types of stories, wrote a perfunctory story that was dismissive and didn’t rise to the occasion (and the LGBTQ commenters in the story were very disappointed and gave much more thoughtful perspectives than the actual article).

 

I understand the idea behind “Why is this news?” when someone comes out because it’s increasingly common to see visible LGBTQ people. The idea that “it shouldn’t be a big deal” has good intentions behind and maybe when the world changes a little more, it won’t be a big deal. But that’s not the world we live in. We live in a world where it is big news when a professional athlete comes out. This is self-evident in that there’s exactly one out gay man in all four major professional sports leagues. There’s a reason for that.

 

I think in yawning at public coming outs, no matter how well-intentioned it is, people can come off as dismissive of the experience of the person who comes out. Nassib said he’d struggled for the past 15 years over whether to come out. There’s a lot of pain behind that statement.

 

I think that’s true for a lot of LGBT people. I didn’t have a dramatic coming out. My family was accepting and welcomed Steve into the family. But you still don’t know how it’s going to go until you do it. One online comment I read said when you’re in the closet, little questions like “What did you do this weekend?” can be a minefield because gay people are afraid to say they did something with their partners. It’s a type of trepidation people (understandably) can’t understand unless they’re in that situation. So saying “no big deal” to a coming out can come off as flippant, even if it’s not intended to.

 

There are plenty of gay people in every walk of life, but not all of those are visible or accessible to everyone. The NFL is accessible to pretty much everybody in America. People perceive football as tough and manly so the fact that Nassib is a football player gives this extra resonance, since a lot of people still think gay people can’t be tough or manly. This type of visibility—seeing LGBTQ people where you may not expect us—can help a lot of kids who are questioning how their future’s going to go.

 

We’re not yet living in that world where gay athletes are commonplace to the point where nobody really has to come out and everybody shrugs. If we were, there would be more out men in sports—and just statistically, you know Nassib has to be far from the only one in the four major leagues.

 

Once a bunch of NFLers come out, maybe then we’ll be living in that world and people will yawn. For now, let’s live in the world we have, where a gay man on an active sports roster is a huge deal.