The Case of the Missing Gay Male Athlete

Jun 27, 2024

Ten years ago, the Rams drafted Michael Sam in the 7th round of the NFL Draft. It was a watershed moment, as Sam had come out as gay in a recent interview on Outside the Lines, and the recent SEC Defensive Player of the Year seemed poised to be the first openly gay man to play in the NFL.

There was certainly some backlash to the move: A few older people around the league suggested Sam’s sexuality would be “a distraction,” and many homophobes got mad at ESPN for showing Sam kissing his boyfriend on TV during the draft. But at the time this seemed like the price of progress, and in 2014 most people thought Michael Sam was likely to open the door for many openly gay male athletes in the pros.

This was a time of rapidly increasing visibility and tolerance for LGBTQ+ people. The military had recently ended Don’t Ask Don’t Tell; President Obama had recently announced his support for same-sex marriage, which would soon be legalized by the conservative Supreme Court; nearly 60% of Americans said they found gay relationships “morally acceptable,” up from 40% less than two decades earlier. All this progress seemed to validate a liberal theory of change, in which LGBTQ+ rights had been won by patiently and steadily winning over hearts and minds.

And Michael Sam fit in with that. After all, he wasn’t alone. The previous year, NBA veteran Jason Collins had come out of the closet, and just a few weeks prior to Sam’s announcement, Collins became the first openly gay man to play in an NBA game when he signed with the Nets. Also in 2013, Robbie Rogers became the first gay man to play in the MLS. And the year before that, Orlando Cruz had become the first active boxer to come out.

Given all this, Michael Sam looked like he was both part of a trend AND a pivotal figure in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights. As someone hoping to play the biggest league in the US, and coming out early in his career, Sam seemed poised to inaugurate a new wave of gay men1 who didn’t feel the need to hide their sexuality for most or all of their athletic careers.

Of course, Sam never played a down in the NFL. The Rams cut him at the end of the 2014 preseason, and he spent a couple weeks on the Cowboys practice squad, but by 2015 the NFL was done with Michael Sam. He played one game in the Canadian Football League before leaving professional football altogether,2 citing mental health struggles.

There has probably been too much made of Michael Sam specifically. He was projected as a borderline NFL player even before coming out, and any individual player can succeed or fail for a variety of reasons. What I am more interested in is the trend that never came to fruition. Because after Sam, the progress towards gay male professional athletes mostly stopped.

It’s not that the league lacks a pioneer: In 2021, Carl Nassib, then a linebacker/defensive end for the Raiders, became the first active NFL player to come out. He did it to very little fanfare, with a short post on Instagram, and then went on to play two more seasons before retiring.

But since Nassib’s retirement, no other football player, in either the NFL or a major college program, has come out while they are still active. And the pattern has repeated in other pro sports as well. There has been no gay player in the NBA since Jason Collins retired in 2014, and after minor leaguer David Denson came out in 2015, pro baseball has not seen any players who are publicly out. Luke Prokop became the first player in the NHL to come out in 2021, but as of now he is still the only one.

Not only has there been no wave of gay male athletes coming into American pro sports, but the progress has completely stalled. A decade after all the discourse about the First Gay Male Athlete, we’re still waiting on the second.3 So in honor of Pride, I want to spend some time going over some potential explanations for why this is…

Explanation #1: Gay men do not like, or are not good at, sports.

This first hypothesis might strike you as so ridiculous that it’s not worth spending any time on, but it’s important to at least mention it because, as dumb as it sounds, it never goes away. Whenever there is some systemic inequality, people try to defend that inequality by saying it’s based on natural differences.

When baseball was segregated, people defended that by saying both that Black players were not “fit” for the major leagues and that they wouldn’t want to play with whites even if they could. When women couldn’t attend college or do certain jobs, people said that was because it was simply a feminine quality to stay at home. And given the way homosexuality challenges people’s notions of masculinity, it is understandable that some people might assume gay men do not like sports, or have natural abilities in them.

But, of course, that’s stupid. For one, we ought to be deeply, deeply skeptical of these kinds of explanations. It’s not that natural differences don’t exist, but that they are almost always less important than environmental factors, as seen by the massive difference environmental changes make in these numbers (Black people were eventually overrepresented on baseball teams; women now attend college at greater rates than men; etc.).

And even if it were somehow true that gay men as a group didn’t like sports as much as straight men, or weren’t as good at them, that wouldn’t really answer this question. After all, I’m not asking for gay men to be proportionally represented in pro sports — I’m just asking for one or two…

Explanation #2: The pro sports world is too homophobic to accept gay male athletes.

This explanation seems to be the favorite of non-sports fans, since it conforms to the image of athletes as out of touch troglodytes who would not be accepting of a gay man in their midst. So gay players may not be coming out because they know the reception by their teammates and coaches and fans would be cold and unpleasant.

And there is certainly truth to the idea that homophobia is more common among athletes than in the general population. After all, sports tend to reinforce old-fashioned notions of masculinity and manhood, notions that can be at odds with tolerance of the queer community. It’s also true that a lot of pro athletes hold religious views that can be hostile to the gay community, as we saw when several baseball players boycotted Pride events or when some kicker gave a commencement address calling homosexuality a sin.

Nevertheless, I am pretty skeptical of this explanation. For one, the few athletes that HAVE come out all say the reaction was overwhelmingly positive. Luke Prokop of the NHL says he has heard “zero” derogatory comments from teammates. Jason Collins said that playing in the NBA was actually easier after coming out than before. Carl Nassib said he was met with “nothing but love and support.” Even Michael Sam said that he struggled more with the public attention than with acceptance by the NFL community — and a poll from that time found that 86% of then-active football players would be fine with a gay teammate.

Of course, maybe that’s just people saying the right things. Maybe out players don’t want to publicly throw teammates under the bus by acknowledging homophobia in the ranks; maybe straight players know to be publicly supportive without actually knowing how to make gay players feel welcome.

But if it were true that homophobia is rampant in locker rooms, and that’s what was keeping gay athletes in the closet, then we would expect to see more openly gay men in individual sports like golf and tennis. In those sports, players don’t have teammates to offend, and coaches are hired privately. In actual fact, though, out male athletes are even less common in those sports than in team sports. There has only been one gay golfer on the PGA Tour to come out, and none on the ATP Top 100.

The idea that the sports world is uniquely hostile to gay men is actually a kind of comforting myth. It allows us to pretend that the problem is isolated to a small subculture that is just hopelessly behind the times. But while it is true that people in sports have some pretty terrible views on stuff like this, it’s not as if those things are immune to change. There are many things that are quite common now that would have been considered hopelessly unmanly just a few years ago, like players taking time off for the birth of their children or being open about mental health struggles. So it’s a little odd to suggest homophobia is uniquely immutable in the sports world.

Explanation #3: The whole world is too homophobic and the gains made by the LGBTQ+ community have all been superficial or illusory.

It’s always tempting to indulge doomer explanations like this one, and the current backlash to the gay and trans community has led many to conclude that progress in this area were overstated. Maybe homophobia is so deeply ingrained that there’s nothing we can do about it?

Luckily this doesn’t seem right either. For all the concerted effort to equate homosexuality with “grooming” and ban trans people from public life, people are more accepting of LGBTQ+ rights than in recent history. Support for same-sex marriage is at an all-time high, according to Gallup, and way fewer people “morally disapprove” of homosexuality (33%) than even just ten years ago.

As a likely result, queer identity in younger generations is way more common. Only 7% of Baby Boomers identify as LGBTQ+, but 16% of millennials do and a whooping 28% of Gen Z does. Notably, the latter generation is the one that is now starting to dominate the sports world.4 So if almost a third of them are identifying as queer, then it’s a little surprising that none of those queer young people seem to be playing sports.

At this point, I’m supposed to offer an alternative, “correct” explanation… but I don’t really have one. I really do find the whole thing baffling. It’s not even clear to me if the issue is that there ARE gay male pro athletes who are hiding their sexuality in fear of negative consequences, OR if gay men are being steered away from sports before they ever get that far. The situation is very strange.

Undrafted

Discussion about this post