There were more openly gay speakers at Trump’s Republican National Convention than there are openly gay players in men’s sports today. Sam never played a regular-season down in the NFL, Collins played 22 games for the Nets, and … that was that. A year after that, the Rams drafted openly gay defensive end Michael Sam in the seventh round of the NFL draft, and he kissed his boyfriend in celebration live on ESPN’s airwaves his jersey quickly became the second-best-selling in the NFL. “It’s almost like homophobia is no longer considered cool in sports.” Two years later, NBA journeyman Jason Collins came out in the pages of Sports Illustrated to nearly universal acclaim and a standing ovation at Barclays Center. “Something has happened in the last year,” one expert told me. Sports seemed like the last bastion of this sort of homophobia left in American life, but it did seem like that taboo was … loosening, at least, within sports culture.
This past September, it was seven years since I wrote, in this magazine, “The Last Closet,” a feature about the total insanity that, in September 2011, there were no openly gay players in the four major North American men’s professional sports leagues.
