Former NFL player makes waves by coming out of the closet

Former NFL player who came out this week said he didn’t have support to do so while playing

It’s no secret that coming out is tough. It’s hard to gauge just how someone will react, no matter how close of friends, or even family, they may be.

Now imagine making millions of dollars a year in an industry that relies heavily on it’s super macho image. Coming out would likely be much, much harder.

This was reality for retired NFL player Wade Davis. Davis, who played for the Tennessee Titans, Seattle Seahawks and Washington Redskins during his four year career, came out earlier this week — after his NFL career was over.

“I just wasn’t ready. Oftentimes you need a certain level of support and structure and security and I didn’t think that I had that,” he said.

While Davis acknowledges that American attitudes on rights for gay Americans have changed greatly in recent years, he’s not sure if that evolution had occurred earlier, whether that would have changed his timing. 

Davis said he couldn’t fathom, when he was still playing, just how accepting people have been of his sexual orientation. He says his former teammates have been overwhelmingly supportive since he came out of the closet.

Some “were angry that I didn’t believe that they would still care about me as much as they do,” he said.

David Kopay was the first former NFL athlete to come out of the closet, doing so in 1977, also having retired from the game.

“It shouldn’t be this big of a deal. It should be accepted. It should have been OK years ago,” Davis said.

Davis is currently working as a staff member at the Hetrick-Martin Institute in New York, where he works with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youths. Davis says the best thing he can tell the youths he talks to, based in part on his own experience, is to find the place or person that offers support and safety.

“Oftentimes, youth don’t have that person who they feel will accept them beyond a reasonable doubt,” Davis said. “I didn’t feel that I had that. My parents were very loving. I did have this football family of high school teammates. But I think I was socialized to believe that what I was was so wrong and so heinous, there was no way anyone could ever love me.”

But he tells youths now, that’s not the case. Plus, he says, they’re living in a different time, where people, especially those in their 20s and 30s, are far more accepting than ever before.

Statistically, about 8 percent of American men are gay, according to a 2010 survey of men and women ages 17 to 94. If even 1 percent of the 1700 active NFL athletes were gay, that would mean 17, or one on every two teams, are gay. To them, Davis says, find their own strength.

“They have to find people around them who won’t judge them. But they also have to do it when they’re ready. The coming out experience is a very individual experience,” Davis said.