NBA player Jason Collins is a homosexual

[Everybody Hates Raymond]

http://sportsillustr...11_a1&eref=sihp

I'm a 34-year-old NBA center. I'm black. And I'm gay.

I didn't set out to be the first openly gay athlete playing in a major American team sport. But since I am, I'm happy to start the conversation. I wish I wasn't the kid in the classroom raising his hand and saying, "I'm different." If I had my way, someone else would have already done this. Nobody has, which is why I'm raising my hand.

My journey of self-discovery and self-acknowledgement began in my hometown of Los Angeles and has taken me through two state high school championships, the NCAA Final Four and the Elite Eight, and nine playoffs in 12 NBA seasons.

[rosalie52]

I applaud Jason Collins' courage.

[avelanch]

hopefully more follow suit, so he doesn't have to face the onslaught alone.

[avelanch]

hey guys, as much as i am against deaf people, no person should hide that. You are who you are.

well now, this doesn't make much sense with the housekeeping that happened. aww well. it is what it is; an inside joke for those of us in the know, i guess

[Spitfire_Spiky]

Props to the guy for coming forward.

[theminister]

I hope this starts a chain reaction which will help destigmatize homosexual athletes. The machismo and homophobia in the locker room is a relic of the past which need to go away.

In the 4 major pro sports of NA there must be at least a hundred such people who keep their personal life secret from evryone but their closest friends.

Knowing that a teammate of mine was gay but felt he needed to hide the fact from the rest of the team was an uncomfortable situation that didn't need to exist. His effort in game had nothing to do with his sexuality, it was only in the socializing after the game that it had any bearing, and that was only due to his silence.

[logic]

I hope this starts a chain reaction which will help destigmatize homosexual athletes. The machismo and homophobia in the locker room is a relic of the past which need to go away.

In the 4 major pro sports of NA there must be at least a hundred such people who keep their personal life secret from evryone but their closest friends.

Knowing that a teammate of mine was gay but felt he needed to hide the fact from the rest of the team was an uncomfortable situation that didn't need to exist. His effort in game had nothing to do with his sexuality, it was only in the socializing after the game that it had any bearing, and that was only due to his silence.

[Captain Bob]

I did some house keeping in here, let's keep this thread for what it's meant to be.

[etsen3]

Good for him. Many people don't have the courage to show who they really are. Never be afraid to be yourself.

[Everybody Hates Raymond]

I did some house keeping in here, let's keep this thread for what it's meant to be.

[King Heffy]

Can't imagine what it must be like for him to have had to hide who he truly was for as long as he did. He just did something very brave that will impact not only his sports, but professional sports as a whole.

[-Vintage Canuck-]

@darrenrovell

Jason Collins' agent Arn Tellem doesn't think NBA will push Collins on teams, but thinks it will be in a team's best interest to sign him.

[Ghostsof1915]

Hopefully he won't get any flak for it from opposing players. Be true to yourself. Judge a person by their actions, not who they sleep with or what they look like.

[Bruce Boudreau]

Who cares these days anything goes.

Athletes won't care... to give an opinion publicly since they don't want to lose their job.

[nuckin_futz]

Jason Collins’ former fiance, Carolyn Moos, had no idea he was gay.

Carolyn Moos says she had no idea that Jason Collins, her longtime boyfriend and fiancé, was actually gay.

In the Sports Illustrated piece featuring his groundbreaking revelation, the 12-year NBA veteran wrote, "When I was younger I dated women. I even got engaged. I thought I had to live a certain way. I thought I needed to marry a woman and raise kids with her. I kept telling myself the sky was red, but I always knew it was blue."

Moos, however, didn't know. The former WNBA player told TMZ that she only found out about Collins' orientation a couple of days before the world did:

Carolyn tells TMZ, she never once suspected he was gay, so the news is shocking. She says Collins eventually revealed everything last weekend — just days before his big announcement — and said that his homosexuality was the real reason he ended things with her.

At the time of their breakup, Carolyn says Jason gave a bunch of BS reasons for calling it quits ... and she could never understand what went wrong, until now. [...]

"It's very emotional for me as a woman to have invested [eight] years in my dream to have a husband, soul mate, and best friend in him. So this is all hard to understand."

Moos, 34, met Collins while the two were both students at Stanford, where she played on the women's basketball team before embarking on a pro career that included stints with the WNBA's Phoenix Mercury, Miami Sol and Minnesota Lynx. The couple dated for seven years and got engaged; Collins ended the engagement in 2009.

"Calling off the wedding was obviously a tough decision," Collins said in an interview with ABC's "Good Morning America." "But it was the right one because I knew I wasn't getting married for the right reasons."

While Moos told TMZ she had a hard time processing the real reasons behind the relationship's ending, she doesn't harbor ill will toward Collins.

"I care about [Jason] tremendously and only want the best for him," she said. "I want Jason to be happy for a lifetime and stay true to who he really is, inside and out."

http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nba-ball-dont-lie/jason-collins-former-fiancee-carolyn-moos-had-no-170001023.html

[Gustavo Fring]

Wow must've been difficult.

I hope Kevin Garnett or anybody, doesn't trash talk him on the court about this situation.

FYI, Kevin Garnett is the biggest trash talker in the NBA. He once told Carmelo that her wifes female genitalia tasted like honey nut cheerios.

[Tornado]

Awesome he's coming out with this!

Hope more follow in the future!

[poetica]

Just read this amazing article and couldn't resist posting it....

Actually, Jason Collins Isn't the First Openly Gay Man in a Major Pro Sport

Major-league baseball player Glenn Burke was comfortably out to his teammates and friends in 1976—but back then, it was the press that wasn't ready for a gay male athlete.

A few months back, the Baltimore Ravens' Brendon Ayanbadejo, an outspoken advocate for LGBT rights, told USA Today that he thought the first player in the three major sports to out himself would be a baseball player: "The religious roots are a lot deeper in basketball and football. With that being said, I think baseball players are more open-minded."

What Ayanbadejo didn't know was that one baseball player already had. This week's coming out by NBA player Jason Collins is momentous, but the Jackie Robinson of gay rights was Glenn Burke, who played for the Los Angeles Dodgers and Oakland A's from 1976 to 1979. He tried to change sports culture three decades ago—but back then, unlike now, sports culture wasn't ready for a change.

Burke made no secret of his sexual orientation to the Dodgers front office, his teammates, or friends in either league. He also talked freely with sportswriters, though all of them ended up shaking their heads and telling him they couldn't write that in their papers. Burke was so open about his sexuality that the Dodgers tried to talk him into participating in a sham marriage. (He wrote in his autobiography that the team offered him $75,000 to go along with the ruse.) He refused. In a bit of irony that would seem farcical if it wasn't so tragic, one of the Dodgers who tried to talk Burke into getting "married," was his manager, Tommy Lasorda, whose son Tom Jr. died from AIDS complications in 1991. To this day, Lasorda Sr. refuses to acknowledge his son's homosexuality.

Burke, who also died of AIDS-related causes in 1995, came out to the world outside baseball in a 1982 article for Inside Sports and even followed it up shortly after with an appearance on The Today Show with Bryant Gumbel. But his story was greeted by the rest of the news media and the baseball establishment, including Burke's former teammates and baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn, with silence. Even his superb autobiography, Out at Home, which published the year he died, failed to stir open conversation about homosexuality in sports. Practically no one in the sports-writing community would acknowledge that Burke was gay or report stories that followed up on his admission.

He told People magazine while promoting his book in 1995, "My mission as a gay ballplayer was the breaking of a stereotype ... I think it worked ... They can't ever say now that a gay man can't play in the majors, because I'm a gay man and I made it."

And yet Burke is remembered less today as a pioneer for gay rights and more as the man who, along with Dusty Baker, invented the "high five."

The media in general and the sports media in particular found Burke's homosexuality an inconvenient truth. He told People, "I think everyone just pretended not to hear me. It just wasn't a story they were ready to hear."

Eighteen years later they still haven't heard him. An outstanding documentary, Out: The Glenn Burke Story by Bay Area filmmakers Doug Harris and Sean Maddison, was released in 2010 but remains little seen. If the film had been shown on ESPN, Burke might have finally gotten the credit he deserved. Jamie Lee Curtis, who bought the film rights to Burke's book years ago, now hopes, in the wake of Collins's revelations, to get a feature film on Burke into production.

Jackie Robinson changed American society forever; Robinson, an officer in the Army during World War II, was no doubt in large part responsible for Harry Truman's decision to integrate the military in 1948. Collins's coming out, courageous as it is, isn't so much a breaker of barriers as much as an acknowledgement that the barriers have already been broken. From here on in, it's merely a question of how many athletes will be coming out and in which sports, such as the NFL and NHL, and even in college sports.

But Burke's tale shows why it's good that there's been so much media attention to Collins's announcement. Moments like these are when people should speak up, should pay attention, or else more change won't happen.

If early tweets and quotes from Kobe Bryant and others are any indication, NBA players are lined up in support of Collins. But the real key will be how much support athletes get from those in charge. Without immediate and open statements from league officials, gay athletes will fear cheap shots from opponents, being shunned by teammates, and being traded or even cut by their teams. A strong stance by the heads of the major sports would go a long way to assure them. NBA Commissioner David Stern's strong statement set the example: "....we are proud he has assumed the leadership mantle on this very important issue."

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, MLB Commissioner Bud Selig, and the NHL's Gary Bettman have already waited too long to check in. So have the officials of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Are they pretending that they don't know that they have gay athletes in their leagues? And while we're waiting for the pro leagues to make their official statements, how about the heads of the players' unions stepping up to the mic? What people say now will matter for a long time. If Bowie Kuhn had come out in support of Glenn Burke in 1982, we might not have been necessary for Jason Collins to tell his story to a national magazine this week.

[etsen3]

LOL@ people that will complain about being uncomfortable in the locker room with him. Guess what, if you're a decently attractive chick/dude people are gonna be attracted to you wherever you go, even walking down the street or the mall or the library. And yes some of those people that are attracted will be gay/lesbian, so really being in the locker room isn't much different than going to the beach. As long as he doesn't go around acting creepy (like hitting on his teammates even though he knows they're not gay), it shouldn't be a problem.

[Blueberries]

Really proud of him, but its sad that it took this long for someone to come out and say it.