Esera Tuaolo on Being Gay in the NFL
Bay Windows features an interview with Esera Tuaolo, whose new book, “Alone in the Trenches: My Life As A Gay Man in the NFL,” was released this week. Tuaolo spent nine years in the National Football League (playing for the Minnesota Vikings for a large portion of that time) and came out on HBO’s Real Sports three years after his retirement.
Snippet: “Every single time when the topic of homosexuality would come up in the locker room it was nothing positive. It was always negative. A rumor about a player would come up and everybody, I can’t repeat what they said, it just got out of hand. They would go around the room saying, ‘Oh, you must be gay because you don’t have a girlfriend,’ and another player calling another player faggot and a huge fight broke out. It’s like, that was my life in the NFL for nine years, seeing that, and what I saw was rage and I saw hate. I’d never see compassion or anybody saying, come on, dude, my brother’s gay, don’t even say that. There was never any safe zone.”
Read the complete interview here.
Oh, I’m so glad he had the courage to write this book! How often we’ve commented on the plethora of lesbian women in sports and the absolute dearth of gay men. I cannot name one — not a single one — who has come out while still playing.