In honor of James Baldwin’s 100th birthday, Outsports reflects on the professional and personal achievements of those breaking barriers for the next generation of LGBTQ+ changemakers.
Had James Baldwin been alive today, he’d likely be ecstatic for the more than 190 LGBTQ+ athletes competing in Paris at the Summer Olympics, many of them people of color. The author and activist, who would have been 100 years old on August 2, lived in Paris for nearly a decade.
Sports has long been an area in American life where issues surrounding masculinity, sexuality, and race have intertwined, subjects that were central to so much of Baldwin’s work. The athletes, especially gay Black men, who have come out in the last 15 years have been pioneers in breaking down what has been called the last closet in society.
Jason Collins, pro basketball
Get off the sidelines and into the game
Our weekly newsletter is packed with everything from locker room chatter to pressing LGBTQ sports issues.
Collins came out in 2013, in news so big that then-President Obama congratulated him during a White House news conference. He was the first, and still only, out gay NBA player.
“I’m a 34-year-old NBA center. I’m black,” Collins wrote in Sports Illustrated. “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.”
Collins, then a free agent, made history the following year when he played for the Brooklyn Nets, the first time an openly gay player took the court. All along he has remained a steadfast advocate for LGBTQ inclusion.
Across the NBA, Collins has been present to shape perspectives across the league, getting ahead of culture and language and working to push them toward inclusivity.
Collins has seen the effects of being out in the sport firsthand, talking repeatedly about one of his former teammates who used anti-gay slurs in the locker room eventually becoming a supporter.
When athletes come out in the locker room, the “casual homophobia” of locker-room talk often subsides. Collins’ experience is evidence of that.
As Collins told Sports Illustrated on the 10th anniversary of coming out, “These are the words and language that, unfortunately, are picked up on playgrounds and taught by coaches who are repeating a cycle of words and language that they had used. So there’s a lot of unlearning to do.”
He has seen the culture and the language shift from inside of the league and he has been the driving force.
Michael Sam, pro football
Sam was about to enter the NFL Draft as the co-SEC defensive player of the year when he decided to tell the world he was gay. In doing so, he became the first NFL draftee to declare he was LGBTQ.
“Once I became official to my teammates, I knew who I was,” Sam said at the time. I knew that I was gay. And I knew that I was Michael Sam, who’s a Mizzou football player who happens to be gay. I was so proud of myself and I just didn’t care who knew. If someone on the street would have asked me, ‘Hey, Mike, I heard you were gay. Is that true?’ I would have said yes.
“But no one asked. I guess they don’t want to ask a 6-3, 260-pound defensive lineman if he was gay or not.
“I want to own my truth.”
Where Sam would be drafted became the subject of fevered speculation and as the rounds of the draft slipped by it appeared as if he would not be drafted at all. But near the end of the seventh round, Sam was picked by the St. Louis Rams. He went through training camp and was among the last cuts.
Sam never played in the NFL, though he did play for Montreal in the Canadian Football League. His legacy as a trailblazer is secure, though.
Sam has expressed frustrations with his coming out, telling Attitude Magazine in 2016 that being Black in the gay community was harder than being gay in the Black community.
“It’s terrible,” Sam told Attitude. “People have told me I’m not gay enough, people have told me I’m not black enough. I don’t know what that means. You want to be accepted by other people but you don’t even accept someone just because of the color of their skin? I just don’t understand that at all.”
By contrast, the player says that he never experienced judgement from the black community after he came out as gay, countering a lingering claim advanced by some that the African-American church, specifically, is virulently, unchangingly homophobic.
“I can only go by my experience and the people I’ve been around. I think it’s more accepting, actually,” Sam said of his experience in the black community. “There are a lot of black, openly gay people. A lot of people have [gay] friends, cousins, brothers, sisters. … They have at least one openly gay person, at least it’s more accepting, that’s my experience.”
Byron Perkins, college football
When Perkins came out as gay in 2022, he was not the first college football player to do so. He was, however, the first from a HBCU.
“I’ve been self-reflective and trying to prioritize what makes me happy and makes me feel alive,” he said about his thought process. “I thought it could be just football and school, but there was a component missing. And recently I’ve been able to figure out that I haven’t been fully happy because everyone didn’t know who I was. Authenticity is everything to me.”
“I’ve decided that I’m going to make a change, and stop running away from myself,” Perkins wrote on Instagram, a commom venue for athletes coming out. “I’m gay, let it be known that this is not a ‘decision’ or a ‘choice.’ Yes, this is who I am, this is who I’ve been, and this is who I’m going to be.
“Simply put, I am who I am.
“I have come to understand that life is precious and I could be gone at any moment, therefore, I will no longer be living a lie. No one should have to live a life crippled by what society thinks.
“I have been told on many occasions that I walk around a look as if I’m upset. This is not because I am an angry person, but because I have put on a mask, a mask that has restricted me. Today, I am destroying that mask.
“For the friends and family that have known and supported me to this point, thank you, and for the friends and family that I will lose… Thank you too. You have all helped me in the process of building the young man I am today.”
Being the first player from a HBCU was not lost on Perkins, who said: “Especially at an HBCU, young Black gay men need an outlet. They need a support system. There hasn’t been an out gay football athlete at an HBCU. I want to end the stigma of what people think. I want people to know they can be themselves.
“It’s about that kid who’s going to see this and think he can be himself too.”
Perkins entered the 2024 NFL Draft but was not selected and yet his story will endure long after his football achievements are forgotten.
Outsports’ sister site, Queerty, has incorporated the intergenerational movement, community, and social platform Native Son as a new channel, which highlights a range of voices celebrating Black gay and queer men. Named after Baldwin’s book, Native Son also commemorates its anniversary since launching on Baldwin’s birthday in 2015.
