Dennis Rodman is probably the most colorful player the NBA has ever seen. Like, literally colorful. No other NBA player has colored his hair or worn the colors that he wore on a regular basis while playing in the NBA.
And yes, people thought he was gay.
That’s because Rodman broke the mold of what professional athletes could and should look like in the 1990s. Before there was Cam Newton wearing pink and dressing to the nines, or other current pro athletes wearing fingernail polish, Rodman wore outrageous clothes and died his hair, even bringing attention to AIDS by painting a red ribbon in his hair for an NBA game.
He was recently on the Got Sole podcast talking for about an hour about his career, his fashion, and yes, talking a lot about his gay friends, the gay community, and why people thought he was gay.
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“A lot of people thought I was gay,” Rodman said, per Sports Rush. “‘Cause I was cross-dressing, women’s clothes… Imagine guys, in San Antonio, the Bible bumping city in the world. I was going to gay clubs, gay pride, doing this and that.”
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It might be easy to understand why some people thought a guy in the 1990s who wore glitter and a halter-top might be gay. After all, he had specifically chosen the gays to dress him.
“I had a lot of my gay friends used the help me dress after the game,” he said. “They picked an outfit for me… and they’d just add stuff to it. I did gold, I did glitter, I did everything in the book.”
The reason he had his gay friends dress him? It seems you can look at the fashion of the rockstars of the Sixties and Seventies, as Rodman praised the look of guys like Jimi Hendrix and Robert Plant.
“It was cool how they dressed,” Rodman said, talking about how hot Plant was, in particular. “They dressed so gay.”
Even today, some of the professional and college athletes who dress “gay” or challenge traditional gender norms are automatically thought by some to be a little “gay.” Yet in the 1990s, what Rodman was doing was so out there, so original, it’s not hard to understand why a lot of people went there.
In the interview, Rodman also dished a bit on Madonna, with whom he became friendly and even dated for a bit in 1993. And when he was with the San Antonio Spurs, it seems Madonna was — big shocker — not very shy.
“Strangely enough, she used to come in the locker room and just sit there,” he said. “Literally just sit there. And it was no big deal, guys would let her sit there.”
Rodman has long been a public supporter of the LGBTQ community. Last year he even walked in the Houston Pride Parade in a skirt.
To have a guy of Rodman’s stature — with five NBA championships and in the Basketball Hall of Fame — be such a longtime supporter of the gays is special.
