The NFL Has Its First Out Player

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC, a pride month shocker from the world of professional football. Did you hear the news that Carl Nassib, NFL player for the Las Vegas Raiders, who is now the first openly gay active professional football player did come out? He took to his Instagram on Monday to announce he "finally feels comfortable" to come out publicly, and "representation and visibility are so important", he wrote.

Joining us to discuss this monumental moment for the NFL are Jane McManus, director of Marist's Center for Sports Communication and Deadspin sports columnist, and Jeff Rueter, national reporter for The Athletic. Welcome back, Jane, and welcome to WNYC, Jeff, thank you for joining us. Oh, so far, we only have Jeff, so Jeff, hi.

Jeff Rueter: Hi, thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we want to open up the phones to you as well, especially if you have been a gay man in sports at any level, talk about your experience, or react to this NFL first, 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280. Anyone may call, but gay men in sports we'll center you mostly. If anyone happens to be in that group to call in right now. 646-435-7280, tell us any of your own experiences with that, and deciding whether to come out to your teammates and your reaction to this news, 646-435-7280 or tweet @BrianLehrer. Jeff, for those who don't follow the NFL closely, who is this player?

Jeff Rueter: Carl Nassib is a defensive lineman. He was a former Big Ten defender of the year player for the Penn State Nittany Lions, and he is an established player. I think that that's something that differentiate Carl coming out compared to a couple of other former young American football players such as Michael Sam, who came out before the NFL Draft in 2014, and then R.K. Russell, who came out after he had essentially retired or been unable to find a new team just a couple of years ago.

He is seen as an established presence within the league. He's a veteran of the league. He's played for a few different teams. He's started regularly, gotten sacks, all these things. Now, of course, his notoriety or his notability I should say has increased dramatically.

This week, Fanatics, which is the main jersey manufacturer and sales company for NFL Jerseys does have Carl Nassib as the number one selling jersey in the National Football League since he came out, so that is a very significant milestone just in terms of not just his own recognition, but more importantly, the fan culture and the number of people who are excited by this, inspired by this, and want to support him as he continues in his career as an openly gay man.

Brian Lehrer: Now, Nassib will, and forgive me, everybody, for mispronouncing his name the first time I said it, shows you how much I know about the NFL. You mentioned Michael Sam, the first openly gay player to be drafted by an NFL team. My understanding is he soon thereafter stepped away and never played a regular-season game, citing concerns for his mental health and so Carl Nassib would be the first player to actually play on an NFL team in an actual game after coming out as gay, is that correct?

Jeff Rueter: That's correct. He does have two guaranteed years left on his contract with the Las Vegas Raiders as well, so it isn't just a case where he's going to be competing for a spot. He should be, in theory, certain to take the field at some point in 2021, assuming health and other competition at the position doesn't come into play.

Brian Lehrer: We do also have Jane McManus with us now, director of Marist's Center for Sports Communication and a Deadspin sports columnist who's reported a lot, former ESPN on the NFL. Hi, Jane, welcome back. My first question to you is, as far as you could tell, how are his teammates taking it?

Jane McManus: He's got a lot of support within the league. I think you've had some really notable players come out and say that they publicly support him. Then, of course, Roger Goodell has supported him and came out and made a statement saying that he was proud of Carl, and I think that means a lot. There are a number of players who play in the NFL who have been out privately to their teammates. Their teammates know and are supportive, but the public doesn't know. I think that's because there is this threshold that one crosses when you come out as gay in a public way.

Michael Sam I think has felt the effects of that very considerably. He had been out privately as a college player to his Missouri teammates and they accepted him, but then when he came out publicly in the draft, that's when things really started to change for him. He did get a lot of public support, but he also got a private backlash, and he had to deal with that on his own.

He's come out since then and said that he felt like he didn't get a lot of internal support from the league in the ways that it mattered. He may have gotten people who tweeted support, but then when it came to these structural things-- He never made the team, and I don't think he would say it was because he took himself out of competition. I think he would say that the public conversation around his coming out affected the way that he was looked at as a football player.

I do think that that's still something that even a player like Carl Nassib coming out, again, 10 years after this conversation started about when the NFL would have a gay player who was publicly out as gay, I think that's a long time and that's because there is this distinction between the public and private discussion around this issue.

Brian Lehrer: What about gender? A listener reacted to the fact that I put out the call before you came on for gay men in sports to call in and talk about your experience at any level, and the listener asked, "Why ask for gay men and not gay people in sports?" The reason is that my sense of it, Jane, correct me if you think this is wrong, is that there's just more homophobia amongst straight men than there is among straight women. Lesbians in sports and women's sports don't face the same challenges, by and large, as a gay man in pro sports would. Do you think that's true or false?

Jane McManus: I think that's 100% true. You had women who've been out-- There certainly are issues, not to downplay it entirely, there certainly are issues. I did a story about this in 2011 for ESPN about when the NFL would accept a gay player. I interviewed John Amaechi, who was an NBA player in the '90s, and has since come out as gay and speaks publicly about his experiences, and is a really smart person on these issues. He thinks that the homophobia is misogyny in a sense in sports team.

He said if you come out as a woman, and you're gay, people will think that you're going to be better at your sport because of that. There's no disconnect between the idea of masculinity and excellence in sports, but if you come out as gay as a man in sports, then you get the counter to that, which is that people will assume you're not as tough, you're not going to go as hard, you're not going to be as competitive in the field. There's this idea of softness when it comes to femininity.

In sports, coming out as gay then means that you can have all of these cultural assumptions that we make about people based on our ideas of masculinity and femininity, and none of them benefit men who come out as gay in the context of a professional sport.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, by the way, no men are calling in [chuckles] after my request to talk about being a gay man at any level of sports, maybe that's how rare it is that people who are gay come out in the context of sports at any level, but we invite you again, 646-435-7280. Anyone else may call as well on the Carl Nassib story, 646-435-7280, or tweet @BrianLehrer.

Jeff, you wrote-- and my other guest is Jeff Rueter, national reporter for the athletic and in your article on this, you wrote, "Publicly coming out on social media is a daunting process." Can you elaborate on that?

Jeff Rueter: Yes, I think that, in general, when you see an athlete or any person in the public eye coming out via social media, there's just something about social media that is inherently performative. I think a lot of people see it as bigging yourself up, making yourself sound like you are something more important than you were before, and that it is ultimately a selfish act but really, that isn't the case.

Often, there are a lot of factors that go into play. I came out publicly as bisexual in October via Twitter after having been out to my friends and family for the better part of a decade, and in my own experience, there were many false starts over the course of I would say those eight or nine years where I was out privately but not publicly and its questions of, will I be heard and supported? Is there a part of the inevitable reaction cycle that social media breeds that I haven't considered? What's going to happen next?

It's always the concern of the unforeseen and then when you expand that from a national sports writer who predominantly covers American soccer to an NFL starting player in Las Vegas, that's such a grand scope in terms of the potential risks that may be perceived in this, or there may be other considerations, including the locker room.

We talked about Michael Sam and ultimately how he wasn't signed by the then St. Louis Rams when he was drafted but I think that the other part of it was that a lot of the media discussion around it at the time was not as it is right now with Carl Nassib. It wasn't questions of how will he be, how will his mental health be? Will he be given a fair chance? It was questions of articles such as, "Will Michael Sam be trusted in a team shower?" and that was a lot of what the discussion was.

I think that that news cycle also informed Collin Martin, who for the last two-and-a-half years has been the only openly gay, active professional athlete playing in American soccer, formerly in Major League Soccer now in the second division USL. He told me when he came out in 2018 that the reaction to Michael Sam coming out kept him from doing the same for a couple of years publicly because he didn't want it to be the pre-eminent part of his identity.

He wanted to be taken seriously as a soccer player first and then as he established himself in his career, by the time he turned 23, then he did come out then with six years in Major League Soccer under his belt but there is so much that you don't know is going to happen.

One other thing I will say, though, is that in the aftermath of this, you do find so many people who say that they are inspired by people like Carl Nassib and Collin Martin, people who say that they feel more comfortable in their own skin, that they find someone in culture, in sport in particular, that they feel that they can identify with more than they had before and the impact of that is so crucial to normalizing the idea of gay athletes in men's sports.

Brian Lehrer: Justine in Astoria you're on WNYC. Hello, Justine.

Justine: Hi, Brian. Thanks again. I called before. I'm a transwoman and growing up as a boy, I played sports and I'm not surprised that athletes are starting to come out now because there are always been gay athletes. I might mean to or maybe I don't mean to project onto other people, but I think that a lot of young men, whether gay or straight, play sports precisely because they're trying to fit into society's definitions of masculinity.

I know that's what I did. I wrestled and I played soccer in high school. One of the reasons I got involved in sports and got myself into shape was because I was getting bullied and sure enough, the bullying stopped after I played sports, although I'm sure there were whispers about me.

Brian Lehrer: Justine, thank you very much and we always appreciate your calls, that's a great perspective to add to it. Bill in Rego Park you're on WNYC. Hi, bill.

Bill: Hi, good morning. This is an interesting spot. It occurred to me that there are some sports in which it's okay, societally okay for gay males to come out and they have, such as figure skating, diving, gymnastics. I'm wondering if your guest has any comments about this?

Brian Lehrer: Bill, thank you very much. Jane, let me throw that to you. Yes, we're talking about the first openly gay NFL player. I can't think of anybody who's been openly gay as an active NBA player or Major League Baseball player, hockey player in the NHL, or do I just not know these stories?

Jane McManus: I think Jason Collins came out in 2013 in the NBA, so there have been, and there are other players but that's exactly right. I do think your caller has a real point. We do assign much as other languages assign masculine and feminine pronouns to things, we do assign, I think, gender to sports in some ways.

If you look at something like figure skating, which is more popular for women than for men, you might see a young man who wanted to be a figure skater bullied because of our misogynistic tendencies in this country and these ideas that-- the idea of sport and playing sport just like Justine said is very much about, we are reinforcing cultural values. When we teach our children about sports, we are teaching them these cultural values that we are assigning to that sport.

For football, we are assigning one set of cultural values, maybe a little different for baseball, different for figure skating, think of a young man who might go into ballet, which is another physical pursuit today, think about how that would be responded to. I do think that it's because we have these cultural ideas of masculinity and femininity and we apply them to sports.

I just like to make another point about what Justine said, which is so important. If these sports really do want to support somebody like Carl Nassib and the other players who are coming out-- Mike Lee today put out a tweet saying that he was going to be proposing another bill-- Senator Mike Lee, that he's going to be proposing another anti-trans bill, and young women like Justine who want to play sports are being targeted across the country right now and there's a lot of legislation that's designed to keep them from playing sport. I just think culturally, it's really important to think about how that fits into this discussion and what we are saying to those young women when we say we don't want them to play.

Brian Lehrer: Let's go next to Robert in Astoria, you're on WNYC. Hi, Robert.

Robert: Hello. I grew up playing sports throughout my entire life and was the closet gay male. In high school, I played football. I think that because of the machismo culture of American football, it kind of prevented me from going out in high school, and as an adult now, I play men's volleyball with Gotham Volleyball League in New York City. It's the largest gay men's volleyball league.

Within men's volleyball internationally, gay culture is completely accepted. There are multiple professional gay men who play volleyball. I think hopefully there's a paradigm shift within like NFL football now. I hope that that's the case. I'm fearful that he won't get a play.

Brian Lehrer: Robert, thank you very much. Jeff, from The Athletic in our last minute, what do you think happens on the Raiders now? One of you mentioned bathroom issues before, and so many of these conversations seem to come down to straight male fears about what happens in a locker room. Does team management now step in and educate the other teammates about Carl isn't going to attack you in the locker room, or what has to happen there?

Jeff Rueter: Look, as you alluded to, a lot of those fears are rooted in homophobia. I believe that you've seen public statements from the Raiders organization again on Twitter where inherently social media feels performative, but they did have a statement of support for Carl. I think that you would also see-- you would hope to see, I should say, organizations within the Raiders as well as beyond in the greater Las Vegas community that are looking to educate the fan base or make it feel like a more inclusive and truly be a more inclusive place. That means more than just having a pride night where you're selling a Raiders Jersey with rainbow numbers.

It means actually going in and ensuring that there is a safe space, that there is shared awareness, that there is that common humanity that is highlighted here. It isn't the straight players on the Raiders and Carl Nassib, but it is the Raiders and just make that a broader macro-level, he's been in that locker room already. He's been in NFL locker rooms. Those fears should be subsided in theory, I think that the question is going to be how much more open is the NFL to having a gay player than they would have been eight years ago with what Michael Sam went through?

Brian Lehrer: There is your pride month shocker from the NFL. Jane McManus, director of Marist's Center for Sports Communication and Deadspin sports columnist, and Jeff Rueter, staff writer at The Athletic. Thank you so much for talking about it with us.

Jeff Rueter: Thanks, Brian.

Jane McManus: Thanks.

Brian Lehrer: The Brian Lehrer Show is produced by Lisa Allison, MaryEileen Croke, Zoe Azulay, Amina Srna, and Regina de Heer. Zach Gottehrer-Cohen works on our daily podcast. Megan Ryan is the head of live radio and that's Juliana Fonda at the audio controls. I'm Brian Lehrer.

 

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