Gay pro

The Gay Pro amplifies the voices of queer leaders to advance their success. Join Omaralexis Ochoa every week as he explores the incredible business research, trends, and stories that are impacting LGBTQIA+ professionals most. Here's a list of players in college and pro football who have proved you can be gay or bi and still run the gauntlet.

Running back Dave Kopay, who signed with the San Francisco 49ers in By sharing the incredible research, trends, and stories that are impacting LGBTQIA+ professionals most, The Gay Pro also hopes to inspire current and future queer leaders to make an impact. The Gay Pro is a podcast dedicated to empowering LGBTQIA+ business professionals with the resources, networks, and visibility needed to succeed in the workplace as their authentic selves.

Thanks to these prominent athletes who are gay, the sports world is becoming more and more accepting of homosexual players. Whether these famous Olympians, tennis greats, and basketball players came out after they retired, or revealed their sexuality during their sports careers, they’ve paved the way for major LGTB sports progress.

Originally from Miami, Tim was an am for Birdhouse Skateboards at the end of the nineties, but his career was cut short in when his sponsor pulled an interview in Skateboarder magazine in which he talked about his sexuality. He talks about his sponsored days with the kind of fondness people have for old friends, tinged with the sadness of a relationship gone wrong.

It was just after I broke my ankle, so I had to take some months off anyway, but [the incident] definitely reduced the amount of time I spent skating.

If not society, then what about skateboarding? Surely the cool, creative, enlightened world of skateboarding has gotten past all that? Maybe not. Surely that should have changed by now? He says he knows of plenty top level female pro skaters who are openly gay — something that ex- Big Brother editor Dave Carnie also confirms when he points me towards two big names.

Bryce Kanights , an ex-pro skater turned photographer says he can think of seven skaters — ams, pros and ex-pros — who are gay, but not out in any formal way. No one, it seems, is keen to break the code.

Thanks to these prominent athletes

The typical street skater kid is between ten and twenty years old, with a big bulk being fourteen to sixteen. I speak to Sophia Le who agrees that the road to acceptance is a long one. Sophia lives in the San Francisco area, skates and is gay. It takes so many baby steps. Steve Olson, legend of the West Coast seventies skate scene, party animal and father of Girl Skateboards golden boy Alex Olson , is not one to sugarcoat things.

Might they be more open-minded than we think? For Andrew Reynolds, ignorance has nothing to do with age. He recalls how, as a teenager coming down from Lakeland, Florida, he was pretty nonplussed by the whole issue. I talk to Dr Nigel Jarvis , a senior lecturer at Brighton University who has explored masculinity issues in grassroots-level sports in the UK and Canada.

A lot of people making decisions could be basing them on a gut instinct that could be quite outdated. Do they have evidence to back that up? In the shift from being a bunch of reprobates screeching around Santa Monica to becoming a multimillion-dollar industry backed by some of the biggest brands in the world, has skating lost some of its maverick spirit? Brooke agrees that there are more open-minded pockets within the world of skate.

But is this all really about money? Possibly not. I ask whether he thinks there is genuine deep-seated homophobia within the ranks of pro skating? It reminds me of an incident in in which pros Danny Way and Josh Swindell were involved in a fight outside a bar in Los Angeles with a man who was allegedly propositioning Swindell.

Way was never convicted of any offence in connection with the incident, but Swindell got fifteen years for second degree murder. Still, as Sophia Le points out, coming out professionally is a leap into the unknown. Of course, there will be those who pioneer, who go out there and do it anyway, but to get there you also need that support from the industry. So is that safety net there? And if they wanted to be the person whose mission it is to talk about it and bring it forward, then Toy Machine would be there to help.

Everything he or she did after that would be seen through the lens of them being gay.