“Your purpose in life is simply to leave the world a better place than you found it.

”
That’s the advice my mother gave me when I was just entering my teens, a kid like so many struggling
with his identity. She had no doubt heard it from someone else who assuredly had heard it from someone
else. It’s a platitude straight off one of those posters with a waterfall in the background. But as a kid it
struck me as particularly true. If I wasn’t living my life for someone else, then what the hell was the point of
living at all?
I’ve worked for some incredibly powerful companies in my life, from the Walt Disney Company to
Morgan Stanley. I currently have the pleasure of being part of Vox Media, a fast-growing former start-up
that looks to dominate the online media landscape. I’ve met the president of the United States and had
dinner with some of the most powerful people in Hollywood.
Yet it’s the young LGBT athletes who have left the most lasting impressions on me.
When I first talked with Conner Mertens he was a scared kid trying to find his way on the Willamette
University football team. Identifying as bisexual, he knew he was different, but inside him was a desire
to express his true self despite what his teammates might think. When he finally came out to his
football brethren and to the world—through a story I wrote for Outsports—he found acceptance and
love he hadn’t fathomed.
Dalton Maldonado was a high school basketball player in Kentucky. When he was forced out of the
closet by an opposing team from Lexington, they (allegedly, of course) tried to attack him, then chased
his school bus. Still, Maldonado’s rural Kentucky teammates stuck by his side all the way to the state
playoffs.
Stephen Alexander was a standout player for his girls high school basketball team before transitioning.
He returned to his rural Rhode Island high school as a boys coach in several different sports, including
baseball and tennis. Despite his well-documented past as a female athlete, Alexander found acceptance
from the people in his conservative hometown.
The last decade has been colored in rainbows by young athletes like these brave youth who dared to
be themselves. While so many in the media focus heavily on professional athletes, it’s these young LGBT
athletes—growing in number—who have shown us the face of the movement.
It wasn’t always this way. LGBT people in sports have long believed they didn’t belong—particularly
gay men and trans people. A sense of belonging in sports still doesn’t exist for countless people—
including all genders—struggling to find their identities in this world.
Even so, we have made so many incredible strides for LGBT athletes in the last fifteen years. In 1999,
when Jim Buzinski and I started Outsports, gay athletes were marginalized by people in sports as well as
by members of the gay community. Sports were no place for people like me, a message that was
reinforced daily by both straight athletes on the basketball court and gay men in West Hollywood.
“Oh, you like sports?” I would routinely hear from gay men I met in the late nineties. “How butch of
you.”
That “butch” label was designed to marginalize me and people like me. We had to be putting on an act
with our professed love of sports—uncomfortable with our sexual orientation and the mandatory embrace
of Broadway show tunes. I was deemed a “self-loathing” gay man because I didn’t check all the
stereotypical boxes. Sports and the gay community? Outside of Rosie O’Donnell playing softball, they
simply didn’t mix.
Today those two disparate worlds have merged.