Although the former players no longer purport to be straight, they all insisted on anonymity for the study because they didn’t want their teams to find out they’d been gay. Those interviews, along with the fair amount of past research Mrozek analyzed for this study, make clear that not only have non-straight football players faced disturbing discrimination from teammates and even coaches because of the hypermasculine nature of the sport, they’ve also feared that coming out would alienate fans and others on the team, and jeopardize their shot at being drafted at the professional level.
But when players were found out, they could become targets. One former student who witnessed a couple of people being outed said that when his team found out a player was gay, “they became like a pariah; they had to be gotten rid of.” In an interview with Mrozek, he described how this drove one player to self-destruction. “Other members of the team found out, and what they basically did, they just started beating the crap out of him whenever they could catch him alone,” he said. “He was so upset about it he ended up – he was actually found somewhere outside of town – because he didn’t want to play football and he didn’t want to tell his parents and, I know it was deliberate…. He mangled up his legs so that he couldn’t play.”
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