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| Photo: Courtesy Jim Lavrakas, Anchorage Daily News |
February 1982. I get up from my desk at the Anchorage Daily News and head to the editor's office, pumped up and ready for a fight. I walk through the room past colleagues and friends, feeling for the moment very alone, very isolated, and very unsure about what is about to happen.
Whatever it is, I am ready for it.
So I walk into the glassed-in office and tell my boss I'm gay.
At the time, I had not yet even come out to my parents. They were thousands of miles away in the Midwest and I did not want to tell them until I knew they would be able to see me often enough to know I was happy, the only thing they ever said they wanted me to be.
And I had no gay-and-out friends in sports. Glenn Burke's story had not yet been published in Inside Sports , and word of the first Gay Olympic Games to be held later that year in San Francisco had not hit Alaska yet. The only gay athlete I had even heard of was former NFL player David Kopay; he was a remote source of inspiration at the time, but the lack of others reinforced my concerns that this was going to be a very lonely and cold excursion.
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We hope for many more years of thoughtful sports coverage from Roger, and thank him for the countless great stories already shared.
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