Patrick Burke tells closeted athletes to trust their teammates

On the Our Group blog, Patrick Burke shares his insights after two years of advocacy as an ally:


In the two years that I have been doing outreach to the athletic community regarding LGBT athletes, fans, and coaches, I have been lucky enough to share the stage with fantastic representatives of the LGBT community: Openly gay coaches, administrators, team captains, record setters, leading scorers, All-Americans, and Olympians. They share their stories to our audience, usually college sports teams, with tremendous openness and honesty. I provide the straight ally’s perspective, which generally consists of me listing all the ways I screwed up before I knew how to treat the LGBT community with respect.

After the second or third “Invisible Athlete Forum”, I began to notice a pattern. At some point during our talks, while I was listing all the mistakes I had made, all of the LGBT athletes would list one universal mistake: “I wish I had given my straight teammates more credit for being accepting.”

We all know that locker rooms can be intimidating for LGBT athletes. The constant use of casual homophobia can intimidate anyone into staying in the closet for fear of being ostracized. This is the principle focus of the You Can Play Project- encouraging athletes to end casual homophobia and make the sports world safe for the gay community. But every single one of the athletes I have presented with has expressed their regret for not trusting their teammates to support them when they came out.

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