A day is coming when this will not make headlines.
Dave Kopay, now 78, was the first major team athlete in North America to publicly come out as gay. He did it in 1975, shortly after retiring from the N.F.L., through a newspaper article. Then he bore the brunt for years.
“Blackballed from football,” he told me this week. “College and pro. I was an outcast.”
Michael Sam, a star lineman at Missouri, came out as gay through interviews with ESPN and The New York Times. It was 2014. He received more support than Kopay did decades earlier, but also a similar backlash.