Provo • The night before he put on the costume of Cosmo the Cougar mascot for a football game, Charlie Bird lost sleep.
The young student at Brigham Young University — which is owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — remembers how he felt about being gay: confused, depressed and trapped.
So when a mother came to him at the game, saying her son wanted to be just like Cosmo when he grows up, Bird thought to himself: “If this lady knew who I actually was behind this mask, would she let her son look up to me?