Meet Division I Football’s Only Openly Gay Player

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Love may have won this past June in Washington, but in college sports, openly gay players remain obscenely hard-to-find. So it must have taken an incredible amount of courage for Mason Darrow, an offensive lineman for Princeton, to meet with OutNews on Tuesday with a big reveal: he, in fact, is gay. This makes Darrow the only openly gay football player both at Princeton and in all of the league.

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Darrow told OutSports that he came out because he wanted other students to know that you can be gay and play sports at the same time. “I want to show people you can be gay and play Division I football,” Darrow said. “If that’s going to help some sophomore in Arizona come out to his teammates and be comfortable in himself, that’s the reason I’m doing it.” Darrow further reported that coming out had gone smoothly, both at home and on the field. “People will surprise you,” he said. “I was definitely concerned that people, teammates, would react poorly. I think in this day and age people really just don’t care about it.”

Darrow might have had a positive homecoming, but for other players in the league, challenges remain. There are 128 schools in Division 1 football and thousands of players. Yet only one of them—in a day and age when “people don’t really just don’t care about it”—has felt safe and supported enough to come out. Darrow’s big disclosure can hopefully make an even bigger change.

(Via: Outsports)