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Former football player David Kopay made history by being the first professional NFL athlete to publicly expose his homosexuality in 1975, shortly after he retired from the professional league. Recently, he gave an interview to KESQ New Channel 3 telling a little about his motivations and that, before he told everyone, he had even thought about telling his own life.
“I had to be true to myself. I was getting very, very depressed that I felt locked up and suffocated” – he said.
“It was a very difficult battle because [naquele tempo] nobody talked about it.” – he said, also adding that for many years his family rejected and did not want him in their lives.
He also comments on the lack of openly gay athletes in football today: “It’s pathetic! I wonder what they are afraid of?”
At the end of the interview, visibly moved, he said that he felt very lonely: “I stayed in a very lonely place … and alone … because there were few people [gays] who didn’t even try [sair do armário] “
When asked if he thinks there was social advances from that time from the 1970s to today, Kopay shows a lot of optimism: “We are better off as a society today, especially in the way we treat each other. We have a lot more compassion and love, in addition to being more honest with ourselves than we were.”
David Kopay is currently an LGBT activist and lectures on the subject, in addition to having donated more than $ 1 million to the LGBT center at the University of Washington. He is also looking for a boyfriend to share his life with.
It is worth mentioning that for decades he remained the only professional player to publicly expose his homosexuality, and that even today it is very rare to see an athlete “coming out of the closet”.
Only in 2014, player Michael Sam exposed his homosexuality and, in his case, was the first NFL player still active to do so. Six months later, another player, Chip Sarafin, also came out.
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