It was nice to see that Sam could stand in his truth.” “I saw Michael Sam get drafted, and he kissed his boyfriend and I was like, shit, that is amazing. There was one aspect of Sam’s coming out that really hit home for Callan.
To know that there are out pro athletes is important.” “For young people like me, it can be very inspiring and could give strength and encouragement to others who share similar identities. Their coming out gave Callan, then a teenager, pride. Michael Sam made history in 2014 as the first openly gay player drafted in the NFL. “I feel like I’m living three very specific experiences and when you see other people in that position, I could relate to that,” Callan said. Navigating this terrain gave him an appreciation for the courage it took for people like Collins and Sam to come out. And you would think that a lot of gay men would understand and empathize with the fact that you are a part of multiple marginalized communities, but in a lot of cases, there is a lack of understanding.” More often you experience microaggressions and comments that are offensive and dismissive of minority communities,” he said.Īs an example of the latter, he recalled meeting one white gay man who told Callan, “‘I thought you were gonna be ghetto, you’re not,’ and I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’ It can be very frustrating. “Some have said, ‘Oh, you want to be a girl?’” he said.įurther, Callan says that as a black man in the larger gay culture “you do experience racism within the gay community. It’s embedded in a lot of black culture,” he said. “I feel like culturally it is very prominent … I’ve seen a lot of it in marginalized communities. In addition, Callan says gay black men often deal with what he calls the hypermasculinity in black culture. The first obvious struggle is the history of discrimination against black people in U.S.
“I feel like they are all three completely different challenges.” ”A person of color has to deal with not only being gay, but being black, and then being black and gay,” Callan said. Gay football player felt driven from Miami Hurricanes by anti-gay taunts For Callan, these stories resonate because he sees the power and courage in what they did. Brittney Griner, Seimone Augustus, Angel McCoughtry, Nicola Adams, CeCé Telfer and Caster Semenya are among prominent female black athletes who have come out. Derrick Gordon was the first active Division I men’s basketball player to come out as gay in 2014. Both of their stories were huge, spilling out from sports into mainstream news and culture.Ĭollins and Sam are far from the only out black LGBTQ athletes to have made a difference. Two prominent examples whose coming out announcements had an impact beyond sports are Jason Collins, the first NBA player to come out in 2013, and Michael Sam, the first openly gay player drafted in the NFL in 2014. Outsports recently spoke with Callan about how the history of black athletes coming out, and specifically black gay men, has been particularly meaningful to him.
Callan, 22, left the Miami program after experiencing what he described as a hostile environment, where gay people were spoken of in derogatory terms, ultimately keeping him in the closet. Callan has long recognized the intersectionality of being a gay man, a black man and a gay black man. “For example, if we are able to determine that many individuals in an HIV transmission cluster have also been using intravenous drugs such as opioids, we are then able to better target prevention resources to prevent further transmission.Former University of Miami running back T.J. “This method of studying HIV transmission clusters allows us to observe cluster growth and formation and direct resources in a more efficient manner,” explained Morgan. The researchers studied HIV “transmission clusters,” which are groups of people living with HIV who are linked to genetically similar strains of HIV (and therefore known to have transmitted HIV to one another). With the lifetime risk of HIV for black gay men nearing 50% in the U.S., public health experts are keen to identify what’s putting young gay black men at higher risk-and figure out what can be done to protect young gay black men from HIV.Ī new study, by Ethan Morgan, PhD and colleagues, tried to answer some of these questions with research that included young African-American and black men who have sex with men living in the South side of Chicago.