In April 2013, Jason Collins and I collaborated on his deeply personal essay for in which he became the first active male athlete in any of the four major American pro leagues—NBA, NFL, MLB and NHL—to announce he is gay.
It was hoped the NBA center’s declaration would encourage other gay athletes to go public. But 10 years later only one other active player in those leagues, Tampa Bay Buccaneers linebacker Carl Nassib, has come out. He did so while playing for the Las Vegas Raiders in ’21. By disclosing his orientation, Collins, then a 34-year-old free agent, breached one of the last barriers in the locker room, an ultra-masculine preserve where being gay is often equated with femininity, and femininity with weakness.
The response to Collins’s announcement was overwhelmingly positive. It was hailed as a milestone in civil rights. “A lot of young people out there who are gay or lesbian, who are struggling with these issues, to see a role model who’s unafraid, I think it’s a great thing,” said President Barack Obama. Others were not so accepting. Basketball analyst Chris Broussard—a fundamentalist Christian—said on ESPN that living publicly as a gay man was a sin equivalent to adultery and premarital sex, and that Collins was “walking in open rebellion to God and to Jesus Christ.”
Those contrasting reactions foreshadowed the polar views toward gender fluidity now playing out in courtrooms and state legislatures, and on courts and fields, across the country. In the decade since Collins dropped his bombshell, he has embraced his role as a symbolic figure for the path toward enlightenment of pro sports.
On Feb. 23, 2014, after months of waiting for a team to call, he signed a contract with the Brooklyn Nets. Collins had spent half his career with the Nets when they played in New Jersey, where he was a teammate of Jason Kidd, who by ’14 was the team’s coach. A few hours later, to cheering and applause, Collins took the floor in the second quarter of a road game against the Lakers.
From the next game to the end of that season, he wore No. 98, as he had the previous year. But now the world knew why: It was a tribute to Matthew Shepard, a University of Wyoming student who was tortured and murdered in 1998 in a notorious anti-gay hate crime. Besides championing a raft of LGBTQ causes and contracting long COVID at the start of the pandemic (“the weird side effect is that one of my toes swells enormously”), Collins has found happiness in a nine-year relationship with Brunson Green, a film producer best known for . He shuttles between homes in Austin and Los Angeles, where we discussed what’s happened and not happened during the intervening years, and why.