GAY PRO FOOTBALL PLAYERS   --    BULLETINS

An Icon Recast:Support for Gay Athlete

By ROBERT LIPSYTE

MIDDLETON, Mass. -- When Corey Johnson told teammates on the Masconomet High School football team last spring that he was gay, the two other starting linebackers responded characteristically. Big, steady Dave Merrill quietly absorbed the almost physical shock, then began worrying if the revelation would divide the team. Merrill said he decided to take it on as a challenge, a test of the captaincy the two shared and a test of his own character. Jim Whelan, the artist, said he looked into Johnson's eyes and saw a need for instant support. He broke the silence by saying, "More than being teammates we're your friends and we know you're the same person."

Their reactions were critical in the risky, uncharted, carefully planned campaign to bring out of his increasingly claustrophobic closet an American icon, the hard-hitting football hero. The campaign involved Johnson's parents, teachers and coaches, as well as a gay educational agency, all encouraged by the administration of a school with a long history of diversity training. One measure of their success will be seen Sunday when Johnson, who turned 18 on Friday and will graduate in June, speaks in Washington at the Millennium March for Equality.

For gay activists trying to shatter stereotypes, Johnson is a rare find, a bright, warm quick study who also wrestled and played lacrosse and baseball as he earned three varsity letters on a winning football team. For athletes, whose socialization often includes the use of homophobia by manipulative coaches, he is a liberating symbol. And for school systems struggling with such complex issues as diversity, tolerance and jock culture, his story is a hopeful model.

"Someday I want to get beyond being that gay football captain," Johnson said, "but for now I need to get out there and show these machismo athletes who run high schools that you don't have to do drama or be a drum major to be gay. It could be someone who looks just like them." At 5 feet 8 inches and 180 pounds, Johnson had to make up for drama-club size with the speed and brutality of his blocking and tackling. "He hit like a ton of bricks," said Whelan, who became his friend in seventh grade because, he recalls, "he had a strong mind, he liked to think and he was unwilling to accept injustice."

Others in school, including the girls he refused to date ("It's not fair to use people as pawns," he said) were attracted by his friendliness and sly wit. Asked for publication in the yearbook how football captains spent the night before a game, he said, "I go to sleep early with my Tinky Winky." And he indeed has one of those purple Teletubby dolls "outed" by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, crammed in a corner of a stereotypically messy room filled with trophies, athletic posters and balled-up T-shirts.

"This is a great kid with a mind of his own," said Coach Jim Pugh, who faced down a booster club president who wanted Johnson's captaincy revoked. "My issues with him were not gay-related. They were about who knows better how you step out on certain defensive plays."

Johnson said he had suspected his homosexuality since sixth grade, but suppressed thinking about it. In the high school's "elite jock mix" of heterosexual innuendo and bravado, he came to realize "this just isn't me." His crushes were on other boys.

"In health class a teacher told us that in every large group of friends, one turns out gay," he said. "When I was lonely and depressed and isolated, I kept thinking, 'Why does that have to be me?' I wanted to live a quote normal life."

In the fall of 1997, in the first game of his varsity career, as a sophomore starting at both right guard and middle linebacker, his blocking was so effective and he made so many sacks that the line coach awarded him the game ball. Yet, he was so afraid that everyone would hate him when his secret was revealed that he was often unable to sleep at night or get out of bed in the morning.

He would reach out on the Internet in a teen chat room on a site called http://Planetout.com finding other gay youngsters, even other gay football players. For years, he has exchanged e-mail messages with a gay right guard in Chicago.

Johnson's decision to come out began taking shape during his family's 1998 Super Bowl party in the living room of its rented townhouse in this suburb 25 miles north of Boston. One of his uncles pointed at the comedian Jerry Seinfeld in a television commercial and described him with a gay slur, and said that such "sick" people needed to be "put into institutions." Another uncle laughed. Corey's mother, unaware at the time of Johnson's sexual orientation, said she chided her brothers and asked them not to use such language.

Johnson said he went into the bathroom and cried. A month later, he told his guidance counselor and biology teacher that he was bisexual. He says he was a virgin at the time. Later, he told his lacrosse coach that he was gay. All three were supportive. They also began to understand his moodiness and mediocre grades.

One of His Parents Wasn't Surprised

He told no one else during that summer and the football season of his junior year. He joined the school's Gay Straight Alliance, which was made up mostly of straight girls. Since he was known for defending kids being hazed or bullied, no one found this remarkable. In December 1998, the football team voted Johnson and Dave Merrill co-captains.

After Christmas vacation, he decided to tell his parents. His father already knew. He had read an exchange between Johnson and a gay e-pal. For months, his father held the secret; he did not want to burden his wife, absorbed in ministering to her dying mother.

"I dropped the ball," he said in retrospect. "What if Corey had done something to himself?"

A burly, 45-year-old, chain-smoking former marine who drives a Pepsi-Cola truck, Rod had helped raise Johnson since the boy was 1. He and Johnson's mother, Ann, who gave birth to Corey when she was single, were married 12 years ago. Johnson never knew his biological father, though he kept his last name. (For reasons of "privacy and safety," Rod and Ann agreed to be interviewed only if their last name was not published. They also have a 10-year-old daughter.) Ann's reaction, according to both of them, was the unreserved love she had always offered, but now it was tinged with fear; if people found out, would they be mean to her son, would they hurt him?

That spring, Donna Cameron, a health teacher at the school and a Gay Straight Alliance adviser, took the group to a conference of the Gay Lesbian and Straight Education Network, a national organization that works with Massachusetts' Safe Schools program. Johnson attended a sports workshop led by Jeff Perrotti, the organization's Northeast coordinator. Perrotti talked about challenging the entitlement of athletes and finding a way for all students to be treated as well.

At the end of the session, Johnson raised his hand and said he was a football captain and wanted to come out and needed help.

Player's Statement Thought to Be a Joke

Perrotti, a 41-year-old openly gay former high school teacher, said he immediately realized what this meant. "A football captain is an icon," he said last week, "and one coming out would raise the expectations of what was possible, it would give hope."

Masco, as Masconomet is called up here, is the regional high school of 1,300 students for affluent, predominately white Boxford, Topsfield and Middleton. The phrase "Only in Masco," used by friends and critics, often refers to its liberal commitment to diversity and alternate education. Pugh, the football coach, a warm, steady 50-year-old from Long Island, seems equally at home on the field and in what he calls his "touchy-feely world" as a special-education teacher.

Perrotti said he consulted with Bob Norton, the Woburn High School principal, who had been a football and hockey coach. Johnson's mother came to school for meetings with the staff and Perrotti. It was decided that Johnson would first tell his junior classmates on the team, on April 8, 1999, more than a year after he had first told some teachers.

Three days before that meeting, Cameron, 52, the Gay Straight Alliance adviser, who had been out as a lesbian to friends and family, came out to her students. "I didn't want Corey to stand alone," she said last week. "I wanted to put a second human face on what for most of the kids was just an abstract when they used gay slurs. As it turned out for both Corey and me, kids found it even easier to talk to us about other problems."

The day before the meeting, Johnson came out to Pugh. It was fine with him, Pugh said, as long as everyone remembered that the football season was about football and that it would not become a "media circus" that would spoil everyone else's experience. That attitude prevailed; a major magazine was turned away last fall, and until now there has been no mainstream national exposure.

Ann and Rod were not persuaded about even this controlled coming out.

Rod said, "I felt he was putting a target on his back."

Ann said:"We were afraid for him that he would be hurt. But if I said no, then we were acting as if we were ashamed of who he was."

At the meeting, in Pugh's classroom, Johnson told his teammates that he was gay, that he hoped for their support and not to worry. "I didn't come on to you last year in the locker room and I'm not going to do it now," he said. "Who says you're good enough anyhow?"

That lightly dropped remark had been scripted in the preliminary meetings.

Outside, in the hall, Merrill said players asked him if it was a joke. The news spread quickly through the school. There were several scrawled gay slurs, but no one was going to go bashing the football team.

"It sort of all evolved through the summer lifting program and into the season," Merrill said. "It escalated and then it dropped off. It got to be old news."

"At first the team was meek about it," Johnson said. "People didn't talk to me, and when they saw it was still just me they asked all kinds of questions. They wanted intimate details. They thought it would be cool to know more about the subculture. When they heard abut a gay bar called the Ramrod, they asked me to get them T-shirts."

Whelan, visiting his girlfriend at college, met an openly gay "fun guy," who he thought would be perfect for Johnson. He told them about each other and tried to fix up a double date.

The most dramatic incidents were football related. Pugh said the president of Masco's active booster club, the father of four past, present and future players, demanded that Johnson be removed as captain for "unit cohesiveness."

Pugh told the father that he was the divisive one, and that it was not an issue.

The night before a game, the captain of the Lynnfield team made anti-gay remarks in a pep rally speech. His coach benched him.

At the game, an opposing lineman shouted gay slurs in Johnson's face.

"I couldn't stop laughing," Johnson said. "Here, I had come out to my teachers, my parents and my team, and this guy thought he could intimidate me?"

Finding a Date for the Senior Prom

Johnson and Perrotti like to say that the team bonded through the experience, but other players are not so sure. While Whelan and Merrill attended and spoke at gay-rights conferences, and the team once sang the gay anthem, "Y.M.C.A.," after Johnson had a particularly good game, there was an element of distraction. Merrill said "some kids were nervous and had to be talked to." Masco dropped from 10-1 in 1998 to 7-4, but Pugh attributes that to the loss of last season's quarterback and star running back.

Some problems never did materialize. When younger players complained to Merrill about having to shower with a gay teammate, he would growl, as he would to most complaints, "You're a football player, just suck it up." But then, Masco football players have traditionally never showered at school.

Although Johnson's parents and many of his teachers and coaches think he should go to college in the fall, he said he has decided to "become an activist" for a year and to intern in the network's San Francisco office.

Merrill is going to the University of New Hampshire, without a football scholarship but confident that he will walk on the team.

"I'll know now I'll be able to make it in the real world," he said. "I handled it. I was mature. We were a unit."

Whelan is going to the Rhode Island School of Design in the fall. That "fun guy" he spotted finally met Johnson, at a gay conference. Whelan was right. They liked each other. The fun guy, Michael, became Johnson's first boyfriend, and next month Johnson will take him as his date to the Masconomet senior prom.

The season isn't over yet.

The season isn't over yet.

[Corey Johnson is online at CoreyJohnson2000@aol.com]

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