Every out WNBA All-Star owes a debt of gratitude to Sue Wicks, who blazed the trail

When the WNBA’s brightest stars take the floor at the United Center for the All-Star Game on Saturday night, a record number of them will do so as openly out gay, lesbian, bisexual and queer women.

None of it happens without LGBTQ+ sports icon Sue Wicks.

Almost 25 years ago, Wicks wasn’t trying to make history. The New York Liberty forward, in the middle of a championship run, which they would lose, in what would turn out to be her final WNBA season, was just tired of dodging questions about her sexuality. 

In an interview with Time Out New York in 2002, a reporter finally asked her directly whether she was gay. Wicks didn’t do a high-bouncer advance. She simply took her shot, and told the truth, framing it as a matter of New York direct speak 

What she was saying was if you’re gay, you’re gay, and there was no reason to pretend otherwise. It made her the first active WNBA player, and one of the first active athletes in any major U.S. team sport, to come out publicly.

Get off the sidelines and into the game

Our weekly playbook is packed with everything from locker room chatter to pressing LGBTQ sports issues.
Subscribe to our Newsletter today

Related

Nearly half of the 2026 WNBA All-Stars are publicly out LGBTQ athletes
Over 45% of the players in the 2026 WNBA All Star Game are LGBTQ and publicly out, with one of them named a team captain.

There was no news conference, no team of publicists massaging a message or for that matter, a self-shot Instagram video. There was just Wicks, an athlete answering a question honestly, at a moment when doing so still carried real professional risk. 

“No one would ask that question,” Wicks recalled in an interview last month. “So that somebody asked it and was like, I want to write about this. That was a big deal.”

It’s almost a cliché to say that being first, in anything and particularly when it involves your sexuality, takes tremendous courage. It almost seems to dismiss what actually happens to the people who do it. 

There’s no one before them to learn the right — or wrong — way to do it. And there is zero guarantee the locker room or the league or the fans will still be there for you and applaud you afterward. 

Every athlete who comes out later benefits from someone who has already cracked the proverbial ceiling and proved the sky didn’t fall upon them. The second person always has it a little easier than the first.

But in professional sports, even No. 2 and 3 still fear the worst — that they will lose support. So in theory, coming out as gay for any athlete is precarious, particularly in men’s sports. And as we all know, that’s a damn shame.

The much-beloved Jason Collins became the first openly gay active player in any of the four major U.S. men’s leagues in 2013, and that was more than a decade after Wicks had already done it in the WNBA. 

Sadly, he died in May at 47, after a battle with glioblastoma, and the outpouring afterward showed how much that single act of honesty had meant to people who never met him. But since Collins, no one has yet to step forward in the NBA while they still traverse the court.

Carl Nassib is the only other case, coming out with the Las Vegas Raiders in 2021 and retiring two years later. Since then, no active player in the NFL, NBA, MLB or NHL has publicly come out.

That gap, with an WNBA All-Star roster stacked with out players this weekend, against major men’s leagues that have had exactly two in their history, says less about who is or isn’t gay in professional sports than about which environments have made it survivable to say so.

It’s easy to forget that Wicks came out just a few years after Ellen DeGeneres did. In 1997, DeGeneres came out on the cover of Time and then again as her sitcom character on ABC’s “Ellen,” watched by roughly 42 million people. 

ABC slapped a parental advisory on every episode afterward, advertisers bolted, ratings collapsed, and the show was canceled within a year. DeGeneres has said she lost her career overnight.

That was, for the most part, the culture when Wicks came out, and it was still an improvement on what Billie Jean King faced two decades earlier. King didn’t choose her own timeline; she was outed in 1981 by a former partner’s lawsuit, and lost an estimated $2 million in endorsements within 24 hours. 

She’s said she didn’t feel comfortable in her own skin about being gay until 51, after years of therapy, shaped by a society not that far removed from classifying homosexuality as a mental illness. 

Set against that backdrop, Wicks being New York blunt with a reporter in 2002 took real guts.

None of this diminishes the players taking the court Saturday, because if you think about it, nobody hands you comfort in your own identity, no matter who came before you. 

But amid the pride nights, the rainbow branding and the record number of out All-Stars, it’s worth remembering the WNBA’s impressive history. It occurred because one player, mid-championship-run nearly a quarter-century ago, answered a question she could have passed on to somebody else.

Wicks left basketball after that 2002 season and built a second career on Long Island’s waters, where she now runs Violet Cove Oyster Co. in Moriches Bay, and became the state’s first licensed commercial kelp farmer along the way. 

Earlier this month, more than two decades after that interview, she was inducted into the LGBTQ Sports Hall of Fame. 

Saturday night in Chicago, when a record number of out players take the United Center floor, they can thank a gutsy Sue Wicks for a metaphorical clear out.

Subscribe to the Outsports newsletter to keep up with your favorite out athletes, inspiring LGBTQ sports stories, and more.