Gay Houston Rockets exec Clay Allen forges path in sports, with assist from his gay twin brother

Clay Allen’s life has been marked by a series of uncanny parallels.

He grew up a mile away from his favorite NBA team, the Houston Rockets, and wound up working for them in several roles. He started as a minimum-wage marketing employee tossing T-shirts during timeouts, rising steadily to become the general counsel of the Rockets and the Toyota Center.

He also has an identical twin brother, Thain, who also happens to be gay, and referred Clay’s coming out social media post to Outsports back in 2021.  Clay Allen has worked to capitalize on all of these parallels on his journey to becoming one of the most prominent out executives in sports and No. 11 on the Outsports 2025 Power100 list. 

Throughout his life, Allen, 46, has navigated a family divided by divorce, his own coming out 10 years after Thain’s and the lack of representation in his career during his coming out process.

Allen’s journey to coming out within his personal and professional lives has been a series of careful deliberations.

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

Sibling bond

The twins grew up in Houston in a sports-loving family with four other siblings.  The twins were close and followed each other through their lives from childhood through post-college adulthood, until the point of coming out. 

“My brother and I were always really close growing up: Identical twins, grew up in the same bedroom,” Clay Allen said. “We went to college together, shared the same dorm room for the first two years…But we didn’t really talk about romantic relationships.” 

Though Allen knew he was gay from a young age, he and Thain did not come out until they were older, with Thain coming out right after college, and Clay waiting 10 years later.

During the period where Thain was out and Clay wasn’t, it was an awkward time for Clay because he used the false identity of “straight” twin as a signifier for the public to tell them apart. 

Related

Top 50 most powerful LGBTQ people in sports for 2025 highlighted on Power 100
These Top 50 of the Outsports Power 100 are the most powerful and influential out LGBTQ people in American sports.

Houston Rockets promote Clay Allen, who is openly gay, as general counsel
Clay Allen started with the Rockets 20 years ago and is now their lead counsel. He has a twin brother, also gay.

“Our coming out journeys are a lot different,” Clay said. “I hadn’t been in a relationship with a guy before, so I was not ready to come out myself.  So it just put me in a weird situation where now, to tell us apart, we would be the gay twin and the straight twin.  And it put me in a weird position for a long time, and I was like, ‘Man, this is going to make it harder to come out, because now I’m the straight twin.’ But it just wasn’t time for me to come out.”

Ultimately, Clay was able to observe the different reactions to his brother’s coming out from both sides of his divorced parents. 

“My dad’s side of the family is from South Texas, and when my twin brother came out, it was tough on my dad’s side of the family — a very religious and conservative family,” Clay said. 

“I can remember my dad calling me upset, saying that he didn’t agree with it, that there’s counseling for things like this, and it put me in another awkward situation.  But over the years, my dad and my stepmom got used to the idea of my brother being gay and accepted my brother’s husband into the family.

“I came out years later, but by then, my twin brother had done all the hard work for me.”

 Though Clay got to observe the reactions — both positive and negative — that his brother went through, it served as both a fear-inducing, yet reassuring mechanism in his own coming-out process. 

“It was tough on me,” he said. “It definitely made me think what it would be like when I came out, and I think maybe even more reluctant at that time to come out. …  I’m definitely grateful for my brother to kind of forge a path for me.” 

Scarcity in sports

While Clay knew he was gay from a young age, it didn’t significantly impact his sports participation.  It wasn’t until he began working in the professional sports field that he realized the lack of LGBTQ representation in sports, both front-office and among the players. 

 “This is in the ‘90s, so nobody really talked about famous gay people at all,” Allen said. “I didn’t play sports at the high school level, so I didn’t really run into the homophobia that you see in locker rooms…But to be honest, I don’t really think [lack of gay representation] crossed my mind until I started working in the sports field and realized how few out athletes there are, and how few out people in the front office there are.” 

Allen, who lives with his partner, Jimmy Doan, in Houston, started working for the Rockets before law school, working in their marketing and special events department for six years.  He got the job after Thain encouraged him to apply for the position.  “I think back then … I wasn’t out, so I don’t know that it bothered me that much,” he said.

“But I think it was later on in my career, when you started hearing about [NBA players] coming out — Jason Collins and John Amaechi — and realizing they were the first ever, and I was thinking, ‘How can it be the 2000s, and there had never been a gay NBA player?  Or a gay baseball player?’ I think that’s when it started clicking to me that there was a big lack of representation.”

After a stint at a law firm, Allen returned to the Rockets in 2013, and he ultimately was promoted to the general counsel of the team and Toyota Center in 2021. 

 “When I came back to the Rockets in 2013, it was immediately clear to me that not only were there not out gay athletes, there weren’t a lot of out gay professionals in sports either,” Allen said. “For a long time, I was the only gay employee at the Rockets.  We’ve got a few now, but definitely a small number compared to what the population is.”

When he decided to come out personally and professionally, he wrote an email to close family and friends and posted a coming-out story on social media.  He received minimal reactions at work (none were negative), though a few close work friends directly acknowledged his coming out and praised his bravery. 

After he was promoted to general counsel, it was generally known that he was an out gay man, and he viewed the promotion as a way to further make a statement about the visibility of being a prominent gay figure in sports. 

Seeing the possibilities for LGBTQ people in sports

“When I got promoted to GC in 2021…I knew that that was my opportunity to make a statement about being gay and working in sports.  And my hope was that other young people who wanted to work in sports saw my story and saw that it was possible that he can work in sports.  So I wrote a LinkedIn post about my promotion…with a paragraph in it about how important it was to me to let people know that I was gay, and that, you know, gay people have had the opportunity in sports, and they can look at my story and see that something like this is possible.”

When asked about why front offices of sports leagues lack gay representation, Allen offers several theories.

“I think sports in general can be kind of stereotypical,” he said. “I mean, even in the front office, it’s not like a locker room or anything, but I think a lot of people who are sports fans are kind of viewed as more masculine or more manly. 

“I think it’s possible that gay people just don’t see a spot for them, don’t feel like they’d fit in, or are more willing to look for careers where they feel like they could fit in a little bit better, be part of an organization that would be more accepting to them. 

“If you played high school or college sports and were confronted with homophobia in the locker room, that might have turned you off from sports. Some former athletes might not be interested in working in sports because they saw how the athletes acted toward them when they were younger. I don’t know that there’s one single answer on why there are so few gay people working in sports.

 “It helps to see important, powerful gay people in sports: Dallas Mavericks President Rick Welts (No. 1 on Outsports’ Power 100), USTA President Brian Vahaly, me as general counsel, Peter Lovins [general counsel of the NHL’s Columbus Blue Jackets].  …I think also that kind of the movement toward DEI in the organization has helped.”

He does see things improving, at least at the Rockets.

 “It’s definitely getting better,” Allen said. “I see it here at the organization. We’ve got more gay people working here. We have a Pride Night every year. They participate in the Pride parade every year.”  

He advises aspiring LGBTQ individuals in sports not to see their sexuality as a roadblock and to reach out to people already in the industry for guidance.  He emphasizes the importance of networking and finding mentors who can help kickstart their careers. 

“People end up — whether it’s purposeful or not — hiring people that they can relate to,” he said. “And so if there’s not a lot of gay people in sports, then gay people getting hired into sports roles are less likely.  But as more and more LGBTQ people are working in sports, I think they’re hiring other LGBTQ people because they can relate to them.”

Allen’s final takeaway is positive. “It is definitely possible to have a career as an out person in sports.” He is living proof.

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

The post Gay Houston Rockets exec Clay Allen forges path in sports, with assist from his gay twin brother appeared first on Outsports.