Robert Goman helped Nike embrace LGBTQ athletes, and he’s not done yet

Robert Goman didn’t have any intention of working in sports until he got recruited by Nike.

As if to underscore that, when he joined the athletic shoe titan, he didn’t even own a pair of Nikes.

By the time Goman left the company, he had brought the athleticwear company together with LGBTQ sports culture more closely than ever before.

Now he is the board chair of the Sports Equality Foundation, using education and visibility to advance LGBTQ inclusion in sports. The organization recently revived the LGBTQ Sports Hall of Fame.

For his work with SEF, and in acknowledgement of his groundbreaking career with Nike, Robert Goman is a 2025 Outsports Power 100 honoree.

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

Before all that, though, he had to reconnect with the sports world for the first time since he was in high school.

Related

Rising 50 highlights powerful LGBTQ up-and-comers and veterans in sports on Power 100
Outsports Power 100 this year features a Rising 50 of out LGBTQ people across sports who have power and influence.

Growing up gay and finding his sports home running

In the mid-1980s, Robert Goman attended school in Salinas Valley, a rural area in the central valley of California. Because he was tall and lanky, he was encouraged to try out for the basketball team on the very first day of his freshman year.

Although that didn’t take, Goman eventually joined cross-country and track & field, finding a comfort zone as a runner.

Goman was not out to anyone at the time, although he definitely knew he was gay. He found that participating in sports offered him cover among his peers not available to other closeted high schoolers.

“Athletics and being in sports kind of gave me a space. Because I was an athlete, I was also able to be in marching band and drama and not get harassed or teased or given any bit of a bad time,” Goman told Outsports.

A few years after graduation, Goman was outed to his parents and family at age 23. He had been living in the Bay Area and exploring The Castro on his own while learning to embrace his true self. Unbeknownst to him, an acquaintance had dropped by his parents’ house to let them know what he was doing in San Francisco.

On an ensuing visit home, his mother told Goman to talk to his dad. When Goman met his father, he found out that his parents knew he was gay.

“In the moment, it felt super horrible,” he said. “But for lack of better words, it crossed the bridge that needed to be crossed and kind of forced the conversations to be had. And I was very fortunate to have a very accepting family—parents and extended family—on all of that as we navigated that new space,” he remembered. 

Robert Goman’s career leads to Nike and Portland

Professionally speaking, Goman had spent years specializing in retail design for Gap Inc. when he was recruited to join Nike in 1997. With a nod to his experience, he was tasked with designing Niketown franchise stores in San Francisco. 

When he took the job, Goman casually followed Bay Area teams like the San Francisco Giants and 49ers, but he didn’t consider himself a sports fan. His new position inspired him to reconnect with that part of his personal history as he became immersed in his new company culture.

“It made me reflect back on what sport gave me in regard to confidence and what those athletic moments gave me in regards to team camaraderie and getting to know people and really working as a team. That was one thing about being at Nike that really translated because you were always working as a team,” he noted.

Designing and helping run the Bay Area Niketown outlet also brought Goman into contact with San Francisco sports icons like Jerry Rice and Steve Young. Nike was centering its brand around those stars but over time, Goman also noticed it was shifting to bring in more female athletes as well.

Still, at that moment, Goman couldn’t imagine Nike’s inclusive focus expanding to include LGBTQ athletes. He had friends who played in rec sports leagues and knew how important they were to the gay community.

Yet merging the gay scene with his professional life was still not on the radar in the late-90s.

Over time, Goman’s job description within the company grew to include supervising the design of several stores in the region. Then in 2002, he accepted a new position to oversee visual merchandising for all of North America which required him to relocate to Nike’s headquarters in Portland.

After Goman got established in his new location, he began running Nike’s LGBTQ employee resource group and managing the company’s representation at Portland Pride. In 2009, several higher ups were pitching ideas for the parade when the chief executive of operations mused, “Maybe we should do a shoe.”

With Goman’s help, those six words changed the direction of the entire company.

Using his background in retail marketing, Goman decided to use the company’s personalized shoe design platform to produce rainbow Pride sneakers and distribute them to his coworkers.

For the next few years, Nike’s ERG marched with Pride shoes along with a promotional van equipped with computers for parade-goers to design their own looks. It became a massive hit, even with those who were—to put it gently—not part of Nike’s typical target demo.

“The van is open and Mr. Leather Portland is creating a shoe. He’s in chaps, a sash, and he might even have a harness on. And he’s in there doing the whole thing. When I go back and look at it, I think, ‘My world has come together,’” Goman mused.

A sportswear company unveiling rainbow merch that wone over the king of leather daddies was an indication that Nike might have been onto something.

The birth of BETRUE

Goman also noticed that when Nike’s ERG marched, a lot of Pride attendees were asking, “Where can we get the shoes?” The question came up so often, he realized there might be enough demand to inspire the company to create an entire line of LGBTQ-inclusive shoes.

Nike had done one previous rainbow shoe that sold well on a small scale. Goman met with that shoe’s designer and decided to merge the Pride sneaker with a new hashtag that was making the rounds in a then-current Nike commercial aimed at college athletes.

That hashtag: #BETRUE.

Nike paired the Pride shoes with a line of #BETRUE merch and initially it was a minor success. In the beginning, Goman thought of #BETRUE simply as “a side hustle within the company.”

Then Jason Collins came out publicly in 2013. That June, Nike received a call from organizers at Boston Pride informing them that Collins was interested in wearing a #BETRUE t-shirt at The Hub’s parade. Goman used his retail connections to make sure Boston’s Nike reps hand-delivered a shirt to Collins that morning.

During the parade, Collins was photographed wearing his new rainbow #BeTrue shirt with an instantly recognizable Nike swoosh. That was the moment when Goman’s side hustle became a national phenomenon.

“That moment iconically shifted not only the narrative for athletes but the narrative for Nike as a company and what they were doing and who they were standing for and with,” he reflected.

It was also the beginning of a confluence between an LGBTQ inclusive marketing campaign and a wave of high profile athletes coming out publicly.

“We kind of hit the gay jackpot in sports” Goman noted, “Because Jason came out, Robbie Rogers came out, Brittney [Griner] came out. It just opened this space. And the beauty of it was the acceptance through the organization as a whole of how it felt. And it felt right. One of Nike’s big propositions was ‘Do the right thing’ and it was doing the right thing.”

Furthermore, as #BETRUE took off, it wasn’t just the high profile pro athletes who were driving its impact. 

Goman remembered that during one of Nike’s youth summits, a gay high school athlete spoke about being afraid to work out at his hometown gym for fear of being harassed. The young man eventually began wearing his #BETRUE shirt, found a comfort zone, and told Goman and his peers, “I feel like I have the Superman logo…#BETRUE makes me feel protected when I’m in that space.”

As Goman summed up the campaign’s impact, “It was almost mind boggling about the closet doors it opened up. Because it suddenly presented a freedom for some athletes to finally feel that they had protection.”

#BETRUE was a grassroots campaign and that gave the LGBTQ sports community the space to embrace it wholeheartedly without feeling like everything was coming from a slick marketing machine. That was the key to its success.

Related

The LGBTQ Sports Hall Of Fame returns with an upcoming slate of new inductees and a Vegas event
The LGBTQ Sports Hall Of Fame is making a big comeback, with big plans, new honorees coming soon and a new organization.

Leading the Sports Equality Foundation

After 23 years with the company, Goman eventually left Nike when the shutdown in 2020 led to an organizational restructuring. He decided to use his free time to pursue another longtime passion: interior design.

Together with his husband, Jeff, Goman founded E. Rigby Studios. Named after The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby,” Goman exclaimed, “It’s as gay as gay can be!”

They two spent a few years running the company as a side hustle to find a sense of purpose as the country emerged from the early 2020s, and it continues to operate to this day.

Then in 2023, Goman rejoined the professional ranks in a visual merchandising role for Tailor Brands, the owner of Men’s Wearhouse and Joseph A. Bank. He and Jeff have been married since 2018 and live together in the Portland suburbs with their two dogs—also named Eleanor and Rigby.

Goman was also part of a group of LGBTQ people across sports that resurrected the Sports Equality Foundation. Goman was named chairman of the board, as the organization continues to build outreach and provide resources for people to create LGBTQ spaces in sports. They’ve had a

He is happy to be in his current space both personally and professionally. Just as importantly, Goman is comfortable with the legacy he left at Nike and what #BeTrue means for the future of LGBTQ inclusion in the athletic world.

“It has left its mark in history in sports. We’ve seen it on different athletes, we’ve seen it on different sports teams, we’ve been celebrated, and we’ve been honored,” he said, “It’s truly a body of work that I will always be very proud of and I think that as long as we can continue to do the work for the sports community, it will be successful and we will not stop.”

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

The post Robert Goman helped Nike embrace LGBTQ athletes, and he’s not done yet appeared first on Outsports.