This college football captain came out as gay 26 years ago. He says visibility is still vital.

In 2000, Brian Sims did something that was almost unimaginable in college football: He was openly gay to his teammates while serving as co-captain of the Bloomsburg University football team in central Pennsylvania.

That was more than 25 years ago, and if the same thing happened today, it would still be big news.

Sims wasn’t a bench warmer. Quite the contrary. He was a starting defensive lineman, an All-Conference player and the leader of a team that would make an improbable run to the NCAA Division II national championship game. 

He came out to his teammates in the middle of that season, during a time when there were no social media posts, no public acknowledgement, and no openly gay male football player as an example he could follow.

It took nine years before Sims publicly told the story, when Outsports published his account in 2009. The response was enormous. Hundreds of athletes and former athletes contacted him, according to Sims, many looking for advice about their own sexuality and whether they could ever come out.

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

Former College Football Captain Was Openly Gay
Brian Sims led his Bloomsburg University team to the NCAA Division II Championship game while he was out to teammates.

Today, Sims is still having those conversations.

“All the time,” he replied when asked whether athletes still reach out to him about coming out. “At all levels. I suppose as the story grew more pervasive and more people heard it, I started to hear from younger athletes, high school athletes. I hear from college athletes all the time. I hear from professional athletes all the time, both here in the U.S. and overseas.”

It is one of the stranger aspects of Sims’ legacy. He came out more than a quarter-century ago, in the belief that simply being himself might make it easier for the athletes who followed. Sadly, few have followed his lead.

“I wasn’t thinking that, no,” Sims said when asked whether he imagined other athletes would follow his example. “When it happened, I was thinking about my world and my teammates and my life and my friendships and my family. I wasn’t at that time thinking about its impact on other people.”

Significant impact

Only later did he understand the significance of what had happened.

“By the time I went public, I certainly had had a lot of time to see how my coming out had impacted my friends and my teammates in their own lives, not just in their relationship with me,” he recalled.

What surprises him now is how much the story still matters.

“In 2009, I sure wasn’t thinking that 17 years later, 18 years later, that it would still matter as much, because there would have been so few out athletes at that level.”

Sims’ football career eventually led to a life in advocacy and politics. He went to law school, became an advocate for women’s and reproductive rights and, in 2012, ran for the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. When he won, he became the first openly LGBTQ legislator elected in Pennsylvania history.

But he doesn’t necessarily see politics as the inevitable destination of his coming out.

“Politics was not the fulfillment of a lifelong dream,” he explained. “Going to law school was, being an advocate, doing women’s and reproductive rights work. That was the dream for me.”

His football career, however, had already taught him something about leadership and responsibility.

“My teammates now, even now, will tell you that back then I was talking about equality, and I was talking about advocacy, and I was talking about having to stand up for people because we were big guys and because we were seen as right, even in situations where we often were not,” he said. “And that privilege also came with the responsibility to stand up for other people.”

‘I really miss the practices’

He still thinks about those football days. Just not necessarily the games.

“I really miss the practices,” Sims said. “A game is one day a week against, you know, people you don’t know, and while you’re not taught to hate them, you’re sure taught to want to defeat them. Whereas practice was every day with people you know well and your friends.”

The locker room, then, remains central to how Sims understands both his coming out and his work today.

He believes the resistance to LGBTQ acceptance in sports has become entangled with a renewed form of hypermasculinity.

“I think the rise of the sort of manosphere, bro-y Christian nationalism thing, I think has been more of the reason than I think a lot of people want to admit,” he said. “I think that there was this sort of backward, declining recommitment to machismo and a sort of lesser compassionate, a lesser thoughtful sort of approach to manhood and manliness that sort of men are suffering through right now.”

That makes his advice to athletes considering coming out particularly practical.

“Coming out is not about the amount of people that you tell,” Sims advised. “It’s about the quality of the people that you tell.”

If an athlete tells one trusted friend, he says, “you’ve come out.”

“The world doesn’t need to know all the time about everything that everyone’s doing,” he said. “When people are safe and have been able to come out publicly in ways that inspire others, I think that’s fantastic. But not everybody can.”

For Sims, the lessons of that 2000 football season have never really ended. They simply moved from the locker room into the rest of his life.

Sims’ life today is a far cry from that football field in Bloomsburg. He met his husband, Alex Drakos, during his final term in office, and the two were legally married on the Speaker’s Balcony at the Massachusetts State House in Boston before holding their wedding ceremony last September in Mystic, Conn. 

Now 48, Sims spends much of his time advising political candidates, advocacy organizations and corporations about the political risks of discrimination and ignoring human rights. 

And this month, he added another chapter to his career, joining the inaugural faculty of Vanderbilt University’s new New York campus as a professor of Culture, Advocacy & Leadership. For Sims, though, the through line remains the same: “What I know about humans I learned on a football field and in a locker room and, you know, sitting on a bench with teammates talking about life and bond.”

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