CNN news 2013-04-08 加文本

cnn news 2013-04-08

Words tonight that pro football may be reaching a pivotal moment. One of the sport's most outspoken advocates for equal rights for gay and lesbian Americans, former Baltimore Ravens linebacker, Brendon Ayanbadejo, says as many as four gay NFL players may be considering coming out publicly on the same day, current players, not retired athletes.

He told the "Baltimore Sun" it could happen sooner than anyone thinks. If it does, it would be ground-breaking, obviously. Right now, there are no openly gay players currently in the ranks of pro football, baseball, basketball.

Ayanbadejo's prediction comes a day after he was cut from the Ravens. I'm very pleased that he joins me now tonight. Brendon, it's great to have you on the program.

Thanks for having me on.

So first of all, let's talk about you being cut. Do you believe this has anything to do with your advocacy?

No, absolutely not. The Ravens have been supporting my advocacy since 2009 and they've actually facilitated me hooking up with marriage equality supporters in Maryland and basically helping everything that I've done in Maryland for marriage equality and LGBT rights. So in no way, shape or form, have they ever not encouraged me to be myself and to keep helping the LGBT community.

It's really rare, I mean, not only to have a sports figure of your stature but also a straight person be such an ally to gay and lesbian Americans and trans-gender Americans. What, did you have a personal evolution on this issue? I I mean, was there a day you suddenly, I mean when, did you always feel this way, or … ?

I would have to say I always felt this way growing up in Santa Cruz, California. But, you know, to me, this issue is very personal. To me this is a fight we fought before. This is loving versus Virginia in the '60s.

They're trying to tell us who we can and can't love. The government shouldn't dictate that. My father would not have been allowed to marry my mother in the '60s so luckily I'm a child of the '70s and so we're fighting the same fight now in 2013.

You see this as a continuum of the civil rights struggle.

This is an LGBT rights, this is equal rights. Yes.

Yeah, I mean, I usually try to use the term not gay rights because it makes it sound like some sort of special rights. It's equal rights.

Absolutely.

OK, you said that there may be four gay NFL players right now who are considering coming out. Obviously, you're not going to name them or anything like that but do you know these people?

No, actually, what it is, there are organizations that I'm in contact with and there are individuals that I'm in contact with and collectively we know of some gay players and these players, some of them are anonymous, some of them we know who they are but their identity is super-secret and nobody wants to reveal who they are.

And some of them, they don't want to reveal who they are rightfully so because it's entirely up to them what they are going to do. What we want to facilitate is getting them all together so they can lean on each other, so they can have a support group and potentially it's possible.

It's fathomable that they could possibly do something together and break a story together, and one of them had voiced that he would like to break his story with somebody else and not do it alone and that's all I'm saying.

And, you know, whether it's one person that wants to do it or two people that want to do it, not all of these athletes are even in the NFL. They are in other sports as well. So ….

How do you think the response would be? I mean, I guess among fans in the locker room, you can't generalize, of course, but we have heard, you know, some statements recently from some players saying it would be a distraction. It would be selfish for a player to come out on a team.

Yeah, well, I think ideally what we're trying to do is we're trying to get to a point where we're past talking about inclusiveness in sports and LGBT rights, kind of how we're past talking about racism in the locker room. It's a thing of the past. It's something that we don't even address or consider, even think about racism in the locker room.

So I think we're trying to get to that point and ideally have a trickledown effect into younger people and into children so that's what we're trying to do. Of course, we're gonna to have to break some barriers to get there and we're gonna have to, you know, sit down and we're gonna talk about this.

And we're gonna have to hash things out and at the end of the day, everyone's gonna will have to accept it whether they like it or not because it's the right thing to do. So, we're trying to get past the issue but we have to get there first and of course, we have a lot of work ahead of us.