The topic of whether a gay player would be accepted in a NFL locker room is probably overblown. Players like teammates who can help them win. The rest is trivial.
This is shown by the 1993 Houston Oilers. The Houston Chronicle ran a tremendous oral history on that wild season and team (it’s excellent, check it out, as was the NFL Network’s “A Football Life” episode on the ’93 Oilers), and in it there’s a revelation that the Oilers had at least two gay players.
And nobody thought it was a big deal. Here are a couple of quotes from the Chronicle’s story:
To think that the 1993 Oilers are the only NFL team that had a gay player or two is naive. It has happened before, and it’s a good bet that players on other teams knew about it, as the 1993 Oilers did. No active NFL player has come out as gay (the gay players on the ’93 Oilers weren’t identified), but maybe that’s not as much about the locker room as we think. The outside attention from media and fans would be overwhelming.
But maybe it wouldn’t be all that big of a deal to the players on his team. It wasn’t in Houston 20 years ago.
