Coming Out to Play, page 15
The season was just about over with Stevenage. I’d been injured a lot, hardly played, my mind was elsewhere, and whatever dreams I’d had of using my time with Stevenage as a way back into the Championship League had evaporated. Because I’d played so infrequently, I had no opportunity to demonstrate what I was capable of doing. Instead, the only thing I’d managed to do during my few months with Stevenage was demonstrate how prone I was to injury. All I could focus on now was coming out and getting as far away from soccer as possible.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t just walk away, because I was still under contract to Leeds United. Getting out of my contract was something my agent, Shaun Higgins, was going to have to help me with, so I sent him an email and said, “We need to have a serious talk.” I was so nervous about telling Shaun I was gay that it never occurred to me that based on the tone of my email he might have thought I was going to fire him (which was what he told me later he’d feared). Even though I’d come out to two dozen people by then, when I sat down with Shaun a few days later at a coffee shop near Covent Garden, I was scared and sweaty and jittery and hyper-aware of everything going on around me. It was like I was about to be eaten alive by some creature I couldn’t see.
I knew that once I could get the conversation started I’d be okay, but it was the anticipation that left me agitated and with a cramp in my stomach. You would think that, given the fact I hadn’t had a single bad reaction up to now, I wouldn’t have been such a mess, but I was still afraid of how Shaun might react. He could say something awful or he might not understand, and that terrified me. It was that way with everyone I’d come out to.
As soon as Shaun walked into the coffee shop I gave him a hug—I’d known him since I was fourteen, and when we were younger we’d played on the Orange County Blue Star together, so he was a friend, too. At first we talked about random things like my injuries and my family. Then I took a deep breath and told him I was gay. I explained that I’d told my parents and that I wanted him to talk with Leeds because I wanted out of my contract.
I was relieved when the first thing Shaun said was “It doesn’t matter to me.” Then he said he was sorry and that he wished he could have helped me when I was younger. But what he said next made me think he didn’t get what I was going through. He said, “You should continue to play.” At first I was angry because he didn’t understand. And to be fair, he wasn’t gay, so how could he know what a living hell my life had been?
So I tried explaining. I asked Shaun to imagine what it would be like going back into the locker room or going out on the field once everyone knew I was gay. What scared me most was the thought of being in the locker room and being treated differently, that my teammates would walk on eggshells and treat me like an outcast. I told him I was worried that my teammates would be afraid to shower with me or they’d walk out of the shower room when I walked in. The thought of going into an environment with my teammates where no one wanted to be with me scared the shit out of me.
I’d worked so hard to fit in, and now I could easily imagine being frozen out. If I’d been playing for a U.S. team I’m not sure I would have been as afraid, but given what soccer is like in the UK, I felt certain it would be a bad situation for me. Then I talked to Shaun about how difficult it had been for me hiding all those years. And I said that I needed time to figure out how to be myself, as a gay man, away from soccer and out of the spotlight.
Maybe I wasn’t good at explaining myself or maybe my experience was just too unknowable for Shaun, but two or three more times during our conversation he told me that I should keep playing. I know it was coming from a good place, but I just wanted to tell Shaun to “shut the fuck up.” Instead I said as firmly as I could, “I’m done. You need to talk to Leeds.”
You might think that after all of the hard work, all the training, the highs and lows, the championships, the cheering fans, and all the strokes I got from my family and friends for being Robbie Rogers the professional soccer player, I might have felt a moment’s regret when Shaun called me to tell me it was done, that I was no longer under contract to Leeds. Not a single regret, at least not then. I was just focused on enjoying my life in London, spending time with Scott and my friends, and learning about magazine publishing at my new internship in the fashion department at Men’s Health magazine.
One thing I had to do, if I was going to go back to school to study fashion as I’d said I wanted to, was submit my application for the London College of Fashion. It turned out to be a much more challenging process than I’d expected. I already had experience with fabrics and fit because of my work with Halsey, but that wasn’t nearly enough. They wanted me to prove that I was creative, too. So I had to demonstrate that I could sketch and develop mood boards. (A mood board is a collage of images and colors that you use as inspiration to create your clothing line.)
I wound up having a total of three interviews in which I presented my mood boards, and each time the interviewer (who was the same person each time) asked me to do some more work and come back again. One of my mood boards was based on the architecture of New York City, and I used conflicting patterns made up of different styles of building windows. For my other mood board I used a lot of African patterns and colors and played with different kinds of flowers, with an eye toward creating a clothing line that was structured but colorful.
The whole experience of applying to school was scary, and I was especially nervous for the interviews, because I’d never been interviewed like that before and I really wanted to be accepted. I loved the creative process and was eager to get started on the next phase of my life. But by the time the acceptance letter came two months later, I’d upended my own plans to step out of the spotlight and found myself at the center of a full-scale media storm. And I can tell you that no one from CNN wanted to interview me about my inspiring mood boards.
Around the same time back in December that I was working on my mood boards for the fashion school application, a friend introduced me to Nick Mulholland, a public relations guy at one of the biggest PR companies in the UK, to get advice on whether to make some sort of public statement about being gay or to just let the word seep out organically over time. I met with Nick at his office and told him everything about my story and explained that I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. He suggested that I do some writing, just put my thoughts down on paper and think about the kinds of questions I’d likely get from the media and how I might answer them.
So I took Nick’s advice and a few days later sat down at my computer and created a file called “LetterOfLife,” and wrote straight through without stopping to change anything. I wrote the letter mostly for myself because it helped me get some things off my chest that I wanted to share with people who might have known me but had no idea what I’d been struggling with. Here’s what I wrote:
The Next Chapter . . .
Things are never what they seem . . . My whole life I have felt different, different from my peers, even different from my family. In today’s society being different makes you brave. To overcome your fears you must be strong and have faith in your purpose.
For the past 25 years I have been afraid, afraid to show whom I really was because of fear. Fear that judgment and rejection would hold me back from my dreams and aspirations. Fear that my loved ones would be farthest from me if they knew my secret. Fear that my secret would get in the way of my dreams.
Dreams of going to a World Cup, dreams of The Olympics, dreams of making my family proud. What would life be without these dreams? Could I live a life without them?
Life is only complete when your loved ones know you. When they know your true feelings, when they know who and how you love. Life is simple when your secret is gone. Gone is the pain that lurks in the stomach at work, the pain from avoiding questions, and at last the pain from hiding such a deep secret.
Secrets can cause so much internal damage. People love to preach about honesty, how honesty is so plain and simple. Try explaining to your loved ones after 25 years you are gay. Try convincing yourself that your creator has the most wonderful purpose for you even though you were taught differently.
I always thought I could hide this secret. Football was my escape, my purpose, my identity. Football hid my secret, gave me more joy than I could have ever imagined . . . I will always be thankful for my career. I will remember Beijing, The MLS Cup, and most of all my teammates. I will never forget the friends I have made along the way and the friends that supported me once they knew my secret.
Now is my time to step away. It’s time to discover myself away from football. It’s 1 A.M. in London as I write this and I could not be happier with my decision. Life is so full of amazing things. I realized I could only truly enjoy my life once I was honest. Honesty is a bitch but makes life so simple and clear. My secret is gone, I am a free man, I can move on and live my life as my creator intended.
Before closing my computer I read through the letter once and remember thinking that if I ever did anything with it I’d better have my sister Katie read it first to fix the punctuation and grammar. She’s the writer in our family. But for now I was content to let the letter sit on my desktop as I went about my life in London.
About two months later, on February 15, 2013, I was at home with Scott talking with him about whether I should come out and make a statement or not. A lot had changed in those two months, both for me personally and for gay people in general. And while my focus was very much on myself, my relationship with Scott, and living my newly liberated life, I was aware of the dramatic political and social shifts under way in attitudes toward gay people and marriage equality in the United States, the UK, and across the Western world.
In the United States, 2013 began with President Obama embracing marriage equality in both his inaugural address and State of the Union speech, which was extraordinary from a historical perspective, but to me it just seemed like the right thing to do. What felt so hopeful about the President’s support and the other efforts I was hearing about was that the world was opening for people like me, even if the world of men’s professional sports remained something of a throwback when it came to the inclusion of openly gay athletes.
The biggest change for me personally was that it had become clear to me by early February that Scott and I had different ideas about what our relationship was going to be. He wasn’t someone who was all that expressive about his feelings, but after spending a few months getting to know each other and spending a lot of time together he wanted to know where I saw our relationship going, because he was ready for some kind of commitment. The problem for me was that I didn’t share Scott’s wish. I said, “Honestly, I don’t know, I love spending time with you, and you’re great, I’m attracted to you, but I’ve just come out and, besides, I’m going home for the summer.” I think I surprised myself by how direct I was, because being direct about anything involving my emotions was something still so new for me.
Scott knew I was planning to return to London to go to school in September, but there were still so many question marks for me about my life. I explained to Scott that, having just come out, I wanted to explore being gay and wasn’t nearly ready to settle down. I then said something that I’ve since learned is a total cliché, but was something I really felt in my heart. I said, “Even if we’re not dating we need to be friends.” And very reasonably he responded, “It might be too hard for me.” I said, “Well, let’s try.” So we did.
It was soon after our conversation that we were at the dinner table at my place talking about whether I should make some sort of statement. By that time I think Scott was growing bored with my back-and-forth, indecisive one-man debate. I asked him, “Do you think I should say something one day?” And he said, a bit impatiently, “Say it or don’t, but whatever!” I’d never shown Scott the letter I’d written and saved on my desktop, so I showed it to him. He read it and got really emotional and said, “This is really good.” I think, like anyone who is gay and had to struggle as they came to terms with their sexuality, he could relate to my struggle and it reminded him of what he’d lived through.
Scott said the letter was perfect, that he wouldn’t change a word, and that I should post it. I thought he was messing with me, but he assured me that he wasn’t. There was something about how he reacted, in combination with my wish to tell more people that I was gay and that I was finished with soccer, that gave me the confidence to press the button on my computer to post the letter to my blog. Then I went to my Twitter account (I had eighty thousand followers back then) and tweeted: “Getting some shit off my chest,” and included a link to the letter.
I had two competing thoughts immediately after posting my letter. First, I thought, Oh, shit, now everyone will know. And almost simultaneously I felt, Everyone will know and now I am free. I had no way of knowing how people would react, but I figured it would be both positive and negative. But mostly it just felt so good to be out from under the “Big Lie.” I felt light, like I could start fresh now that I’d shared what my struggle had been. I had nothing to hide anymore, so it was done. Right after I pressed “Enter” and posted the letter I turned off my phone, put away my laptop, and Scott and I went out for some drinks at Shoreditch House, a club in London.
In retrospect, this was another one of those moments when I chose not to think about the potential impact—on me or anyone else—of what I’d just done. Did it occur to me that I still wasn’t out to my grandparents? Had I considered that people in the media might have a few questions for me and when they couldn’t find me they’d be on my sister Alicia’s doorstep first thing in the morning? Did I think to talk to my mom to give her a heads-up that I’d decided to make a public statement and she’d better call her parents if she wanted to get to them before the New York Times or ESPN did? No. None of it. But to be fair to myself, I also had no idea of the kind of media feeding frenzy I’d unleash by sharing publicly my deeply personal feelings about so much that I’d wanted to get off my chest for so long.
While we were having drinks, Scott couldn’t resist checking Twitter and said that the reaction was crazy. Good, but crazy. I said I didn’t want to look, so he put away his phone and we headed to Pizza East for some pizza.
It wasn’t until the next day, after Scott and I had arrived in Brighton on the southern coast of England to run a half marathon, that I turned on my phone and immediately had a call from my mother. And she was mad! It hadn’t occurred to me that because I went on radio silence reporters would understandably seek out those closest to me for their reactions, and the first two people they found were my mom and Alicia. Here’s my mother’s memory of what happened:
I had just come out of a meeting and I had all these messages on my phone from people in the media asking me to comment on Robbie’s letter, which I’d never seen. The last I heard from Robbie he’d said he wasn’t going to say anything to anybody. And now he’d sent out this incredible, heartfelt message to the entire world and we weren’t told about it. I tried to reach Robbie, but his phone was off.
My first thought was that I had to get to my parents before CNN showed up at their door, because I didn’t want them finding out from a stranger that Robbie was gay. So I canceled out my office day, grabbed a copy of the letter Robbie had sent to me when he first told me he was gay, and drove down to my parents. And the whole time my phone is ringing off the hook.
I finally get to their house and sit my parents down and say, “Mom, you’re a mother. Dad, you’re a father. I want to read you something my son sent me,” and I read them Robbie’s letter. We all cried. My mother said, “Are you kidding me? Do you think I care if Obbie Ogers is gay? He’s my grandson. I love him.”
I was so relieved by how my parents embraced Robbie without a moment’s hesitation, but the whole thing felt like such a betrayal, like Robbie had thrown his family under the bus without thinking.
It wasn’t just my mom who was angry. Alicia was furious with me. This is what she remembers:
Here I was, laid out in bed sick, and so sick that I’ve called in sick to work. I’m thirty pounds heavier than I normally would be, just a pregnant wreck. And I get a call from the hospital with a message that the New York Times called and wants to speak with me. I guessed it was about Robbie, but I had no idea what was going on.
Within minutes of that call there’s a knock at the door, and I get myself out of bed and answer it and there’s some random reporter staring at me. I closed the door on him and locked it. I got my mother on the phone and she told me what happened and I thought, What a selfish prick! I kept your secret. I’m here for you no matter what. But then you expose me and our entire family without any warning.
When I calmed down and had the chance to think, it occurred to me that maybe the reason Robbie didn’t ask me in advance what I thought was because he was worried I would talk him out of it, or worried that I’d say, “Robbie, you said you didn’t want to be the gay poster boy,” and maybe I would question him. Robbie can be very stubborn and when he makes up his mind about something, he needs to jump. But it was just so incredibly selfish, as if my life was not important.
My mother and sister were both right. What I did was incredibly selfish. But that didn’t keep me from being defensive, at least at first, because I felt they weren’t being considerate of me and what I’d been through for all those years. So when my mother told me she was mad at me because I didn’t warn her and that she was getting questions from reporters who had the impression from my letter that my family wasn’t supportive of me, I got mad right back. I said, “Well, Mom, actually it was hard growing up and you guys aren’t the most gay-friendly people I know of. And there’s a reason I’m like this—that I’m so fearful, and that it took me so long to come out. So think about me for a second.” Mom was silent for a moment and then said, “Okay, true.” But while that was true, what the letter didn’t reflect, because it was two months old, was that my family had really rallied around me in the weeks since I’d first written it. The next day, once I’d cooled off, I tweeted a note about how amazingly supportive my family had been and how much I loved them.
