News :: GLBT
Pioneering gay student athlete says schools must protect all students by Ethan Jacobs
staff reporterThursday May 7, 2009 Ten years after drawing national attention for coming out while serving as co-captain of his high school football team, Middleton native Corey Johnson told attendees at the annual conference of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network of Boston (GLSEN Boston), that his own visit to the conference a decade ago was instrumental in his decision to come out publicly.
Speaking to a crowd of youth, teachers and administrators gathered at Jamaica Plain’s English High School on May 1 Johnson recalled traveling to that year’s conference on the Tufts University campus on a bus with his school’s gay/straight alliance (GSA), but the Masconomet Regional High School student sat as far away from the GSA kids as possible for fear that people would think he was gay. Yet arriving at the conference completely changed his perspective.
"I remember I was so amazed at how many people -- teachers, young people -- were there, and how they were living their lives openly and honestly and were well-adjusted and happy. And I immediately had this overwhelming sense that that was what I wanted for myself," said Johnson, who currently lives in New York City and works for a Wall Street real estate firm.
Johnson’s story -- first reported nine years ago in Bay Windows and eventually landing on the cover of the New York Times and featured on the television newsmagazine 20/20 -- attracted media attention in large part because of how little controversy it generated. Johnson’s family, his coach, his teammates and his fellow students all rallied around him after he came out, and his story was viewed as evidence of the growing acceptance of gay people in mainstream America.
Yet Johnson pointed out that 10 years later, a very different kind of story was making headlines: the suicide last month of 11-year-old Carl Walker-Hoover of Springfield. Walker-Hoover’s mother has said she believes one of the primary factors that prompted him to hang himself was the bullying he endured from classmates, including taunts from students who accused him of being gay. Like Johnson, Walker-Hoover played football, but while Johnson was the popular, masculine team captain, Walker-Hoover was allegedly teased by his classmates for being sensitive.
"I was a gender-conforming young man in middle school and high school that luckily in many ways was in a position o privilege, and that really helped me in my coming out, helped me in my acceptance," said Johnson. "The reports we’ve seen of this young man [are] even though he was on the football team, he was 11 years old, he was in many ways gender non-conforming. He was in many ways not the young African American masculine image that many people had expected or society had wanted from him, and that was the reason why he was bullied. He was bullied because he was being himself, and he wasn’t accepted for that. I think part of our focus needs to be, and this is GLSEN’s mission, is making schools safe for all students, not just captains of the football team, but to any student, regardless of what position they hold in a school."
Nine years after his own coming out story broke new ground for LGBT people in the athletic world, there have been few if any other high profile stories about student athletes coming out while competing. But Johnson believes that more and more students are coming out, they’re just not attracting the same level of media coverage as he did.
"I think that it is happening," he told Bay Windows after he spoke. "Every couple months I look [on the LGBT sports website Outsports] and there are some really good stories about young people at universities and high schools coming out," said Johnson. "Part of it was timing. I came out, my story was publicized just a year, year and a half after Matthew Shepard was murdered, and the country at the time was yearning for a positive story with so much anti-gay stuff going on at the time, post-Defense of Marriage Act, all that stuff. And so my story was a positive story, and it was iconoclastic, with the small-town football player. So I think people wanted to have a positive story and relate to that."
Ethan Jacobs can be reached at ejacobs@baywindows.com
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