Jason Collins opened a door. Many LGBTQ athletes still don’t feel safe walking through it more than a decade later

By Eryn Mathewson, CNN

(CNN) — Sometimes the hardest news comes at the end of the day.

Late afternoon on May 12, NBA commissioner Adam Silver announced that former NBA player and LGBTQ advocate Jason Collins had died. The 47-year-old had been battling stage 4 glioblastoma, an aggressive and often terminal form of brain cancer, for eight months.

In December, Collins opened up about his treatment and the support he received from his husband, Brunson Green and his family on Instagram.

Collins made history when he came out in 2013, becoming the first active player in the NBA – and in any of the four major men’s professional sports leagues in the US – to come out as gay.

Since his death, tributes have poured in from league executives, activists and athletes across professional sports.

Major League Soccer player Collin Martin called Collins a trailblazer and told USA Today that “without him, I don’t know if the rest of us that came out after him, if it would have been as easy.”

Chris Mosier, an eight-time Team USA competitor and the first known transgender man to represent the United States in international competition, described Collins as “a big brother.”

“Beyond being a great athlete and a ‘first,’ he was a dear friend, husband, brother and son,” Mosier wrote on Instagram. “His smile not only lit up a room, it stayed with your soul long after you left his presence.”

But more than a decade after this groundbreaking announcement, he remains the only active NBA player to say publicly that he is gay.

In 2026, the sports world is grappling with how and whether to support LGBTQ athletes — especially those who compete in men’s sports or athletes who are transgender.

The Door He Opened

The night after Collins died, Charles Barkley reflected on Collins’ decision to come out and the broader culture surrounding LGBTQ athletes.

“Anybody who thinks we ain’t got a bunch of gay players in all sports, they’re just stupid,” Barkley said. “But there is such animosity toward the gay community, and that’s what’s really unfortunate.”

The comments resonated with Hudson Taylor, a former collegiate wrestler and founder of Athlete Ally, a nonprofit working to make sports more inclusive for LGBTQ athletes.

Taylor worked with Collins on several of the NBA’s LGBTQ inclusion efforts, including encouraging player participation in Pride Nights. They led trainings for incoming NBA players and were part of conversations that helped push the league to move the 2017 All-Star Game out of North Carolina because of the state’s controversial, anti-trans HB2 “bathroom bill.”

“For a closeted athlete, there is a calculation going on between the risk of coming out and the reward of being your authentic self,” Taylor told CNN. “The risk is maybe I won’t get my contract renewed. Maybe I’ll get fewer sponsorships. Maybe my family is kind of homophobic, and they won’t love me as much.”

Taylor said the NBA has been consistent in both its public support for the LGBTQ community and in addressing locker room culture proactively. But he says institutional support does not automatically translate into athletes feeling safe enough to be open about who they are.

For many athletes, Taylor said, conversations around LGBTQ inclusion are shaped not only by league policies, but also by questions around faith, family and even how to navigate a locker room or shower around an out teammate. He said Collins’ voice was helpful here.

“One of Jason’s strengths has always been to educate with a sense of humor and grace. He really just did a beautiful job helping guide them [players] through those really hard, challenging conversations.”

Still, he says, coaches, owners and sponsors could do more to say, “It’s okay. I love you. I accept you. I got your back.”

“I’ve been really moved to see how much support Jason has gotten since his passing,” Taylor said. “But homophobia exists every single day. And every day we don’t address it is a day we allow that perceived risk to stay greater than the reward.”

What should inclusion look like?

Ashland Johnson, a policy attorney and founder of The Inclusion Playbook, agrees that athletes continue to weigh the risk and reward of coming out. After working with Athlete Ally and the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, she now advises leagues, sports governing bodies, and schools to help create more inclusive athletic spaces.

Johnson remembers Collins as happy, humble and “the biggest hero in the room.” She says he helped to usher in an era of visibility for LGBTQ athletes and broader conversations about identity and politics in and outside of sports.

Now, she says that era appears to have come to an end, at least in some places, as the current political climate is testing how committed leagues, teams and organizations truly are to inclusion.

“The people who have the power,” Johnson said, referring to leagues, owners, and sports associations, “should not put it all on the athletes to be the most courageous people in the room,” she told CNN.

Johnson praised the NBA for going beyond symbolic gestures and investing in broader LGBTQ inclusion efforts.

“They’re not just doing Pride Nights,” she said. “They’re pushing for LGBTQ inclusion, sometimes at the legislative level. They’re doing the education. It’s more than just marketing. It’s about structural change.”

At the same time, she points to what she sees as a scaling back of some Pride initiatives across sports – particularly among some NHL and NBA teams in conservative states. She also noted the NHL prohibited players from wearing Pride-themed or “specialty” warmups and Pride tape in 2023. The league later reversed its ban on Pride tape.

“It’s like an ‘all were welcome in sports’ night,” she said. “We’ve seen people pulling back because of the political pressure, and it’s not just in the sports space, it’s in every space.”

The NHL told CNN it remains committed and proud of its LGBTQ inclusion efforts, which range from Pride Night games to donations to LGBTQ+ organizations. A source with knowledge of the league’s internal considerations said the decision to discontinue specialty warmup jerseys was about internal consistency, not political pressure. (The source spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on behalf of the league.)

After a handful of players declined to wear Pride-themed jerseys — citing religious or personal beliefs — the league opted for uniformity: no themed warmup jerseys for any issue, for anyone. The source added that you can’t force people to do something they don’t want to do.

Both the NBA and NHL prohibit homophobic language and can discipline players for anti-gay slurs, while leaving decisions about Pride Nights and related initiatives to individual teams.

But tension persists. Of the thousands of athletes who have played in the NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB, only two active male players have come out as gay.

In 2021, Carl Nassib became the NFL’s first active openly gay player after spending five seasons in the league before his announcement. That same year, Luke Prokop became the first player under an NHL contract to come out as gay, though he has yet to appear in a regular-season game.

And while Michael Sam was out when he was drafted by the then-St. Louis Rams in 2014, he was cut months later and never played in a regular season NFL game.

Today, the political climate has grown increasingly hostile toward LGBTQ visibility and transgender rights, and leagues, players and advocates are still wrestling with LGBTQ inclusion: what happens when efforts to promote inclusion collide with players who do not want to participate in them? What happens to the team dynamic if participation is optional? And how far are leagues willing to go to match words of inclusion with action?

The first through the wall

ESPN’s Andscape columnist William C. Rhoden has covered athlete activism for decades. He called Collins courageous for coming out – then and now.

“Jason was a good player. He wasn’t a superstar, but he was a good player and had a solid career,” Rhoden told CNN. The announcement changed how Collins was viewed by the press and the public, he said.

“He stepped out of the ordinary. The idea of a male player coming out as gay was and still is significant news,” he said. “I guess the question is, when will it stop becoming news?”

“We thought that maybe when Jason Collins came out, it would begin a deluge of openness and more players coming out. But it has not.”

Collins first came out to friends and family in 2012, while playing for the Celtics. Same-sex marriage had been banned by the Defense of Marriage Act, and in many industries, it was considered very risky for a public person to disclose their sexuality if they were anything other than straight.

“I didn’t want to be first,” Collins recalled during a 2019 WorldPride event. “The first person through the wall is usually bloodied, and I don’t really want to be bloodied.”

Collins announced he was gay in a 2013 essay for Sports Illustrated, which began: “I’m a 34-year-old NBA center. I’m black. And I’m gay.” It was published about 10 days after now-WNBA star, Brittney Griner publicly came out during the WNBA Draft, which earned her much praise but little fanfare.

Collins received support from NBA leadership and some players, including Kobe Bryant, who tweeted: “Proud of @jasoncollins34. Don’t suffocate who u r because of the ignorance of others #courage #support #mambaarmystandup #BYOU.”

But not all reactions were positive. Notably, Larry Johnson, then basketball and business operations representative for the Knicks tweeted: “I don’t Jason Collins personally but he seems like a great guy. Me personally gay men in the locked room would make me uncomfortable.”

When someone replied to that statement by saying “there’s no place in the NBA for gay players,” Johnson responded, “I agree.”

After Collins’ retirement, NBA Cares named Collins an ambassador for the league’s social responsibility program, where he continued advocating for LGBTQ inclusion in sports.

He designed “Pride socks,” praised the WNBA’s embrace of LGBTQ players and said one of his dreams was “to see every single team in every single sports league, at a minimum, have a Pride Night game.”

Collins also shared he was deeply concerned about the treatment of transgender athletes.

“A lot of young athletes, especially trans athletes, are leaving sports because they don’t feel safe,” he said in 2019. “All of us know what it’s like to walk into a room and feel uneasy, and in that moment, we wanted to feel welcome. So, if you have an opportunity to feel welcome or to bring them in, please do that.”

At the time, several major sports governing bodies, including the International Olympic Committee and NCAA, subjected athletes to strict and contested testosterone-level testing.

In the years since, those restrictions have become more stringent, particularly for trans women competing in professional and amateur-level women’s sports. In some cases — including the Olympics and some international swimming and track and field events — trans women are barred from elite women’s competition.

“For a transgender athlete, this is not a welcoming environment,” said Rhoden, who has written about trans athletes and Title IX, “You know, this is a fairly regressive environment. I think we’ve taken five steps forward and four steps back,” he said, adding that the media itself is still figuring out how to cover trans athletes.

The next frontier

One of the last times Chris Mosier saw Jason Collins was in 2024, at the Stonewall National Monument in New York City during Pride. The three-time World Championship duathlon competitor learned about Jason’s death on social media.

“It has just been such a tumultuous time to be a queer person in sports. And I think Jason’s loss is gonna be something that our community is dealing with for a long time,” he told CNN.

Mosier described Collins as both family and a collaborator in the LGBTQ sports inclusion movement.

“I think at the core of every interaction that he had, he wanted to make the world a better place,” Mosier said. “Whether it was just through how he acknowledged and recognized you with such warmth and loving energy, or the way he was so incredibly thoughtful about his advocacy.

He pointed to Collins choosing No. 98 on his jersey in honor of Matthew Shepard as one example. Shepard, a 21-year-old student, was tortured and killed because he was gay in 1998.

The rise of Mosier’s career as a professional triathlete and trans activist coincided with Collins’ emergence as one of the most visible LGBTQ advocates in professional sports.

“We had a lot of overlap in the fact that we were both firsts and that we were both trailblazers in our different lanes, and we were always able to connect over that.”

Mosier says he and Jason were on the same page about making sports welcoming to trans athletes and anyone else who wants to play, and on using sports as a tool for social change.

But he says the level of visibility that comes with that approach is costly.

“I feel a sense of obligation and desire to continue to show up and fight every day. And at the same time, it is exhausting,” he said. “I long for the day where I am not on such high alert for my own personal safety, for my digital safety, for the safety of those who I love around me.”

Despite the risks or the setbacks, Mosier said Collins showed him the power of staying open and generous.

“The fact that he was able to consistently show up with a smile on his face, with great energy, with warmth and love for every person he interacted with … I was taking notes,” Mosier said. “If Jason taught us anything, it was really the power of…in-person interactions and seeing people as full humans worthy of the same rights and dignity and respect that I think I deserve.”

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