Being out in the athletic field isn't easy. But these LGBTQ collegians are doing us proud.
Many young LGBTQ athletes have to choose between playing their sport and living their truth.
Whether due to tension in locker rooms or the challenge of pleasing dedicated fans, queer people in sports are often unrepresented and silenced. But in the age of Adam Rippon, Sue Bird, Colin Martin, and Gus Kenworthy, LGBTQ people are more visible than ever in the field, ring, and court.
Here are our picks for LGBTQ college athletes to root for this season.
Abrahm DeVine, Swimmer
Before DeVine became 2018 NCAA champion and a member of the U.S. Men's National Swin Team, he almost got out of the pool for good while struggling with his sexual identity. But after connecting with his former teammate Max Williamson, who encouraged and supported him, the Stanford University senior came out to his team.
"I'm a gay athlete. There aren't too many of us, so when I came out to my college team, that was a really tough time for me," DeVine recently told Swimming World, "Just feeling my whole team wrap around me and feeling that love in a place where I hadn't really felt it, that was definitely pretty special for me."
DeVine is now competing for a spot on the 2020 Olympic team with the support of his fellow swimmers.
"Just seeing them kind of prove me wrong was definitely special, something I'll never forget," he said.
Jake Bain, Football Player
As a freshman at Indiana State, Bain is openly gay and in a relationship with University of North Carolina student Hunter Sigmund. In his first days of summer training, he wasn't afraid to let his teammates see him live authentically.
"There are times when we'll be in the dorms playing video games and I'll get a Facetime message from Hunter and I don't get uncomfortable with that," Bain told Outsports. "I don't feel a need to go into a different room. Everybody knows. A lot of the freshmen I've been dorming with have seen Hunter and know who he is."
Although Bain was harassed by the homophobic Westboro Baptist Church during his high school years, when he and Sigmund were the only out gay couple at their school, his home city of St. Louis rallied around him. Now he's been welcomed by his college football team.
"Hunter came up to Indiana State and I was walking him around campus and passed some of the football guys and introduced Hunter to them and they all treated him like they would somebody's girlfriend," Bain recalled. "They were really nice."
Jacob Van Ittersum, Football Player
"After I came out as a bisexual to my college football team in May, my biggest worry was with our locker room. I wasn't sure if the guys would want me in there anymore," the offensive lineman for Northwood University wrote in a commentary for Outsportsafter he came out in a tweet. However, he was welcomed by teammates and coaches alike.
The 20-year-old studies operations and supply chain management and made the All-Academic Excellence team in 2016 and 2017.
"As I enter my senior season as a starting offensive lineman, a huge weight is lifted off of my shoulders. I can finally be myself without fear of ridicule. Any worries about the locker room were ended by my quarterback's support," he concluded.
Konrad Eiring, Runner
After suffering a devastating injury in 2013, during high school in Barrington, Ill., that forced him into a walking boot for three months, Konrad Eiring took a season off from running and worked on his courage. It was that semester that he came out as gay to his family and community.
"It allowed me an opportunity to be on my own and think about life without a lot of distractions," Eiring told the Chicago Tribune. "It was a blessing in disguise. To be honest, I don't know if I would have come out when I did without the injury. I may have waited for college."
Now he is a senior runner at the University of Illinois, where he had to come out again.
"One of my teammates from high school was on the U of I track team," Eiring said. "He told the whole team, 'Hey, Konrad's gay, but he's cool.' A lot of them don't really know many gay people. There was some warming-up time, but basically after the first month or so they were like, 'It's just Konrad.'"
Jack Thorne, Swimmer
High on the top times list for Northwestern University's swim team, Jack Thorne has been out since high school. In the midst of recruitment for a college team, he came out via Twitter and Facebook. None of his athletic suitors were put off.
"This didn't affect it at all, which I was pretty happy about," Thorne told Loveland, Colo.'s Reporter-Herald in 2014. "I was actually really happy with that. They were interested in me and my swimming. All the schools that I cared about cared only about how I'd fit in with their team, my grades, and how fast I was."
Now a senior, Thorne is still making a splash.
Lindsey Farrell, Lacrosse & Soccer Player
Now a senior communications major at McDaniel College, Farrell made headlines in 2017 when her friend Mark Dragon created a short film documenting how she came out to her lacrosse teammates -- through a game of Hangman.
"We were playing Hangman, and my one teammate who's a captain knew that I was gay, because she's my best friend and I told her prior," Farrell explains in the film. "So I drew a little hangman symbol and I ... put blank spaces to say C-O-A-C-H-I'-M-G-A-Y. ... It was so easy to write [gay] because that's who I am."
Farrell is not only on the lacrosse team but plays soccer as well. You can watch her coming-out video below.
Sam Johnson, Soccer Player
A junior on Whittier College's Division Three soccer team, Sam Johnson grew up in a Christian home and when to a Catholic high school in Seattle. But after the mass shooting at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando in 2016, he felt compelled to step up to advocate for other LGBTQ youth.
"You all are aware of what has happened in Orlando, and regardless of your opinions of the topic, a man walked into a bar and targeted people of the LGBT community and killed them, and that is the simple fact," he wrote to his extended family. according to Outsports. "You grow up being afraid of who are you, and then eventually you come to terms with it. And then something like this happens and you go right back to where you were. Put yourself in the shoes of the mothers, fathers and siblings of those people who won't come home after their Saturday night out, put yourself in the shoes of people who have to watch their backs and live in fear for simply expressing who they love."
Since becoming an openly gay college player, Johnson has refused to back down from his values. He now filing a Title IX report against Los Angeles's Occidental College due to a gay slur being hurled at him by a fan during a match in September.
"I just have never been so rattled, so uncomfortable, and I wanted to get off that field as soon as I possibly could," Johnson told Outsports. However, he has decided to stay on the field and advocate for his community both on and off.
Abbie Hetherington, Cross-Country Runner
A senior at Oklahoma State University, Hetherington has won the indoor individual Big 12 title in the 1,000 meters and was named to the 2017 Second-Team Academic All-Big 12.
But being a lesbian who moved from her hometown of Carlisle, England, to Oklahoma was the most difficult hurdle Hetherington had to clear.
"In England, I really didn't have a coming out process. It was very natural. Everyone was accepting. Nobody even questioned it. I really didn't have a lot of people to tell all at once like I would when I came to college," she wrote in Outsports. "I was scared when I came to Oklahoma. It was a completely different world from what I was used to at home. In England, I knew so many people who are out, and I was hoping on a Cowgirls team of more than 50 track athletes that there would be a least a couple of LGBTQ athletes, but this wasn't the case."
After recloseting herself for a semester, the runner came out again. To her surprise, her teammates reassured and accepted her.
"When I race now, I race with confidence in who I am as a person. I can tell my teammates are proud of me for coming out, and it means a lot to me that they accepted me for who I am," Hetherington wrote.
Wyatt Pertuset, Football Player
Wyatt Pertuset, a punter and wide receiver on the football team at Ohio's Capital University, was recently named named Special Teams Player of the Week by the Ohio Athletic Conference, Outsports reports. He set a personal record for average yardage in his punts the last weekend in September, and also made his longest punt ever, 55 yards. One of seven out gay players in college football this fall, he scored a touchdown earlier this season, becoming perhaps the first publicly gay player to do so, according to Outsports, which defines "publicly gay" as "someone who discussed being gay or bi in the media" before making that achievement. Of this season's seven out players, "Pertuset is the only one who plays a skill position on offense, making him the most likely to score a touchdown." He scored while playing wide receiver and catching a 37-yard pass from quarterback Thomas Wibbeler in a game against Mount St. Joseph. Capital lost the game, but Pertuset took pride in the play, which marked his comeback from an injury. And he dedicated it to the gay community, telling Outsports, "I want it to be one of those images in young minds, especially for the same age as me, who might be in the closet, to work hard and just play your heart out, not only for your team but for what you stand for. I want this to be a turning point that proves to people that we are great athletes as well." He came out publicly on Outsports last year but had previously been out to his teammates at Capital and at his high school in Richmond, Ohio.
Susie Poore & Michael Mitchell, Runners
Friends who run together come out together too! On 2017's National Coming Out Day, Poore and Mitchell came out in a joint essay, a choice they never have looked back on.
"The reason we chose to do it so publicly, personally, was -- instead of just telling a couple of friends -- it's broader. When you come out, I feel like everyone should know. It's something you should be proud of, and you don't want to hide it anymore, so I didn't want to hide it," Mitchell told Lehigh's college newspaper, The Brown and White. "No one really cares. The biggest person who cared was myself."
The pair, who are now sophomores, are still running on Lehigh's track and cross-country teams.
Kennedy Lohman, Swimmer
Lohman's path to self-acceptance was no lazy river. Suffering from anxiety and depression, she went off her meds in May 2014 and quit swimming.
"I was still struggling with myself and admitting my -- or searching for my -- sexuality and accepting that," Lohman told Outsports. "It was just a whole lot of negative emotions, and I was just sitting in my room all the time because I didn't have anything else to do."
Once she came out as a lesbian the dark clouds around her disappeared. She now swims for the University of Texas, having transferred from the University of Arizona, and she aided her older brother Connor, who swam for Brown University, in his coming-out process.
