![]() Everywhere else in the culture, it seems, there's a rah-rah gay consciousness afoot: Last autumn, at the same time the vice president's praise of Ellen was catching more flak for being an act of desperate opportunism than for being an endorsement of sexual deviance, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a statement imploring parents not to turn out their gay sons and daughters, because "God does not love someone any less simply because he or she is a homosexual." In Out was the nation's leading film comedy Elton John was cracking self-twitting queer jokes on Leno. What causes these fits is not his current station in life, which is more edifying and lucrative than it sounds, but the nagging idea that to this day it's still pretty much just him: "lonely old me," as he rails in one of his paroxysmal moments, "Dave Kopay–the-gay-football-player." Since he took his great leap, he has been joined in the annals of known gay football pros by precisely two people: his old Redskins teammate Jerry Smith, an all-pro tight end who went to his grave without publicly disclosing his sexual orientation but whose death from AIDS in 1986 occasioned posthumous discussion of his homosexuality, and a former guard with the New York Giants named Roy Simmons, who outed himself on Donahue in 1992, nine years after he left football, and promptly disappeared from public view. Today he is a 55-year-old flooring salesman at Linoleum City, a store in Hollywood whose catchphrase is "Sears is next to us." He's a nice guy, with a mirthful, gabby way about him-"Would I do Troy Aikman on Sunset Strip?" he mused, unbidden, the first time we ever spoke on the telephone, answering, "Yes! That would be my fantasy!"-but he's also prone to fits of pique where his body goes taut with frustration and anger and there's just no consoling him. Twenty years ago, Kopay was a sociological phenomenon, the first National Football League player, active or retired, ever to publicly acknowledge his homosexuality.
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