UnDisciplined: Carl Nassib came out while playing in the NFL - here's what the media thought about it

By Matthew LaPlante

Published October 19, 2023 at 7:05 PM MDT

Carl Nassib playing for the Cleveland Browns during a game in 2018.

There are no openly gay players in any of the five major men's sports leagues in the United States. Not in football, baseball, hockey or soccer. None. But that's not because there are no gay players in those leagues — the reasons why so many athletes stay in the closet are complicated.

Ted Kian is a professor at Oklahoma State University, where his work is focused on sports media, especially in its framing of gender, sex, orientation, and identity. His paper on the media's reaction to Carl Nassib coming out was published in The Sport Journal.

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Matthew LaPlante

Matthew LaPlante has reported on ritual infanticide in Northern Africa, insurgent warfare in the Middle East, the legacy of genocide in Southeast Asia, and gang violence in Central America. But a few years back, something donned on him: Maybe the news doesn't have to be brutally depressing all the time. Today, he balances his continuing work on more heartbreaking subjects by writing books about the intersection of science, human health and society, including the New York Times best-selling Lifespan with geneticist David Sinclair and the Nautilus Award-winning Longevity Plan with cardiologist John Day. His first solo book, Superlative, looks at what scientists are learning by studying organisms that have evolved in record-setting ways, and his is currently at work on another book about embracing the inevitability of human-caused climate change with an optimistic outlook on the future.

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