If only everyone who came out in sports could come to the same revelations that Boston Herald sports columnist Steve Buckley has concluded. Just a month after announcing he’s gay, Buckley is talking not about how horrible it would be to be an out player in pro sports, but how much support that person would find from people who have gay relatives and friends. He talked to the Good Men Project last week, and you can see his appearance on Outside the Lines after the jump:

If I really thought it out I would have made this realization, but reading all these emails in the last couple weeks, everybody’s got a lesbian sister. Everyone’s got a nephew’s who gay. Everyone’s got somebody in their lives who’s gay. And it’s not a question. People say, “Well, can a Major League baseball player be out? Would his teammates accept him?” And that misses the point. It’s not a question of whether those teammates will accept him. It’s a question of whether those teammates have already accepted other people in their lives who are gay or lesbian or transgendered.

If only everyone who came out in sports could come to the same revelations that Boston Herald sports columnist Steve Buckley has concluded. Just a month after announcing he’s gay, Buckley is talking not about how horrible it would be to be an out player in pro sports, but how much support that person would find from people who have gay relatives and friends. He talked to the Good Men Project last week, and you can see his appearance on Outside the Lines after the jump:

If I really thought it out I would have made this realization, but reading all these emails in the last couple weeks, everybody’s got a lesbian sister. Everyone’s got a nephew’s who gay. Everyone’s got somebody in their lives who’s gay. And it’s not a question. People say, “Well, can a Major League baseball player be out? Would his teammates accept him?” And that misses the point. It’s not a question of whether those teammates will accept him. It’s a question of whether those teammates have already accepted other people in their lives who are gay or lesbian or transgendered.

And that’s the education that I’ve had because I can now walk into a press box and point to 20 people who have somebody in their lives who’s gay, because they told me. They came up to me and told me or they emailed me or they called me. And how can it be any different from the athletes? They’ve got people in their lives—brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, parents maybe, who are gay—So they’ve already had to deal with it and question whether or not they do embrace that person. So now it’s gonna be a question of embracing somebody else. And that’s why I think it’s not that big a deal … it will be a big deal when an athlete comes out, because he’ll be the first—but I don’t think it’ll be as dramatic as people think.

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