ESPN radio host Jared Max, who came out of the closet last year, talked at length with Out magazine about his new publicly out life. One of the pieces that struck me was Max’s repeating of the same story we hear over and over and over and over again in sports: How easy it was to do it, and how he was embraced afterward:
He remembers wrapping up his on-air soliloquy last year, thinking, Holy shit, this is easy, realizing “that all the fears I’d built up were useless.” Supportive emails and texts were flooding in before he’d even wrapped, but the memory that stands out is the way his board operator sauntered in and said, “Hey, my old man called, he said congratulations.” For Max, that was everything. “I got the impression that his dad was old-school, so it really meant a lot to hear that,” he says.
ESPN radio host Jared Max, who came out of the closet last year, talked at length with Out magazine about his new publicly out life. One of the pieces that struck me was Max’s repeating of the same story we hear over and over and over and over again in sports: How easy it was to do it, and how he was embraced afterward:
He remembers wrapping up his on-air soliloquy last year, thinking, Holy shit, this is easy, realizing “that all the fears I’d built up were useless.” Supportive emails and texts were flooding in before he’d even wrapped, but the memory that stands out is the way his board operator sauntered in and said, “Hey, my old man called, he said congratulations.” For Max, that was everything. “I got the impression that his dad was old-school, so it really meant a lot to hear that,” he says.
As the article’s writer, Aaron Hicklin, points out, Max is No. 1 in his time slot with key male demographics. Coming out certainly hasn’t hurt his career, either.
