Mason Darrow was in a slump. The freshman offensive lineman for the Princeton Tigers had made it into a couple of games in the 2013 season, but his practices one defining week in early November were a mess. He was slow making calls and his feet were stuck in the mud.
His racing mind was getting in the way of his performance with internal questions he was increasingly tired of answering.
Walking to the sideline after a particularly poor play, Darrow's head hung low. The strong breeze of autumn brought a chill, the sun setting behind the rainbow of oak and maple trees lining the athletic facilities on campus. A thousand miles from home and playing badly, loneliness and dejection gripped him.
In that difficult moment, someone reached out.
"You all right?" Caleb Slate, a fellow offensive lineman and a sophomore at the time, noticed Darrow's somber demeanor.
Darrow, playing the aloof college kid who couldn't be bothered with emotion, blew it off.
"Just got some personal stuff," he said. "I'm fine."
Slate wasn't having it.
"No, you're not fine," Slate said, later recalling that Darrow's mind was "on another planet." Darrow clearly needed help and Slate would answer the call.
"Come up to my room after dinner and we'll talk," Slate said.
For the next hour in the locker room and the cafeteria Darrow sorted through all the possible ways out of the impending conversation with his teammate. He composed a text to Slate saying something had come up; he couldn't swing by. He would just blow off Slate and avoid it all together. Except, you just don't do that to a fellow offensive lineman. Maybe to a receiver or a linebacker, but not another guy in the trenches. Darrow had fleeting thoughts about lying, but that wouldn't fly either.
"It's not as scary as it all seems."
He finished his meal, deleted the blow-off text and trudged to Slate's room.
Poised to knock on Slate's door, doubt held back his arm. If he walked through that door, there would be no turning back. Football players like him - 6-foot-5, 285 pounds - simply weren't gay. He was a lineman at a Division 1 FCS program, not some Broadway dancer. What's worse, his teammates could end up being the lugheads of football lore, men who would tolerate anything but a gay man showering next to them.
"I felt trapped. I wasn't happy. I wanted to tell people, but I thought there would be a lot of animosity. There are a lot of guys from the South on the team. I wasn't sure how people would react to it."
Slate represented everything Darrow feared the most. A big bruiser like Darrow, Slate was from Middleburg, Fla., more Alabama than Miami. Mitt Romney won Clay County, Fla., 73%-27%, in 2012; in contrast, the GOP presidential candidate won only 61% of the Alabama vote. Slate was exactly the guy Darrow most feared telling.
"But I knew at that point I didn't want to be closeted my entire time here," Darrow said. "I knew this had to happen eventually, so it might as well happen now. Might as well rip off the Band-Aid."
After a couple of very deep breaths, Darrow knocked before his mind could think anymore. Slate was by himself in the room, a relief for Darrow. Better to tell one person at a time.
Darrow distracted the conversation with small talk about dinner and questions about Slate's girlfriend. His teammate wasn't having it. He wanted to know what was up.
"I've just had some stuff I've been dealing with," Darrow said, "and I'm not sure how I want to go about dealing with it."
Slate chuckled.
Darrow never struggled with the morality of being gay, he just never figured he could actually be queer.
"If this is a girl issue," Slate said, "I'm going to be pissed."
Darrow looked around the room for an escape hatch. The moment of truth.
"Actually, it's kind of the opposite."
Slate was, understandably, confused. Huh?
"I'm gay."
Slate's cocked eyebrows turned into wide eyes.
"Wow, OK," Slate said. "Didn't see that coming."
After a few more words, Slate assured Darrow it would be OK. Then they did what any other teammates would do on a Thursday before a big game: They ate mozzarella sticks and sat down for some video games.
The only thing that changed that night was Darrow's sudden sense of freedom.
Darrow never struggled with the morality of being gay, he just never figured he could actually be queer. He didn't enter high school until Barack Obama was the president. Several states had already legalized same-sex marriage by then. Gay entertainers - and yes, even some gay athletes - had received praise for their courage. Darrow had grown up in a country on the doorstep of equality for gay people.
Yet the constant drumbeat of media images of gay men put forward a particular kind of gay guy: Small, 6% body fat, listens to pop music, drinks pink martinis and dances on Broadway. He didn't fit the bill. Mostly.
"Don't get me wrong, I like Broadway shows," Darrow said as I gave him a grand tour of West Hollywood one evening this summer. "But I thought, this isn't right. I like football. It just made it harder to figure out because I didn't fit into the stereotype."
That struggle has kept him from engaging more with the gay community. While he came out to his team, family and friends two years ago, our rendezvous in West Hollywood in August was the first time he had ventured anywhere near a gay bar, let alone one of the epicenters of the gay community.
"I look at Outsports a lot, and I identify with a lot of those guys. But I don't identify with the gay community very much."
Mason in High School.
"I felt like I had to keep appearances up. I didn't want to arouse suspicion that I might be gay, so I went along with the flow and did what I thought was expected of me."
While he knew he liked guys in the sixth or seventh grade, images of powerful gay football players like Esera Tuaolo were few and far between. Michael Sam had revealed his truth to his teammates but not yet to the world.
Darrow was, like so many gay athletes tell themselves, a complete anomaly. He was part of an athletic family, attending Princeton in the footsteps of his brother, Mack, who played basketball for the Tigers. At 6-foot-5, 285-pounds, Darrow was a beast. On the high school football field he turned heads with his strength and acumen.
Mid-major football programs like Wyoming, Bowling Green and Western Michigan offered him athletic scholarships. Michigan State made inquiries, and Vanderbilt was interested in making him part of the team.
This was not the life of a gay man.
So he hid. He dated women. When someone in his high school asked him if he was gay - and that happened a couple of times - he denied it.
"I felt like I had to keep appearances up. I didn't want to arouse suspicion that I might be gay, so I went along with the flow and did what I thought was expected of me."
He kept up those appearances until Nov. 7, 2013, when his teammate Slate didn't let him off the hook and Darrow was tired of living a lie. It didn't take long for word of "the gay teammate" to spread across the entire team. Darrow told some of them, and Slate shared it with others with Darrow's blessing.
"The only prerequisite to being on a football team," Slate assured him, "is that you work hard. This isn't going to bother people if you tell them."
In the coming weeks various players asked Darrow if the rumor was true. While he'd rejected the notion from the guys in high school, he didn't hold back with his fellow Tigers.
Jack Knight, a fellow offensive lineman from North Carolina, is now his roommate. Knight hadn't been friends with a gay person before he met Darrow. He didn't believe the rumors about Darrow being gay before he heard it straight from his mouth.
"He's a great guy," Knight said. "I live with him now. I've known him for three years. I see what he does off the field in the classroom. I know what he does on the field. I know he's a very accountable person. He's a hard-working person. And I know when I'm out on the field making a block that he'll be right there with me making a hit as hard as he can."
Slate's outward acceptance had empowered Darrow, and the reaction of each subsequent teammate was more water for the germinating seeds of his courage. The clear message that nothing was going to change - Thursday nights would still be full of fried mozzarella and video games - was the most powerful one he could have received, echoed by every teammate with whom he opened up.
Nothing was going to change.
Photo: colorgraphics
