Born June 28: Dave Kopay

Thirty-eight years ago when Dave Kopay became the first former NFL player to come out, the newspaper that ran the groundbreaking interview (The Washington Star) and tv newscasts that reported the story, received vociferous hate mail. Kopay had played eight years for San Francisco, Detroit, Washington, New Orleans, and Green Bay. Since 1975, he has been an enormous inspiration through his lectures, public appearances, and especially with the publication of his 1977 memoir The David Kopay Story which was a New York Times bestseller. However, the NFL has ignored him. To this day, they will not even hire him to be a diversity speaker to the league. And the total number of former NFL players to come out since Kopay is still only four: Roy Simmons in 1992, Esera Tuaolo in 2002, Wade Davis in 2012, and Kwame Harris this year. Unable to get any sort of coaching job, Kopay worked for twenty years at his uncle’s flooring business, Linoleum City, in Hollywood. He has been involved with several sessions of Gay Games. A real hero, he says he's leaving one million dollars to the University of Washington's Q Center. Last month, the fledgling National Gay & Lesbian Sports Hall of Fame in Chicago named him among its initial honorees. He's 71.