GQ's interview with Michael Sam

Men of the Year

Michael the Brave

The first openly gay player in the NFL? When you take a good long look at the path Michael Sam took to get here—the sleepless nights in the backseat of his mother's car, the routine beat-downs from his outlaw brothers, the fact that his own father barely accepts who he is—coming out seems like the easy part

By Andrew Corsello
Photographs by Peggy Sirota
December 2014

It's now an American rite of sports, with a protocol as ingrained as those governing the seventh-inning stretch and the Gatorade bath: The strapping young athlete gets the nod and, overwhelmed by the realization that he has arrived, turns to his significant other and plants a kiss. We saw this rite performed to a T on the evening of May 10, after the St. Louis Rams made Michael Sam the 249th overall pick in the NFL draft. Spontaneously/on cue, Sam burst into tears and then, like countless jocks before him, performed the kiss. It all seemed reassuringly familiar. Oh…wait. Scratch that: On account of the fact that the significant other on the receiving end of that kiss was a guy named Vito Cammisano, it was mind-blowing.

An NFL defensive end passionately kissing his boyfriend—had any of us ever seriously entertained that configuration of words, much less their realization on national TV?

He never wanted any of this, you know. He never envisioned himself as an activist or icon before he came out in February, and doesn't regard anything he's said or done in 2014 as heroic. It's not hard to see where he's coming from: He wants to be a football player who happens to be gay, not "Gay Football Player Michael Sam."

The deeper, and stranger, nature of Michael Sam's story is that when it began, he never envisioned himself as a football player, either—never even really wanted football itself. It wasn't dreams of glory or love of the game that brought him to the gridiron; football wasn't his pursuit. It was a means of flight, a getaway vehicle with which he escaped a home existence—in a small southeast Texas scab of a town called Hitchcock—that was nothing short of horrifying. He and his family—Sam was the seventh of eight children, and the youngest son—were known as "those damn Sams." His eldest sister died before he was even born, accidentally knocked off a dock and drowned when she was 2. Sam was 5 when his dad left for good and when his teenage brother Russell was shot dead trying to break into a home. Three years later, he and his younger sister were the last to see his brother Julian before he walked out the front door and never returned. (Police term Julian a missing person; Sam believes he's dead.) The remaining brothers, Josh and Chris, were in and out of jail and routinely beat their youngest brother for failing to follow in their footsteps. Chris is currently serving thirty years for aggravated robbery.... MORE at http://www.gq.com/moty/2014/michael-sam-men-of-the-year-game-changer