Collins decision will hopefully do more than make headlines

Jason Collins is a professional basketball player. Strike that: Jason Collins is an openly gay professional athlete.

In an explanation he wrote for Sports Illustrated (SI), Collins didn’t say he came out for the good of the gay community or that he thought he was a pioneer — he came out for himself.

I’m not here to recap the man’s story. It’s well written, and I recommend it, but I want to give some context to what I feel is a bizarre issue that is still a very real today: people living in fear because of their sexual orientation.

Collins first noticed he was gay when he and his twin brother, Jarron, were in high school. In his story for SI, he said, “It was around this time that I began noticing subtle differences between Jarron and me. Our twinness was no longer synchronized. I couldn’t identify with his attraction to girls.”

Jarron wrote a sidebar to his brother’s story saying that they always have and still do push each other. They competed to see who could get the best grades and now every season they see who can lift more weight. Jason said Jarron followed him to Stanford and into the NBA, but when Jason told his brother last summer that he was gay, Jarron had this to say: “I won’t lie. I had no idea.”

I think it’s amazing – borderline tragic – that a twin, after 33 years, is surprised to hear that his brother is gay. I share all major events in my life with my family, particularly my older brother. There is little I could hide from him and can’t imagine the amount of strain it would put on me and/or our relationship to do so.

Collins said he resisted impulses in high school and said he felt he had to live a certain kind of life. He even was engaged to a woman for some time. “I kept telling myself the sky was red, but I always knew it was blue,” he said in his story.

Now, I assume that Collins, who is 7-foot, 255-pounds, wasn’t ever afraid of coming out. But he said he felt he had certain expectations to live up to.

He cited a number of reasons that fueled his decision to come out. The Boston Marathon Bombing made him realize that life can change in an instant — “so why not live truthfully?” — and also his old college roommate Joe Kennedy, now a Massachusetts congressman, marched in Boston’s 2012 Gay Pride Parade. He said that made him envious. “I wanted to take a stand and say, ‘Me, too,’ ” he said in SI.

I hope that Collins’ coming out inspires others to live truthfully. Charles Barkley recently said in a statement that he played alongside teammates knowing they were gay. Players have come out after retiring, but Collins remains the only active professional athlete in a major U.S. sport to be openly gay. Does this seem weird to anyone else?

Maybe it’s because I wasn’t alive for the civil rights movement and the gay rights movement is the closest fight in reach that I feel so passionately about. Maybe it’s because almost every gay man I’ve ever met has been either wonderfully compassionate, creative, intelligent or, at the very least, interesting.

The point is, I hope this helps chip away at the battle young gays face every day when it comes to their choice of living truthfully or carrying on a lie they feel they are expected to live. In the end, I think Jarron Collins said it best: “He’s my brother, he’s a great guy, and I want him to be happy. Jason has taken a huge weight off his shoulders. And I’ve never been more proud of him.”