Erik Brady Updated 1:46 p.m. ET May 18, 2018
SportsPulse: Arian Foster wants you to know he’s an artist who happened to play football. He also wants you to know the current state of the NFL doesn’t allow players to share their emotions the way they should.
Alone in the Game is a new documentary about LGBT athletes for whom the locker room is a sort of giant closet. Here’s a first look at the trailer for the feature-length film that will run on AT&T Audience Network at 8 p.m. on June 28.
One SEC football player movingly comes out in the film. Another Division I player shares his story with blurred face and altered voice. This player says he’s been told he has a shot at the NFL, but says he fears if he were to come out that his teammates wouldn’t talk to him and his coaches would see him as inferior.
“I’m not ashamed,” the player says, “just scared.”
The film centers on the coming-out journey of the SEC player and includes stories of some of the best-known athletes who have come out in recent years, such as former NBA center Jason Collins, former NFL offensive tackle Ryan O’Callaghan, former MLS star Robbie Rogers and Olympic freestyle skier Gus Kenworthy.
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David McFarland, the film’s creator and executive producer, says what’s notable is not how many gay and lesbian athletes have come out in recent years, but how few.
“The idea was to create a documentary that investigated the real-life stories of elite LGBT athletes,” he tells USA TODAY, “delving deep into the big business of sports and providing an inside look at the secret lives of closeted athletes and exposing a culture of exclusion, bigotry and discrimination, which really keeps these athletes in the closet and living in secrecy and in silence.”
The documentary will open at the AFI Docs Film Festival in Washington on June 15.
“If there wasn’t homophobia in sports, and if everyone felt comfortable in being who they were,” women’s soccer star Megan Rapinoe says in the film, “then everyone who is gay would be out.”
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