Football player warms up
Las Vegas Raiders defensive tackle Thomas Booker IV warms up before a game against the Buffalo Bills while wearing a pink Raiders Crucial Catch Intercept Cancer T-shirt at Allegiant Stadium. | David Brytus-Imagn Images
When I go pink, it feels like my gayness gets cranked up to max volume.
It’s the color I flaunt when I’m screaming the lyrics to a B-52s tribute band at a mid-June Pride street fest.
That’s not a feeling I usually associate with football. I doubt that the Las Vegas Raiders would ever try to psyche up Maxx Crosby to deliver a bone-crunching sack to Drake Maye by blasting “Give Me Back My Man.”
But during October when the NFL holds its Crucial Catch cancer-fighting initiative, pink suddenly becomes a color I see all over the football world.
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As a sports fan who first started watching football during the ultra-masc era of the 1980s NFL — a time when the game was defined by the ferocity of Lawrence Taylor and the rage of Mike Ditka — every glimpse of pink in the modern day league still makes me double take.
Zhushing up our looks was not a trait I ever expected to share with football players.
Pink genuinely changed the way I present myself to the world and it had a role in the evolution of my own athletic life.
During my closeted years until my mid-30s, I dressed in the most basic way imaginable, subliminally avoiding anything that might be associated with the gay self I was hiding.
If it was summer, I wore t-shirts. By a conservative estimate, I’d say 70 percent of them featured the Cubs logo.
If it was winter, I wore solid color button-downs. If I was feeling especially fashion forward, they’d have pinstripes.
At the same time, I was also convinced I’d forever be a sports appreciator and never someone who actually played a sport with any degree of competence.
Coming out and embracing pink
But since coming out, a big part of embracing who I am has been experimenting with nail polish and hair color—and eventually distance running.
After decades of crafting a look of fashion indifference to avoid showing who I really was, the nails and hair were a way to tell the world that I wanted my gay self to be noticed.
And when I did them in pink, that meant I wanted it to be unignorable.
For this summer’s Pride month, I asked my stylist to turn my hair pink for the first time. I knew a few weeks later that I’d be running the B.A.A. 10K in Boston and thought it would be a fun way to stand out from the pack.
After years writing about the lives and feats of gay athletes, I’d be getting a chance to show that I was one myself.
This was something I never would’ve imagined doing up until two years ago. That went for every aspect of the race: being out, running 6.2 miles with several thousand others, and absolutely slaying my look with a shock of pink hair you could pick out of a crowd from 1000 feet away.
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Completing a 10K was already an exhilarating experience. Doing so while repeatedly hearing complete strangers screaming “I love your hair!” was such a self esteem boost that I almost don’t have words to describe it.
I got to celebrate the achievement and myself at the same time. My pink hair connected everything in a way that I didn’t anticipate until I was in the middle of running the race.
Now obviously, NFL players wear pink for an entirely different reason, raising awareness and money for breast cancer charities.
But when I catch a glimpse of a football player wearing pink cleats, I still feel a kind of connection to them over the color.
I know what it feels like to do something athletic in pink even at a very amateur level so it’s astonishing to see pro athletes rock that hue while crushing it against the toughest competition there is.
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To do in a sport as brutal as NFL football is next level impressive.
That’s not just a random connection my brain makes. Those moments are when I feel the Venn Diagrams of my gay and sports worlds overlap.
Even if football players sporting pink is not about maximum gayness, it’s always maximum fierceness—in every sense of the word. On a personal level, I’ve embraced that fierceness and I’m infinitely much prouder for it.
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Ken Schultz is a writer, unabashed baseball fan, bocce player, stand-up comedian, and proud Chicagoan. He has appeared on NPR and has opened for comedy luminaries like Gary Gulman and Jimmy Pardo.
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