Out New York college lacrosse player Andrew McIntosh joined Community Link’s Youth Alliance and supporters at The Red Church the evening of July 30th, and spoke about college athletics and coming out.
Youth
McIntosh says he’s known since 13 that he’s gay, but didn’t feel good about it and tried to mask it. He said he immersed himself in sports and academics in junior high and high school to hide his feelings—he thought he could “beat being gay” that way.
His attempts to mask his sexuality led him to transfer colleges two different times, finally landing at
McIntosh said he thought, “How will people remember me after I take this bottle of pills so I can just die and no one will ever know I ‘m gay? I could see my funeral being played out: The images brought me to tears as I watched my father, brother and former team mates as pallbearers, all of them wondering why I decided to end my life. ‘How could Andrew do this to himself? He had it all’.
“I had experienced no lonelier point in my life. I felt no one could understand my feelings. Who the hell is gay and plays sports, especially lacrosse?
“I remembered the first time I tried to kill myself, after I lost a football game in high school. I thought I should have just hanged myself then and I wouldn’t be dealing with any of these problems…Why I am in love with my best friend Mike? Why don’t I love some girl like the rest of my friends? Why couldn’t I just be like everyone else?”
Then he saw the movie “Milk.” He immediately picked up on the scene where Harvey Milk receives a phone call from a boy in a wheelchair who’s gay and thinking about killing himself.
McIntosh said “it was the first time I realized that there are other people out there who are closeted and do not want to live. There are people like me. And it was then that I began to wonder: Are there other gay athletes too?”
The next day McIntosh decided to tell someone he was gay, so he told one of his best friends from home. “I would say Mike is the reason I realized I am gay: I had fallen in love with him in college, and I felt ashamed of it,” according to McIntosh. “Mike was a team mate of mine in high school and became a great friend throughout college. He is also captain of his college lacrosse team. I invited him over to my house after we worked out at the gym. I told him I watched “Milk” the night before, and that I really liked it and related to it. That was my first lame attempt at coming out. Then I hinted that I was questioning who I wanted to be with sexually.”
After he told his friend Mike, McIntosh decided to tell his sister, who is also gay. “I felt she would know some ways to cope with the depression I was feeling. When I called her, she said she had been waiting for that call for years; she was the only one I ever told who didn’t seem genuinely shocked. She and her partner were great resources. One website they told me might help me with the coming out process was called Out Sports. And in Out Sports I immediately dove into a goldmine for coming out stories just like mine.”
After telling his family next, McIntosh told his coach and team mates. All of them have been incredibly supportive. “I’ve my whole team behind me!”
He said his coach “was unfazed. He told me that if we had a roster of 30 players and 15 of them did not want to play on the team because I was gay, he would tell them to leave the team. I felt a new sense of confidence. I felt whole again. I was proud to be playing for not only such a great coach, but a great man who truly cared about the people underneath the uniforms.”
Reflecting, McIntosh said when his story first broke, he thought of himself as a gay man who happened to be an athlete. “I now think of myself as an athlete who happens to be gay.”
