Jason Collins, the NBA's first openly
gay player, was honored Thursday during a Logo TV special celebrating
LGBT rights pioneers.
Thursday's Trailblazers,
which coincided with the one-year anniversary of the Supreme Court's
decision striking down a key provision of the Defense of Marriage Act
(DOMA), also honored the women behind the case – Edith Windsor and
Roberta Kaplan – and the cast of the Netflix hit series Orange
is the New Black.
(Related: Bill
Clinton calls Edith Windsor, Roberta Kaplan “true trailblazers.”)
Former 'Nsyncer Lance Bass and Jason Marsden of the Matthew Shepard
Foundation introduced Collins.
“Thanks
to each and every one of you for making one of the hardest decisions
of my life the single most rewarding thing I have ever done,”
Collins said. “Coming out is really difficult. But [if] I've
learned one thing from all of this, [it] is that the only thing
harder is staying in the closet. Coming out is a gift you can give
yourself that can also help change the entire world.” (The video
is embedded on this page. Visit
our video library for more videos.)