Pennsylvania State Rep. Brian Sims has
said he struggled to come out gay in college.
Sims, the state's first out lawmaker to
be elected, also criticized San Francisco 49ers cornerback Chris
Culliver's anti-gay remarks. Culliver has since apologized for
saying that a gay player would not be welcome in the NFL.
(Related: 49ers
Chris Culliver to work with Trevor Project after anti-gay comments.)
“Everyone should be allowed to speak
their mind, but in this case, it was wholly ignorant and wholly
stupid,” Sims
told ESPN. “This is not acceptable in the workplace and
shouldn't be acceptable in sports.”
The 34-year-old Sims, who was a lineman
for Bloomburg University in Pennsylvania for four years, said he knew
he “wasn't straight long before I knew I was gay.”
“The truth is I was gay my whole
life,” Sims said. “I had dated girls in high school. I think I
knew I wasn't straight long before I knew I was gay. I knew by the
time I got to college that I was gay. My team actually came to me to
ask me whether I was gay. They wanted to talk about it. They asked
me about the struggle and when I was going to tell people. I didn't
go through the same struggles as people today. Today, you have 14-,
15-, 16-year-olds so confident and secure in their sexuality. I was
not. I wasn't a gay 17-year-old ready to come out to the world.
When I got to college, I realized I was gay. I just didn't know how
to go about it. My college didn't have a LGBT group to give me the
language to come out. It was my quarterback who asked me first.”