Former professional soccer player
Robbie Rogers and his director husband Greg Berlanti were honored
Saturday for their LGBT activism.
At the Los Angeles LGBT Center's 49th
Anniversary Vanguard Awards, Rogers and Berlanti were honored with
the group's Vanguard Award. Other honorees included philanthropist
Ariadne Getty and singer Ricky Martin. The event was hosted by Kelly
Ripa and Mark Consuelos.
(Related: At LA LGBT Center gala, Ricky
Martin invites husband Jwan Yosef to “keep having babies.”)
In accepting their award, Rogers called
out politicians working to block the LGBT movement, while Berlanti
gushed about his husband.
“Our safety and equality and basic
liberties are under threat, now more than ever. There are others,
many of them elected officials, who not only don't want to see
advancements for the disenfranchised, they want to take us back to a
time when our story wasn't even possible,” Rogers told the crowd as
he looked to his husband.
“Robbie was the first openly gay
athlete to play in a championship team in a major league sport,”
Berlanti said. “And the entire time Robbie was playing, through
all of this, you should know, his reason for doing so never wavered.
He wanted LGBT kids to have someone to watch that was like them. He
knew the power of representation, because he didn't have it when he
was growing up, isolated and alone.”
“I fell in love with Robbie Rogers
for many, many reasons, but not the least of them was because of his
grace and strength and compassion during all of this – for his
fellow players and the fans and even his critics. Robbie met every
hardship during this time with compassion for the soccer community,
because he knew if real change was going to happen for the next
generation, it wasn't just going to be rules that were going to have
to change, he was going to have to change the hearts and minds of
people, too,” he added.
Guests at Saturday's event included
August Getty, Nats Getty, Tara Reid, Conrad Ricamora, Gigi Gorgeous,
Jason Collins, Brigitte Nielsen, Sarah Jones, and more.