A Letter To My Younger Self

READ MORE: Justin Rogers' journey to being out as gay and working in the NHL on ESPN.com

Dear younger JR,

Becoming the best you will take time and understanding.

That knot in your stomach – the one that makes you feel confused, isolated, lost in the world –invisible to everyone but you? It will slowly loosen. You don’t even understand the knot, but with time you will learn things about yourself and fulfill dreams so many others like you feel they cannot.

You will accept yourself as a gay man, creating a life authentic to you, while welcoming others into it. It won’t be easy, and you won’t do it alone. It will take time. The building blocks will start to take shape now as you enter your teenage years.

When you first start to shadow your high school athletic trainer you can’t even imagine where it will take you. While success is so individual and hard to measure, please trust you have the ambition and drive to achieve it in so many aspects of your life. Some of your successes will include completing internships in the NFL, working football as a grad student at the University of Nebraska, helping build the Penn State Hockey program from the ground up, and winning both a postseason and regular season Big Ten title.

And now you are one of about 100 athletic trainers in the NHL, with the Seattle Kraken. You accomplished all of this while navigating being a gay man in what is presumed to be a hypermasculine sports world.

While in high school you will develop a love and passion for athletic training and sports medicine. That, plus being a great-grandchild of one of the first Doctors of Osteopathy, drives you to follow your dreams despite feeling deeply isolated at times.

Walking into every team locker room being gay will challenge your fears of acceptance like it does for so many others in the queer community. You know you are different. But you will discover there is a community within the sports world made up of LGBTQ+ individuals just like yourself.

There will be many signs of acceptance you will pick up on, both during and after your own personal acceptance. Before ever coming out to your first athlete at Penn State there will be moments of general care and curiosity from athletes that will live with you forever.

One scene will repeat itself more times than you can count. There will be numerous times that sports television networks discuss LGBTQ+ stories while you are working in an athletic training room full of athletes. It will never cease to amaze you that once one of these stories comes on, the room pauses, going silent with every athlete glued to the TV, watching, learning, soaking in every word. Then, as soon as the TV segment is done, the athletes will go right back to normal rehab routines.

The first athlete you ever come out to at Penn State will be a young Russian player who right after scoring a goal, skates to the bench, turns around and asks if you are gay. You will be in such complete shock; you will ask him to repeat the question. He will rephrase it asking if you like Skittles and the rainbow. You will confirm you do but that he should go play the game!

After the game, the player will call you over to his locker to let you know he is cool with Skittles and the rainbow, a subtle way of showing his acceptance.

There will be athletes drafted in Seattle’s expansion draft who will do all sorts of research about their new city. One will tell you and everyone around them they learned Seattle has one of the biggest LGBTQ+ communities. Another Kraken player will tell you about music he heard from a queer artist at a drag brunch with his girlfriend while on All-Star break. Now you will have a locker room with players and staff that know your sexuality and support you.

Not every day will be easy though. In your later teen years, you will have someone tell you, speculating you may be gay, that you may want to reconsider your career choices, that you can’t possibly work and thrive in a sports locker room.

There will be days in locker rooms that you will hear derogatory terms tossed around in reference to queer individuals. There will be at least one time when you demonstrate a rehab exercise for an unsuspecting athlete who will tell you the exercise is the “gayest thing they’ve ever seen.” There will be other times you will hear athletes discuss and debate gay and transgender rights. You will have to decide when to speak up and when to bite your tongue.

As you fall more into your comfort level you will learn how to navigate tough situations while advocating for those who need it. As a white, straight-passing man, you will realize you have a privilege you can use to stick up for those more marginalized than you. And as cliché as it is, when people say you “don’t seem that gay”, you figure out looks can be deceiving. LGBTQ+ individuals come in all shades of the rainbow, no matter their physical appearance and personality traits. Everyone is human.

You will educate your athletes; trying to humanize queer people, in a positive light, in a world that doesn’t have much exposure. You will learn that living authentically will help young athletic trainers you encounter in your work life. You will be an example of someone who prospers in hockey for those players still in the closet who are trying to reach their goals. Through your travels, you will meet people who sadly gave up on their dreams because they thought they didn’t fit in. Meeting you will reinvigorate their own passions to find ways back into hockey.

As you build your support system and add to your chosen family, you will realize you are never alone. So many people are in this with you. Organizations like Pride Tape and the Alphabet Sports Collective will try to increase acceptance directly within the hockey world. There will be national organizations like the Sports Equality Foundation building a support system of LGBTQ+ people within the sports world.

While on road trips, you will network with people in many NHL cities who are trying to build local teams and programs of queer and ally hockey players for those who have a love of this amazing sport. You will see robust programs like the Seattle Hockey Pride Association build the biggest and most inclusive weekend hockey tournaments in which gay, bi, trans, non-binary, queer and ally individuals come out to support and celebrate each other in the name of hockey.

Justin, you will live authentically and in doing so you will change and even save lives. I promise you any struggles or moments of doubt you ever have will be worth it because of each story that you hear and impact you have. Keep being you, keep building your community, and keep showing the love to others the way you have received it from so many before you.

With all the love from your much more confident self,

Justin