Former BU football captain speaks at GSA Leadership Conference

Brian Sims, a ‘01 BU alumnus and former football standout for the Huskies, spoke at the Second Annual Pennsylvania Collegiate Conference on Gay Straight Alliance Leadership (GSA) on Saturday about his experience during the 2000 season.

“I have a rather unique story, part of it is that I really never had any anti-gay backlash,” said Sims, who became the first openly gay college football captain in NCAA history.

 Sims found an acceptance among his friends and teammates within the weeks and months after ‘coming out’ to his team. He said he couldn’t go anywhere without being pulled aside and confronted by positive and encouraging words by his peers. Sims also remarked how he was asked all sorts of questions about his sexual orientation. 

            “I knew that if the seniors and starters were going to be alright with it, that the rest of my team would be alright with it,” Sims said. “The freshmen and sophomores would look at them to see how to react and that’s exactly what happened.”  

   As the season went on, Sims realized how much his football team supported him. He remembered thinking, “Wow, my football team has my back in this in a way that I did not know they did.” His teammates became intuitive and stood up for Sims if others made derogatory or prejudicial comments against him.

            In hindsight, Sims reflected on the 2000 season when the Huskies advanced to the NCAA National Championship game for the first and only time in school history. He wondered if his team’s reaction would have been different if he were a third string player. He believed it would have differed, but since he was a great player, he thought he received somewhat of a “pass,” and a greater acceptance by his team. 

Sims mentioned that he is able to recruit allies, or friends of the gay community more effectively due to his football background and because he does not appear to look like a stereotypical gay. He went on to explain that he is more likely to recruit the “unexpected ally.” An unexpected ally is someone who is part of the majority, but believes in rights for a minority group. According to Sims, the more unexpected allies the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LGBT) community gains, the greater its movement towards equality can be. 

            “Young America is extremely pro-gay,” said Sims, who is president of Equality Advocates and the Gay and Lesbian Lawyers of Philadelphia. “The LGBT community has had a lot of changes in the last 15-20 years and it is because of the support we have gotten from our allies and I think what we don’t do a good enough job of is empower our allies.” 

He also noted how a dynamic in society is changing in the way allies are viewed. It is no longer seen as “guilty by association,” if a straight person is close friends with a gay person, it is beginning to be more accepted and thought of as a sense of self-security. “Most people would agree that the type of personality that people attract is strong, confident, secure, comfortable people,” Sims said.

            According to Sims, the 18-30 year-old demographic is “over-whelming supportive of social issues,” and the younger generation is becoming more open to different views of politics today, such as gay marriage. “Right now for the very first time in U.S. history, people get more liberal as their getting older.”    

            “The more that straight people talk about gay people, good, bad or indifferent, the more tolerant straight people become,” Sims said in an interview. “It is purely an exposure campaign. It’s hard to hate something that you’re around, it’s hard to hate something that you understand, and it’s really easy to hate something from a far.”

Michael Whittaker, a sophomore from Penn State Harrisburg, who attended the conference for his second time, had an overall positive experience. He enjoyed the informative workshops and found the speech by Sims to be “confidence inspiring.”

“I think that we are getting our goal,” said Luis Medina, president of GSA at BU. “Getting a lot of people from GSA together from different schools to fight for a common cause and for a common purpose.” About 150 students attended the GSA conference from 13 different universities across the state.