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Phoenix Suns CEO, Rick Welts, comes out



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It seems like we are having a lot of people who are kicking that closet door open. It's a good thing, but even better is the warm, positive response that Rick Welts, CEO of the Phoenix Suns, received after he outed himself:

PHOENIX — Rick Welts was 40,000 feet in the air on a flight two hours from New York when, as he put it, “my life was changing below me.”

The Phoenix Suns president and chief executive officer knew the story revealing he was gay had been posted on the Internet by The New York Times. When he landed, his Blackberry “exploded with e-mails from all over the place,” all supporting him.

There was a voice mail from Charles Barkley, a text from Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and “really a nice message” from Arizona Cardinals President Michael Bidwill. In all, he said, he had “a couple hundred” emails, some from people he didn’t know.
Welts does mention in the article he thinks it is a lot harder for athletes to come out because of their brief playing careers and fears of how they would be treated. He goes on to mention that male team sports in America are not in step with society's thinking on the issue. It is time for an American gay male professional athlete in a team sport to come out and be counted. They are, indeed, behind the curve. It might be terrifying for someone considering coming out, but they should remember there were many of us in the military services who had a lot to lose by coming out and we did it any way, and things are changing for the better because of it. They should know that when they do there will be a lot of people who have their back.

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