Mason had come out as gay to his teammates as a freshman. Bonding as a football unit requires working together extremely intimately and he felt it was best to ground his relationship with his fellow players in honesty. But he hadn’t come out to his coaches yet — and decided now was the time. “I had great relationships with the staff, but it felt more like a business relationship,” he remembers. “I didn’t feel as though I needed to tell them until I had talked to Outsports about doing an interview.” So Mason sat down with Coach Surace. Coach, it turned out, didn’t much care about his sexuality so long as he could keep protecting quarterbacks Chad Kanoff and Johnny Lovett. And Mason performed — becoming the first out player to play in a D1 game and playing every game of the 2015 season.
Despite all the media attention that resulted from his coming out, Mason never felt his identity as a gay man had anything to do with his identity as a football player.
“In the locker room or at dinner, when the guys talked about girls and stuff, I’d talk about Drag Race,” he says. “No one cared. And it wasn’t like football or being gay were the only things I cared about! As a child I loved basketball. I admired my older siblings and my parents. And obviously, Beyoncé! I never thought about my identity, I was just being me.”
