Out of the closet, into the locker-room

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Scott Heggart (BRUNO SCHLUMBERGER / POSTMEDIA NEWS)

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Sonya Long (from left), Randy Heggart, Brock Doivon, Scott Heggart, Julie Wilson and Russell Heggart. (PHOTOS BY BRUNO SCHLUMBERGER / OTTAWA CITIZEN)

Scott Heggart was a big, strapping teenager, who topped out at six-foot-four. He played football, basketball, softball and hockey.

And he had a secret. It was tough enough to share it with his mom and dad.

But as a young athlete, steeped in the machismo of sport, where "about the worst thing" is to be a "fag" or a "homo," there was one conversation that was even tougher: Telling his teammates he was gay.

Toronto Maple Leafs general manager Brian Burke and his son, Patrick, a scout for the Philadelphia Flyers, have just launched the You Can Play project to tackle the "casual homophobia" of professional hockey, where there is still no openly gay athlete. The initiative is in honour of Brendan Burke, their son and brother, who came out shortly before being killed in a car accident in 2010.

Public service announcements, with 36 NHL players so far signing on, deliver a simple, powerful message that an athlete's sexual orientation does not matter. "If you can play, you can play," is a seven-word mantra taken from a piece written by Brendan.

The campaign is a small sign of change in the elite level of sport. One day, this attitude may trickle down to places such as the locker-rooms of the Lanark-Carleton Minor Hockey League, where Scott Heggart risked being ostracized and ridiculed to do what few athletes before him, professional or amateur, dared to.

His truth telling didn't play out as he'd expected.

From the time Scott Heggart could walk, he'd wander around like a pint-sized warrior swinging some sort of sporting implement, whether it was a hockey stick, baseball bat or golf club. And as soon as he could read, he was memorizing stats.

He loved sports, especially hockey. But by the time he was in Grade 7, he'd come to realize, he didn't love girls, at least not in that way.

Sure, he had gal pals, but when his buddies were snatching first kisses and going on dates, Scott hung back. He wasn't interested.

Did he think he was gay? "I'd started to understand who I was, what it meant. And if I was being true to myself, I probably would have come out in Grade 6, but I didn't want to be that person," he recalls.

At the time he played basketball at Bridlewood Community Elementary School, and minor league hockey in Kanata, Ont. If he owned up to his sexuality, he feared he would have to stop playing.

"The worst thing, from my teammates' perspective, was to be gay. If there was the slightest hint you possessed a feminine side, or if you whimpered after slamming into the boards, or if you dared wear a pink shirt, you were ridiculed."

Faggot this. Homo that. But interestingly, never directed at Scott. No one thought the lanky athlete could be gay. And he planned to never tell them.

But the situation ate at him. "I thought there was no way they would accept me.

So he withdrew. He'd practise and play, then he'd hide at home.

His parents, Julie Wilson and Randy Heggart, wondered what had happened to their "happy boy.

"We knew he was wrestling with something, but we just couldn't imagine what," recalls Julie.

They asked, he shrugged. He had every reason to believe his parents would be supportive. But even if he told them he was gay, how could he admit he was gripped by self-loathing and suicidal thoughts?

"I started looking around me at all the hate that is directed at gay people and that really threw me off the deep end."

So he tried to think himself straight.

"I really mentally punished myself for my thoughts. It wasn't a psychologically healthy thing to be doing." And when he realized he couldn't alter his identity, he thought of killing himself.

"I spiralled downward. And it became this constant mental pain that I was dealing with."

After a year of intense suffering and loneliness, he knew he had to seek help, or he might harm himself.

He emailed his sister, Sonya, 12 years his senior, asking to meet.

"Is this about a girl?" she asked when they were face-to-face. Of all the questions.

When he said no, she replied, only joking: "Is this about a boy?

"I looked her in the eyes, and I said, 'Yeah, I'm gay.' "

He'd finally shared the secret he'd held close for so long. They talked, cried, hugged. Sonya, like the rest of her family, would later say she never suspected Scott was gay. In retrospect it "made sense," in part because he hadn't been girl-crazy like his older brother.

With his sister by his side, Scott told his parents in a few quick sentences.

It went something like this, according to all who were there: "I'm going through a really rough time. I want some more freedom in my life to express myself. I need to feel at home in my own house. I can't go on like this -- I'm gay."

His parents were somewhat relieved.

"When you said you had something important to tell us, I was thinking it was obviously something very grave and I wasn't sure what we were facing," his dad Randy would later say.

Mom Julie says if she'd really thought about it, she might have "put it together." They had attributed the past months of moodiness to a "rocky adolescence." And when their friends asked why Scott didn't have a girlfriend, they'd invariably say he was too busy with sports. And they believed this.

This had been the easy conversation. But Scott, then 15, couldn't imagine taking the next step and telling his teammates. He would also be moving to a new school for Grade 9, Sacred Heart Catholic High School in Stittsville, where he'd have to make new friends. So he chose another, very teenage way, to continue the conversation.

During the first week of Grade 10, Scott recorded a video of himself telling his coming out story. He posted it to YouTube, then showed his parents.

This video would eventually receive more than 52,000 views from people who had no idea he was a gay teen living in Stittsville.

He told his parents he planned to post one video each day for the next year as he documented his experience of coming out as a gay jock. He hoped he could work out his anxieties anonymously online, as well as solicit support from others who had already walked this path.

"Our reaction was total fear because the Internet can be a scary place," says Julie.

She insisted his identity be protected, but she didn't fight him. He posted the videos anonymously to his own YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/user/big93scott). People could find them, and post comments, searching words such as "coming out story" and "gay jock," for example. "He needed to do this. It was a place where he could be himself and share his struggles and his conflicts and everything he was going through with this broader community."

He didn't miss a day. The 365 videos are intense, instructive, intelligent. Some are short updates, in others he talks about gay marriage, or whether gays can be "cured." (Short answer: No.) He wades into U.S. politics and takes on the religious right.

In a series of poignant interviews, he asks the members of his family, one by one, whether they thought he was gay, and what their reaction is now that they know. He asks his dad to offer advice to other fathers struggling to support a gay child.

"This isn't about you," Randy says to the camera. "This is about your child. They haven't changed; it's your perception of them. If you loved your child before you found out they were gay, that shouldn't change. If you think you're having a hard time, imagine how they felt."

The most wrenching videos are those in which he talks about his fears of telling his teammates. His anxiety is palpable. At the time, he was a goalie for a Stittsville team in the Lanark-Carleton Minor Hockey League, which included teams from Almonte, Osgoode and Carleton Place.

In one video specifically about being a "gay jock," seen more than 30,000 times, he says: "In hockey, the homophobia is bad in the locker-room. But the worst is when I played football. It was a pretty fun sport, but there was so much hate and so much fake macho-ism that they put on, that I just couldn't stand it. I only lasted from Grade 8 to Grade 9. There was too much hate for me to handle. I wouldn't want to hear that s--t ever again."

The number of people following Scott grew -- he has had more than 530,000 views -- but by the time he completed his 365 posts, he hadn't told his teammates or classmates.

He couldn't do it. He imagined fans at hockey games chanting that he was a "fag." He feared being banned from the dressing room.

His loneliness was immense. "I was 'out' at home, in the closet at school. So I spent all my time at home." Then, toward the middle of Grade 11, he met a boy online named Brock, who was from Toronto. They hit it off.

This relationship gave him courage, first, to do something that almost every teen at Sacred Heart and on his sports teams had already done: set up a Facebook page. "I'd never joined Facebook because I didn't want to lie."

And then, when hockey season was over and just before softball season began, he decided it was time.

He didn't call a team meeting, or strategically tell a few chums. Instead he changed his Facebook status to say he was "in a relationship." He also posted a picture of himself with Brock.

And then he waited. "None of us slept," dad Randy recalls. "There were a lot of tears.

Says Julie, "We hoped for the best and prepared for the worst."

By the next morning, there had been no reaction to his status change, so Scott went to school wondering if anyone had noticed, or if he'd been blacklisted while he slept. Friday came and went. So did Saturday and most of Sunday.

Then, on Sunday evening, one of Scott's best friends from hockey sent him a private message on Facebook: "What you did man, it takes a lot of courage and I'm proud of you. And I've been talking to a lot of people, and they all say the same thing."

His inbox filled up with messages from teammates and classmates, every last one expressing respect and support.

One teammate wrote, "If I was in your shoes, I wouldn't have had the balls to do that."

Some of Scott's teammates apologized for previous slurs. A former football teammate apologized "on behalf of everybody" for making him "feel so uncomfortable."

And so it went.

Julie was "so proud' of Scott's teammates. "They recognized how much courage it took and they recognized how much trust he was putting in them."

Scott, now 21, still can't make sense of why his teammates had seemed so homophobic, yet supported him unconditionally given the chance. He's come to learn that "kids say stuff they don't mean," and just because they say anti-gay things it doesn't mean they "hate homosexuals."

-- Postmedia News

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition March 24, 2012 J12