"Would I Do Troy Aikman on Sunset Strip? Yes!"

Check out David Kamp's 2006 :

There’s a whiff of comic novelty to meeting a gay football player. Dave Kopay’s apartment in Los Angeles has the requisite ephemera of a finished sports career: the team photos, the plaques, the display of helmets over the big-screen TV, one for each team he played for—the San Francisco 49ers, the Detroit Lions, the Washington Redskins and the Green Bay Packers. (Unrepresented for some reason are the New Orleans Saints, with whom he spent one season.) But in the course of the grand tour, a bedroom cabinet is opened to reveal a poster of meat boys in underwear, and the kitchen bulletin board is a collage of photos Kopay and male friends romping nude or nearly nude by the pool outside his weekend house in Palm Desert. Somewhere in the collage is a dorsal-view portrait, clipped from a magazine, of an unclothed male rock climber.

“Who’s that?” I ask.

“Oh, that’s just a butt I liked,” he says.

Twenty years ago, Kopay was a sociological phenomenon, the first National Football League player, active or retired, ever to publicly acknowledge his homosexuality. Today he is a 55-year-old flooring salesman at Linoleum City, a store in Hollywood whose catchphrase is “Sears is next to us.” He’s a nice guy, with a mirthful, gabby way about him—“Would I do Troy Aikman on Sunset Strip?” he mused, unbidden, the first time we ever spoke on the telephone, answering, “Yes! That would be my fantasy!”—but he’s also prone to fits of pique where his body goes taut with frustration and anger and there’s just no consoling him. What causes these fits is not his current station in life, which is more edifying and lucrative than it sounds, but the nagging idea that to this day it’s still pretty much just him: “lonely old me,” as he rails in one of his paroxysmal moments, “Dave Kopay–the-gay-football-player.”

Since he took his great leap, he has been joined in the annals of known gay football pros by precisely two people: his old Redskins teammate Jerry Smith, an all-pro tight end who went to his grave without publicly disclosing his sexual orientation but whose death from AIDS in 1986 occasioned posthumous discussion of his homosexuality, and a former guard with the New York Giants named Roy Simmons, who outed himself on Donahue in 1992, nine years after he left football, and promptly disappeared from public view.