 "Photo: Katie Flowers/THE DAILY ATHENAEUM")
Brian Sims, the first ever openly gay football captain in NCAA history, spoke about his experiences as a homosexual man in sports and politics at Ming Hsieh Hall Tuesday night.
As the son and grandson of two retired army cardinals, the captain of a No. 2 ranked Division II football team with an extremely conservative head coach might seem like a rough position for someone to come out.
For Brian Sims, it was the opposite.
"My team had 118 guys on the football team. Every single one of them wanted to come find some private time with me to ask how I was doing and let me know that they were okay with it," Sims said.
Sims spoke in front of a crowd of approximately 100 people last night.
In his free time from his responsibilities as an attorney and politician, Sims travels to colleges to promote gay rights.
"Most colleges don’t trust their students to bring me in," Sims said. "I only do this because of how important it is for me."
When Sims came out at the age of 22, he became the first openly homosexual football captain in NCAA history.
His team, Bloomington University, held one of the best records in Division II from the previous season.
Sims was never worried about how his teammates would react but was scared it would have negative consequences on the team’s performance.
"I didn’t think that me coming out to that group was going to benefit the team," Sims said. "I wasn’t planning on coming out to them, but they came out to me."
Sims went on to graduate law school and became an attorney.
In April 2009, Sims got a phone call from a man running a website called Outsports.com, which promotes gay rights within the professional sports community.
Sims agreed to be interviewed by the website, and his email inbox blew up right away.
"They did not tell me what the extent about it would be," Sims said. "For the first three months I had an e-mail every 7 minutes. Do the math."
Since then Sims has dedicated a large portion of his life to helping people from every corner of the world come out as homosexual.
"I started meeting with a group of psychologists and psychiatrists," Sims said. "Now, no matter what state you are in, I can send you to a decent resource."
Sims describes himself as being a Benjamin Franklin junkie growing up. When he got a job at the Philadelphia Bar Association, an association of layers, he took on the job to amend the association’s charter, written by Benjamin Franklin in 1802.
"The first thing I did was to amend that charter, to make it gender neutral, take ‘he,’ ‘him’ and ‘his’ and make it gender neutral," Sims said. "I am a die hard feminist."
In January, Sims will swear the oath to become the first openly gay LGBT State Legislator of the 128th district in Philadelphia, a seat previously held by none other than Benjamin Franklin himself.
To learn more about Sims’ campaign, visit http://www.sims4pa.com.