puto

Spoiler alert: I'm gay. And, frankly, I've basically known this since I hit puberty and realized that I was different. That era - 25 years ago (gasp!) - was not especially kind to young gay men in sports. I remember being thoroughly intimidated by and afraid of the locker room. I had been ridiculed for years as a kid for not being manly enough. It's why I chose individual over team sports, why I stopped playing a musical instrument that wasn't masculine enough, and why I took great pains for years to "pass" as something other than gay. 

This used to scare the heck out of me.

It should come as little surprise, then, that it took a long time for me to warm up to sports. The typical "guy" thing of being into some mainstream sporting event, and all the comes with it, is something I only started to feel comfortable with in college where, as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, I watched our football team snag a national championship in my freshman year. From there, I branched out into other sporting spectating, like basketball, volleyball, gymnastics, and ice hockey. I even played team sports for a split second!

But, even with all that Michigan has meant to me in the decades since, I've found it difficult to invest in other teams. Until now.