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Out of the closet, into the spotlight
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April 27, 2000 | Johnson, a senior at Masconomet High in
Topsfield, Mass., has been public about
his sexual orientation for more than a
year. In early April 1999, after much
deliberation, he elected to tell his
teammates. They did not run screaming
from the locker room, nor did they haze
him, on or off the field. The team did
not self-destruct in an implosion of
homophobia and finished this season
pretty decently (7-4). One difference between this season and
last: Post victory, Johnson's teammates
serenaded their captain with an a
cappella version of "YMCA" by the Village
People. ("Young men, are you
listening to me?") Though Johnson's secret was soon
anything but (the phrase "Football Fag,"
which was scrawled on a campus wall,
seems to have been the extent of the
outrage), his story was not made public
until this year. And though the Times'
Robert Lipsyte is scheduled to run a
piece on Johnson this weekend, and
Vanity Fair approached the boy earlier,
his tale did not appear in a mainstream
magazine or newspaper, but rather in the
campus journal SchoolSports. The Boston publication bills itself as
"a national network celebrating local
high school sports." It publishes
regional versions (10 in all) as well as
a Web site. According to Chad Konecky,
who wrote the Johnson saga for
SchoolSports, the scoop was the result
of serendipity -- as well as the paper's
reputation-free reputation. "The development department [at
SchoolSports] tries to pump up the
paper's tagline: 'Celebrating high
school sports,'" says Konecky. "To a
certain extent that means you do a lot
of feel-good, fuzzy, fawning pieces. But
on the upside of that, you do a lot of
feel-good pieces and everyone loves them
and no one has an unkind word for your
content." It was a woman from that development
department who first met Johnson. Both
were attending a school conference;
Johnson, in association with GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian and Straight
Education Network), was giving a seminar
for athletic directors on how to cope
with gay athletes. He liked her pitch,
and wanted to tell his story in a
publication that was available to his
peers. He especially wanted to reach
other kids who were in the grips of
dealing with their homosexuality. According to Konecky, Johnson (who did
not wish to be interviewed for this
piece) turned down a Vanity Fair profile
for reasons of timing and the
publication's limited appeal to
teenagers. H.R. "Buzz" Bissinger, author
of the high school football classic
"Friday Night Lights," had approached
Johnson on behalf of the magazine with
the idea of following him and the team
this season. "[Johnson] felt like it
would become a national story and
distract him from the game," says
Konecky. "He felt like he had traded one
label for another: The captain of the
football team was now 'The Gay Corey
Johnson.'" Konecky, who does a fine job of
chronicling the young man's decision to
come out, says Johnson is well aware of
the implications of being a poster child
(or role model) for anything. "I was struck by the fact that he saw
where this could go," says Konecky, "and
that years from now people would meet
him at a cocktail party and say, 'Hey,
you're the gay football captain.'" Aside
from public speaking for GLSEN, Johnson
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