Reflecting on Byron Perkins' Trailblazing Path Ahead of the 2024 NFL Draft

Seventeen months ago, Byron Perkins, a Hampton University football player, was in a dark place. After a promising 3-0 start to the season, his team lost two games in a row —  including a likely discouraging, 32-point beatdown at the University of Delaware. 

Out of uniform, things weren’t better. 

Walking around Hampton’s cozy bayside grounds, Perkins, a junior, felt as though he wore an invisible mask, one he couldn’t remove. A transfer from Purdue University, where he was a benchwarmer on a predominantly white campus, he’d become a key contributor on a team representing one of the crown jewels of historically Black colleges and universities. Changing scenery helped his football career, but the stifling feeling remained.

Perkins knew something had to change. So he started with the man in the mirror.

“I’ve decided that I’m going to make a change, and stop running away from myself,” Perkins wrote on Instagram. “I’m gay, let it be known that this is not a ‘decision’ or a ‘choice.’ Yes, this is who I am, this is who I’ve been, and this is who I’m going to be.”

Perkins may not have known it then, but the post changed his life and made sports history. 

With that declaration, he became the first out gay football player at any HBCU program, catapulting him into the national spotlight. News outlets from ESPN to Black Enterprise magazine wanted to hear Perkins’ story.

Ripping off the mask of presumed heterosexuality — necessary equipment, some say, for a gay player in the hyper-masculine, often homophobic world of American football — elevated Perkins’ game. Playing just days after his announcement, he racked up an impressive five tackles against University at Albany, a conference rival. 

Coming out also inspired Perkins to pursue his childhood dream of playing in the National Football League. At the end of Hampton’s 2023 season, Perkins declared he would enter the upcoming 2024 NFL Draft. 

If a team calls his name on the weekend of April 25, Perkins will become the first gay player selected since Michael Sam exactly a decade ago. And he’ll be ready.

“The next six months of my life after the holidays are going to be nothing but rigorous training schedules,” Perkins told Outsports late last year. “Training upon training to make sure I can compete, and have durability, with some of the best athletes in the world. Making sure I’m in the best physical shape of my life.”

Apart from the challenge of making the roster of a pro football team, Perkins’ goal could be an interesting litmus test for the NFL, which has an unimpressive track record when it comes to LGBTQ issues. 

Racism, Homophobia, and Change in the NFL

In 2021, John Gruden, one of the league’s highest-profile coaches and a former TV analyst, resigned after an investigation found he repeatedly used racist and homophobic language in emails to NFL colleagues. That same year, Carl Nassib, a top defensive lineman on Gruden's Las Vegas Raiders team, came out as the league’s first openly gay player.

"I'm a pretty private person, so I hope you guys know that I'm really not doing this for attention,” Nassib, a 4-year NFL veteran at the time, said in the video announcement he posted on social media. “I just think that representation and visibility are so important."

League commissioner Roger Goodell praised Nassib in a statement, calling him an important member of the “NFL family.” He said he hoped that “someday soon,” announcements like Nassib’s “will no longer be newsworthy as we march toward full equality for the LGBTQ+ community.”

“Football is a hypermasculine sport that I’d argue is America’s game. It’s supposed to represent and reinforce ideals and values that are particular to the U.S. Borrowing from bell hooks, this is a white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy, so a gay player in America’s sport contradicts this.”

— Tracie Canada

Though he’d received support from fans, teammates and prominent NFL stars, Nassib retired from pro football just two seasons later. No active player has come out since.

Tracie Canada, a sports anthropology professor at Duke University, isn’t surprised that Nassib walked that path alone. Professional football, she says, amplifies the latent homophobia present in many aspects of American sports culture.

“Football is a hypermasculine sport that I’d argue is America’s game,” Canada, whose work  includes studying the lived experiences of Black football players, wrote in an email interview. “It’s supposed to represent and reinforce ideals and values that are particular to the U.S.”

“Borrowing from bell hooks,” she said, “this is a white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy, so a gay player in America’s sport contradicts this.”

It seemed as though Sam, a gay Black man, would smash that paradigm in 2014.

Michael Sam (Photo Credit: Kathy Hutchins / Shutterstock.com)

The Impact of Michael Sam

An outstanding defensive lineman at the University of Missouri, Sam had the athletic resume of a top NFL prospect: first-team All-American, selection to several postseason all-star teams, and co-Player of the Year for the Southeastern Conference, the best in college football. He had excelled against top-flight competition, and analysts speculated which pro team would get to pick him in that year’s draft. 

Then, not long after he’d played his last game at Mizzou, Sam came out. 

News that a college football star was gay sent shockwaves through the sports world. Sportswriters, talk show hosts, and TV news crews clamored for interviews. Headlines portraying Sam as a gay rights hero in a heterocentric sport all but overshadowed his on-field accomplishments, making him arguably the most talked-about prospect in years. 

Given the hype, progressive sportswriters and activists imagined the man from Mizzou would blaze a trail through the NFL, leading the way for closeted pros who yearned to take off the mask. Others believed he would have a solid pro career, becoming a role model for younger gay athletes.  

More sober experts, however, quietly pondered an obvious, uncomfortable question: whether professional football — a billion-dollar business built on controlled violence, macho swagger, rowdy fans, and scantily-clad cheerleaders — was ready for an openly gay player.  

It wasn’t, at least not in the person of Sam. 

Despite an impressive college career, and Oprah Winfrey documenting his journey, Sam was among the last players chosen, by the then-St. Louis Rams, in the draft’s final round. He showed flashes of potential — in 3 preseason games, Sam had 11 tackles and 3 sacks, and his #96 Rams jersey was a best-seller among fans — but didn’t make the final roster cut. The Dallas Cowboys grabbed Sam for their practice squad, but they eventually cut him, too. 

A year after making history, Sam was out of the NFL.

His critics said Sam’s sexuality wasn’t the issue; he was just too small for his position and not gifted enough to play at the professional level. But NFL critics said the image-conscious league, grappling with multiple players facing allegations of domestic violence at the time, didn’t want the distraction of a successful gay player, so Sam was set up to fail.

Daniel Kelly, a New York University professor who studies sports and society, says Sam’s career was disappointing but important: he broke a barrier for others. Because of Sam, he says, Perkins has a better shot at making a team — if his athletic skills measure up. 

Neither Sam nor Nassib, the Raiders’ gay player, were superstars, but the publicity they generated by coming out helped nudge the league, albeit gently, towards acceptance of gay players, says Kelly, who teaches at NYU’s Preston Robert Tisch Institute for Global Sport. Perkins got plenty of attention when he came out last year, Kelly says, but the spotlight wasn’t nearly as intense as it was with Sam. 

As a result, Perkins “is not going to be as much of a novelty” as Sam was 10 years ago, Kelly says, and is more likely to be judged by his performance on the football field, not as a gay football pioneer.  

“It's going to be seen as, ’Does he have the goods? Can he play the game? And can he compete at this level?’” Kelly says. “Because he's not the first, he will get a fair shot to prove his skills.”

In that respect, Perkins is, objectively, something of a longshot. 

Byron Perkins' Journey to the NFL

Unlike Sam, Perkins played for a small HBCU school in a second-tier football conference. He wasn’t selected for important post-season honors and wasn’t invited to participate in the NFL Combine, a showcase for elite players. And his 2023 statistics as a defensive back — 22 tackles, 1 interception in 11 games, according to the Hampton media guide — are modest for a player with next-level ambitions.

By comparison, Terrion Arnold, considered the best defensive back in this year’s draft, racked up 63 tackles and 5 interceptions in 14 games for the University of Alabama, an NCAA football powerhouse. 

Canada, the Duke anthropologist, said the differences between Perkins and Arnold underscores why, 10 years after Sam, gay pro football players are still rare: only marginal players like Perkins, or unheralded ones like Nassib, have had the courage to come out so far. 

“It’s someone’s personal choice when they come out, but it matters that Nassib came out after he was already on a roster and already had a successful professional career,” Canada said. Declaring his sexuality just ahead of retirement, she said, “was a strategic move on (Nassib’s) part because he likely deemed it safer and less risky then.”

“It’s someone’s personal choice when they come out, but it matters that [Carl] Nassib came out after he was already on a roster and already had a successful professional career.”

— Tracie Canada

High-profile college or NFL players who might be secretly gay, she says, probably believe they have too much at stake — big contracts, lucrative endorsement deals and fan adulation — to risk coming out. While coaches, teammates, sponsors and even the league itself may be supportive of a lower-key gay player, a household-name superstar who comes out risks a homophobic backlash. The heterocentric culture of football, Canada says, is too hard to change.

If Perkins succeeds, “I wouldn’t credit the league with this,” Canada says. “The institutions (the league/different teams) are only concerned with winning games, selling tickets, and gaining fans.”

His odds seem long, but Perkins, 6 foot 3 inches tall and 190 lbs., has his eyes on the prize. If he isn’t drafted in April, he likely will be invited to participate in a team’s training camp, where he’ll get his chance to shine. 

“It is such a privilege to compete,” he told Outsports. “Whatever team I have the privilege to pick up their helmet, it’s going to be surreal. To just be able to touch an NFL practice field, that is a privilege, a privilege that doesn’t come to many.“

“You can’t be mediocre. I’m challenging myself to be elite every single day.”