Jake Bain is openly gay and proud
College footballer Jake Bain shared his story with Ellen about coming out as gay in school.
Bain made headlines in 2017 when he came out as gay to his high school classmates at John Burroughs School in Missouri.
Now he’s playing Division I football at Indiana State University.
He appeared on Ellen yesterday (7 January) to share how his life has changed since.
On coming out to his football team, Bain said: ‘I had a lot of nerves coming out because, at that time, there weren’t very many out, openly gay football players.’
Ellen interjected: ‘Or any!’
Jake Bain: ‘I talked to the coach about my sexuality’
Fortunately, his nerves were misplaced because his coach and team immediately accepted him for his authentic self.
Jake Bain explained: ‘Even before I committed there, I talked to the coach about my sexuality and that I wanted to be openly gay.
‘He assured me from the very beginning that I was gonna be accepted by the community at Indiana State and that my teammates were gonna treat me just like anybody else on the team,’ he said.
Then Ellen introduced Bain’s boyfriend Hunter Sigmund, who was in the audience. The pair have been together for two years.
She ended up gifting them both a six-night stay at a hotel in Fiji.
Ellen DeGeneres in hot water
Ellen recently came under fire for a recent interview with comedian Kevin Hart.
The lesbian talk show host said she wanted the Oscars to re-offer Hart the hosting gig for the 2019 awards show.
It came about after Hart stepped down because old homophobic tweets of his unsurfaced, causing a global uproar.
He initially rejected calls for him to step down from the hosting gig. He also refused to apologize for the old tweets.
‘I chose to pass on the apology,’ Hart said on Instagram, after the Academy allegedly threatened to ‘move on and find another host’.
But just a couple of hours later and after intense social media backlash, he reconsidered this approach.
‘I have made the choice to step down from hosting this year’s Oscar’s’ Hart wrote in a tweet on Friday (7 December).
He later tweeted, however: ‘I sincerely apologize to the LGBTQ community for my insensitive words from my past’.
See also:
Gay comedian wants a footballer to come out of the closet now
