Yahoo Sports 
How Bryan Fautley, a gay varsity athlete, changed his team’s culture by coming out
The past few years have seen movements across sports to reduce homophobia and support gay athletes, ranging from the story of Brendan Burke (which has led to his father Brian and brother Patrick's recent You Can Play campaign, supported by many current NHLers) to the San Francisco Giants and other baseball teams filming "It Gets Better" ads to NBA players and teams recording anti-homophobia messages. Despite all that, though, there are still very few openly gay high-level athletes, and as the story of Lanark-Carleton Minor Hockey League player Scott Heggart shows, there can be plenty of discrimination at the lower levels of sports too. That's what makes Gilbert Coyle's Queen's Journalpiece on CIS volleyball player Bryan Fautley so remarkable: Fautley speaks about the atmosphere of casual homophobia in sports, and he was determined to quit over it, but when he came out to his Queen's University teammates, he wound up altering the entire environment of a program.
As Fautley told Coyle, he quit the team in April 2010 out of frustration over the prevalent atmosphere of casually homophobic comments, but decided to return that fall following conversations with his teammates and head coach Brenda Willis. When he came back, there was a dramatic shift in both the program and his own interactions with the others:
In September 2010, Fautley returned to a completely different culture. The team had not only accepted his sexuality, but took a genuine interest in him being gay.
"A 180-degree change doesn't even describe it … not only were homophobic slurs not being used, but guys were engaging in conversation with me about it," he said. "It was a matter of 'oh, Fautley's gay and we're interested in knowing how his life is different than ours.'"
According to Fautley, nothing was awkward, and no subject was off-limits.
"Just like any two guys would have a conversation about their relationships, they would have it with me," he said. "It was a complete inclusion rather than just an acknowledgement."
Willis said that even though the team cleaned up their language, the real change came from Fautley himself.
"Once Bryan came out and people started being accepting and welcoming, he kind of took the headset off, he engaged in conversation," Willis said. "He joked with them and became himself.
"His reality [during his first three years] was that he felt unwelcome, he felt attacked … his perception was 'I don't belong here,'" she said. "But his perception became 'I do belong here, I'm a valuable member of this team.'"
That change in atmosphere has certainly had benefits for Fautley, and for another gay athlete who joined the team during the 2010 season, rookie Anthony Galonski. It hasn't hurt the team any, either; the Golden Gaels have had a successful program for years, but they hit new heights in 2011-12, winning an Ontario title, making their first-ever CIS semifinal and
finishing in fourth place at the national championships they hosted.
Fautley's story may be most notable as a case in point of how things can change, though. It's not a criticism of his teammates, but rather an account of how their behaviour was altered after finding out he was gay. As he told Coyle, the homophobic comments from teammates that bothered him so much weren't coming from hatred, but rather a typical athletic culture:
Fautley said his teammates weren't ever homophobic — they were simply products of an environment they had been part of for their entire athletic careers.
"Before they knew me, I would be very hard-pressed to know if they even knew another gay guy, let alone a gay athlete," he said. "So when you don't have something tangible to connect two different things, when you don't have a gay friend, you are so easily able to use derogatory language because it doesn't affect you.
"There is absolutely no blame from me to the rest of the guys for using homophobic language and making me feel uncomfortable," Fautley said. "I can only applaud them and respect them for not only acknowledging my homosexuality as a teammate, but to support it."
It's that lesson that might be the most widely applicable. Changing the culture and even just altering language patterns at all levels of sports isn't an easy task, but many players might be more receptive to gay teammates than you'd think. Prominent hockey players like Ryan Kesler and Henrik Sedin have firmly said they'd be fine with gay teammates, as have even NBA players who have been criticized for homophobic slurs, such as Joakim Noah. Some high-level athletes have come out at the end of their careers recently, including former Montreal Impact and Vancouver Whitecaps' player David Testo, and stories like Fautley's suggest players who come out during their careers may receive a more positive reception than they might expect. There's still a lot of work to do on the tolerance front, but this is an inspiring story that suggests that athletic cultures can change in a way that's welcoming to all athletes regardless of sexual orientation.
