”He talked to us about what it’s like to be an openly gay man today and educating us about the LGBTQ community. “He talked about the ignorance on the team, and how sometimes we don’t know we’re being homophobic and we need to be educated,” said Lucas Boetsch, one of Gunn’s co-captains on the team. While it may have been a tough conversation for Gunn to broach, he had the respect of other leaders on the team. “I wanted to make them aware of the issues and things they may have not thought about.” “I talked with the team about some of the awful things they’d said, which was very hard to do at the time,” Gunn said. While he had experienced outward support from his teammates, he also felt that some lingering language around the team - Gunn called it “subversive homophobia” - could still be better.
Working over the last year with the Sports Equality Foundation, he has become particularly present with the importance of modeling inclusive behavior and making sure that every LGBTQ person feels they have a place in sports.Įarlier this year, Gunn had taken the extraordinary step of calling a team meeting to talk about language. “Get that faggot armband off of you,” Gunn remembered an opposing player saying during the match. Gunn came out as gay in 2019 and shared his story on Outsports last January, so it was no secret what that rainbow armband meant. The two schools are in New Hampshire and part of the Great Northeast Athletic Conference.Ĭouper Gunn, a Colby-Sawyer team captain, was wearing a rainbow-colored captains armband in support of his community. men’s soccer team in a Division III clash last Wednesday night. It all started right before halftime when Colby-Sawyer faced the Rivier Univ. Not only was there an emotional halftime speech by the Colby-Sawyer head coach about rallying around their gay teammate, but the team left no doubt with a resounding victory that gave them their first win of the season and sent a message of love and support. When an opponent of the Colby-Sawyer College men’s soccer team called their gay teammate an anti-gay slur just before halftime of their match last Wednesday, the team responded in a big way.