SEVERAL WEEKS AFTER CARL NASSIB came out in June 2021—becoming the first openly gay active player in NFL history—he completed a strip sack leading the Las Vegas Raiders to a week-one win over the Baltimore Ravens. It was a thrilling play and an impressive show of athleticism from the defensive lineman. It was also, in its own way, a statement. For years, coaches, commentators, and league officials had wrung their hands, suggesting that an openly gay player in the locker room would divide the team and sow chaos; the fear was so pervasive it became known as the distraction myth. Yet in one swift play—with 15.3 million people watching at home, marking ESPN’s most viewed season opener in nearly a decade—Carl Nassib vanquished the ghost.

He showed that all the talk about who’s gay and what it may or may not do to the team was the actual distraction—Nassib was there to make some tackles and play some football, and he did them excellently. “Imagine I ruined it for everyone?” he says now. “Like, I let up a touchdown or something. And people were like, Go back in the closet! That could have been horrible.”

Nassib’s laughing—and it’s funny—but he also makes it clear that he hasn’t really thought much about that game since. He didn’t step out onto the field that day with the weight of the world on his broad shoulders. “I felt really lucky that I could be on a big stage and, like, make a good play while representing the community,” he says. “To be the first out player in a game and then to win. That’s sick, that’s fucking cool. But I go out with the same mentality every game, just trying to beat the shit out of the team across from me. My whole thing is, I’m a football player who is gay,” or, more clearly, who happens to be gay. “I don’t think that straight players are thinking, Oh, I’m straight and I’m playing this game.”

He’s right, of course. And he didn’t ask to be the first active openly gay player. He isn’t even sure others will follow soon, though there are certainly closeted gay players in the league. (More on that later.) Still, he wears it well. In his minute-long coming-out video, notable for its nonchalance—“I just want to take a quick moment to say that I’m gay”—Nassib swiftly pivoted the attention away from himself, announcing he was donating $100,000 to the Trevor Project, a nonprofit focused on suicide prevention and crisis intervention for LGBTQ youth. The NFL matched that sizable donation (not a given from a league that did Colin Kaepernick dirty), as did the travel website Booking.com. Daily donations to the Trevor Project also doubled that week, with traffic to its site up by more than 350 percent.