This moment of staggering contradictions seems like a good time to take stock of how far we have—and haven't—come in dismantling homophobia. And the hopes we pin on these pioneering athletes may offer some key lessons.

Shortly after Collins came out, Brendon Ayanbadejo, former Ravens linebacker and advocate for marriage equality, explained the importance of his announcement on Meet the Press. Of course, given the sheer number of Americans who tune in to watch professional sports, athletes have an unprecedented platform to offer positive representations of LGBT people to large swaths of the population. But Ayanbadejo got to the heart of why the importance of a figure like Jason Collins extends beyond the celebrity factor: "People think gayness has something to do with femininity when really we just need to erase that stereotype from our minds," he said. "LGBT people come in all different types and shapes and forms."

As many commentators noted, this helps explain why college basketball phenom Brittney Griner's casual "coming out" just weeks before Collins' was greeted with so little fan-fare. The belief that sports—and perhaps team sports particularly—are a masculine endeavor lingers even 40 years after Title IX ushered millions of American women into the game. And since for women, we think gayness "has something to do with" masculinity, we hold the opposing set of assumptions about female athletes: "In sports right now, there are two different stereotypes—that there are no gay male athletes, and every female athlete is a lesbian," Patrick Burke of the gay sports advocacy group You Can Play explained to the New York Times. The news that Griner, who wore a white tux on her 6-foot-8 frame at the WNBA draft, is gay didn't fundamentally challenge our notion that sexuality has something to do with gender—and it just confirmed the stereotypes we had about women who excel in sports. As Garance Franke-Ruta put it, "Female professional athletes are already gender non-conforming. Male ones are still worshiped as exemplars of traditional masculinity."

Within this context, the hope is that a high-profile gay male athlete—or, more realistically, a few of them—could finally smash the stereotype that "gay" equals "unmasculine" once and for all. And, in fact, to some, Collins and Rogers don't have enough macho mojo to do the trick. Writing at The American Prospect, Joel Anderson argued that Collins' underwhelming performance on the court has taken away from the potential power of his announcement. The New York Times's John Branch noted that Major League Soccer is probably only the nation's fifth-most popular league—and, at least in the American sports landscape, soccer players hardly have an uber-masculine image. (In fact, according to the Onion, soccer became the "world's first openly gay sport" in 2010.) The real game-changer, Anderson wrote, would be if a player in the NFL, that bastion of "a certain kind of masculinity if not outright machismo," came out. "Football players are supposed to be our manliest men," he explained. "Their acceptance of a gay man into that world could go a long way toward unpacking some of the most insidious stereotypes about gay people."