Gregg Doyel

gregg.doyel@indystar.com

INDIANAPOLIS – Even now, there are days Darrion McAlister wonders if it’s really true. Even now he goes to his mirror and stands there and says two words he can’t say to anyone else.

That’s why he’s walking up the IndyStar escalator. He’s ready to say those words to his sisters. To his pastor and his Sunday school teacher. To his football coaches at Marian University, where McAlister is an all-conference center. To his teammates.

To all those guys he played with at Kokomo High, where he was All-North Central Conference in 2012, an offensive lineman who wasn’t interested in blocking the man across from him. He wanted to destroy him.

McAlister steps off the escalator. He’s flanked by two teammates, and everybody’s serious. Nobody’s talking. For all of us, the tension’s uncomfortable.

Darrion McAlister is about to unbottle years of truth. He is ready to tell the world what he still tells the mirror, just to make sure it’s still true.

Darrion McAlister wants you to know what he told his mirror this morning:

"I’m gay."

* * *

Date: Thursday, February 9, 2017 at 7:32 AM

To: Gregg.Doyel@indystar.com

Subject: Gay NAIA Football National Champion

Good Morning Mr. Doyel,

My name is Darrion McAlister, and I am a football player for Marian University here in Indianapolis. I was wondering if you would be interested in doing a segment about a gay football player? I'm not openly gay, but I figured this could be my coming out story, and that it could also be something that potentially helps other gay athletes throughout the state of Indiana in hopes of them feeling more comfortable about themselves in their sport.

Thank you for your time,

Darrion McAlister

* * *

It’s Tuesday, and McAlister, 21, is sitting inside an IndyStar conference room. With him are Marian running back Maurice Woodard, a sophomore from West Lafayette, and guard Ryan Borders, a sophomore from Western Boone. Borders knows why he’s here. Woodard? He has no idea. McAlister asked him to come, so he came. Marian’s third-leading rusher is about to learn his center is gay.

Woodard takes the chair to McAlister’s right, Borders to his left.

“Moral support,” McAlister mutters.

So, I say to him: Tell me about that email.

“I don’t have classes on Fridays,” is how he starts this story, “and all my classes got canceled that (Thursday), so I started drinking. Something about me was like: ‘You gotta do this, you gotta do this.’ And when I sent you the email …“

“You were drunk!” I say.

McAlister nods and smiles.

“I’d taken about four or five shots,” he says. “I was like, ‘He’s not going to respond, so I might as well do it.’ And then you responded and I was like, ‘Oh (expletive).’”

The tipping point’s coming, the day when NFL draft hopeful Michael Sam coming out in 2014 or unemployed NBA player Jason Collins coming out in 2013 is no longer news. Given that there has never been an openly gay player on an active roster in the NFL or MLB (with Collins the lone publicly gay athlete to play in the NBA) — given that last season there was exactly one openly gay college football player (Princeton's Mason Darrow) at any level — that day has not come.

Darrion McAlister is using me today, and that’s OK. He decided it would be easier to tell a complete stranger — and let me tell his teammates, his world — than tell them himself.

“Here,” he'll tell everyone, referring to this story. “Read this.”

And maybe I’m using McAlister as well. Sports is my excuse to write about people, whether it’s a 7-1 South Sudanese refugee on the Hamilton Southeastern junior varsity team, or a heroic Anderson police officer standing outside Colts training camp on a prosthetic leg.

Or this.

Like it or not — and there will be readers who don’t like this story at all — LGBT issues are front and center these days, whether it’s RFRA here in Indiana or the Supreme Court legalizing same-sex marriage or President Donald Trump’s stance on workplace equality. The topic is so large, so everywhere, it’s difficult to wrap your brain around it. A topic like this one, it needs a face.

Here’s one.

Darrion McAlister smiles sadly. His face is as chiseled as the rest of him, this 6-2, 260-pound brick house in a gray sweater. He tells me he’s battled depression since eighth grade, when he first questioned his sexuality. It wasn’t an everyday thing, but once or twice a month he’d wake up and decide getting out of bed was just too difficult. He doesn’t just have a secret. His life is a secret.

A month ago, McAlister was behind the counter at the campus Subway where he works when it hit him: He has to stop hiding. He is breaking down when he calls a friend and co-worker, Kelsey. She comes to Subway, comforts McAlister in the back, takes his place up front until he’s ready to return.

About now, I look at Maurice Woodard. So, I say, now you know. What do you think?

“It was always a thought like, maybe, but I never pressed him on it because it’s not that big a deal to me,” Woodard says. “He’s still the same Darrion.”

Darrion nods. He started at right tackle for Marian’s 2015 NAIA national championship team. He benches 315 pounds. He remembers crying at Subway, wondering what teammates would think.

“Everyone expects you to be masculine, everyone expects you to be macho,” he was thinking. “How are my teammates going to view me? Are they still going to respect me?”

* * *

Two months ago, McAlister and three friends were hanging out at a house in Southport. They’re playing “Never Have I Ever ...” It’s a form of Truth or Dare, minus the dare.

At some point, somebody challenges the rest of the group with this potential truth: “Never have I ever … kissed a man.”

Silence.

And then McAlister is making the gesture. Yes, the gesture says, I’ve done that one. I’ve kissed a man. He looks at three of his closest friends and says what he has said aloud only to his mirror:

“I’m gay.”

Ryan Borders, the guard from Western Boone, is one of the people at the house in Southport. He asks: “Really?”

McAlister nods — and wow did that feel good.

“There was this big relief off my shoulders,” he says. “Somebody else knows. I felt good about myself for the first time.”

How did his friends react to McAlister’s truth?

“We went back to playing the game,” Borders says.

This generation — McAlister’s generation — is more accepting than the generations that came before it. But this truth so often remains hidden. As far as I can tell, in the entire country there will be just two openly gay college football players in 2017. One of them is Darrion McAlister. The other one? McAlister blocked the other one last season.

His name is Kyle Kurdziolek, an all-state linebacker from Illinois in 2013 who will be a junior this season at St. Francis (Illinois). By the end of Marian’s 63-14 victory Nov. 5 against St. Francis, after battling each other to nearly every whistle, McAlister and Kurdziolek had struck up a friendship. They reconnected on social media, grew closer, and at some point Kurdziolek told McAlister he’s gay.

“So am I,” McAlister wrote back.

They talked about coming out. Kurdziolek did it through Outsports.com on Feb. 8. That was Wednesday of last week.

The next morning, McAlister sends me his email.

What happens next, Darrion McAlister has no idea — but he's encouraged by the reaction from teammates and also his father, Demetrius. Darrion told his dad this week and says "he wasn't shocked or anything. He just kind of laughed and said he was looking forward to reading your story. It was a relief."

After telling me his story, Darrion walks out of the conference room, down the escalator and toward Meridian Street with relief. The days of looking in the mirror and being unsure of the man looking back? Those days are over, he says.

“Now that I’ve told more people it resonates well with me,” he says. “I don’t know how anyone will take it. It’s a scary thought, thinking about the unknown, but I’m just ready to be myself.”

We’re almost outside when I ask Darrion my final question:

How did you pick me?

“I went to the website and saw your name and clicked it,” he says.

So you didn’t know who I was?

“No clue.”

Go on, I say, get out of here. And he’s gone, walking across Meridian with two of his teammates. On my side of the street, I hear the cars driving past. On his side, I hear laughter.

Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter:@GreggDoyelStar or atfacebook.com/gregg.doyel.



