A decade ago, Wade Davis was a cornerback struggling to make a National Football League roster. He was also in the closet. “Honestly, I wasn’t strong enough as a person,” Davis said, explaining why he only came out as gay seven years after leaving football, in an interview with OutSports.com this week. Since leaving the NFL, where he was a defensive back for the Tennessee Titans, Seattle Seahawks and Washington Redskins, Davis, 34, has found a new calling: helping LGBT youth deal with the same pressures he experienced as a player. Now an assistant director of job readiness at New York City’s Hetrick-Martin Institute, which provides services such as GED preparation, HIV education and mental health support, Davis said his new job is an opportunity to inspire “other Wade Davis’s out there to live in their own truth.” Davis said he feared revealing his homosexuality would sink his career. On the field, he said, his only focus was football, but when practices and games ended, his identity struggle became “real again.” But Davis said he consistently prioritized protecting his career over resolving that struggle. Asked if he regretted waiting as long as he did to come out, Davis said, “Considering the work I’m doing now, yes. But five or six years ago, no.” Former teammate Jevon Kearse told the Los Angeles Times that he would have accepted Davis’s homosexuality had Davis told him about it.
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