Brittney Griner’s Taboo

Brittney Griner, the former Baylor University basketball star and the number one pick in the 2013 WNBA draft, is featured on the cover of ESPN Magazine this month, for the “Taboo Issue.” If you missed it (not improbable!), Griner came out in mid-April in a video interview with Sports Illustrated. She also wrote a New York Times op-ed piece about a week after NBA free agent Jason Collins came out in a Sports Illustrated cover story.

Griner’s kept pretty quiet since, aside from dunking all over the WNBA — and that shouldn’t surprise anyone, as her actual coming-out was so comparatively low-key (“Being one that’s out, it’s just being who you are,” she said in the SI interview, as if she were stating the time). But then there’s this ESPN interview. Here is a passage you don’t see in sports journalism very often:

“I am 100-percent happy,” she says. “When I was at Baylor, I wasn’t fully happy because I couldn’t be all the way out. It feels so good saying it: I am a strong, black lesbian woman. Every single time I say it, I feel so much better.”

Or anywhere, really! More here.