NFL superstar Coles comes out of his personal closet

How I relate to his harrowing tale of child sexual abuse

Note: This is modified from my Lancaster Today column of Oct. 27

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Laveranues Coles is out of the closet.

Not the closet of homosexuality, or his story would have made far bigger headlines than it actually did, sadly.

No, the New York Jets wide receiver recently came out of the closet of his personal childhood fears, hells and demons. In a September profile story in The New York Times, followed by a gripping October appearance on Oprah, Coles talked about how he was sexually abused for three years by the man who became his stepfather.

“I haven't talked about it in … forever, but I know that holding something like that inside has been a burden for so long,” Coles said in an interview after helping the Jets beat Miami 17-7. “For me to get on this platform that I have, having been in the league and have all the media attention that we have, I think it's something that should be said.

“If it gets one kid to come out and say, ‘Look, this is happening to me,’ … I think it’s right.”

Short of an American male professional athlete, while still playing, coming out and saying he is gay, this is probably the most groundbreaking baring of one’s soul someone like Coles could do.
And the Times profile was only the start.

Coles blazed even more new ground in his Oprah appearance, when he talked candidly about the aftereffects of the abuse — not just juvenile aftereffects, but adult ones he still lives with right now.

Reading stories about the Oprah appearance hit my right in the stomach. Coles talked about many things that I can relate with — feelings of being unclean, unworthy, unsure of oneself and more.

“It’s among the reasons why I am not married or have a girlfriend. I don’t know does someone want to be with me after everything that I've been through,” he told Oprah Winfrey and her audience.


“It makes it very hard for me to trust women,” he said. "I think it has a lot to do with why I'm probably not married today because the way I felt about myself…not knowing how a woman would take having a man that this has happened to.”

Arguably, in light of our stereotype of professional athletes, that might be just as much a bombshell as claiming to be gay.

At one time, Coles followed the American macho athletic male stereotype. He said he received counseling, but in essence tried to shrug it off just as he had been encouraged to shrug off athletic injuries.

“You just want to put it behind you,” he told the Times. “I think, you know, as a man, when you’re violated in that way, you don't know how other people are going to take it, how other people are going to view you. There’s so much that comes with revealing that part of your life and story.”

In fact, based on what his stepfather had told him at 13, at the end of three years of abuse, Coles had reason to be afraid of others’ reactions. His stepfather, whom Coles has not mentioned by name, told Coles’ friends that Coles was gay.

He got into several fights over this — this and probably acting out the anger and fear trapped inside him. He eventually approached officials at his school and told them the real story.
I read one sad part in this story. Either Oprah, for her vaunted empathy and talk-show interviewing skills, doesn’t have that empathetic touch here, or else she’s losing some of her skills.

Oprah asked Coles’ mother, Sirretta Williams, if she thought she and her husband had had a normal sex life at the time Coles was being abused.

What Oprah apparently doesn’t get is that child sexual abuse is no more about sex than rape is. Both are ultimately about the violent and abusive use of power, with sex being the medium for that.

How do I know? Because, with the exception of it being a different family member and my age being younger, Coles’ story is my story.

I write a column every April, which is National Child Abuse Prevention Month, about the need for all of society to take sexual abuse — and above all, incest, sexual abuse by a family member — seriously. I’ve had a couple of very brief statements in a couple of those columns about my childhood history, but they’ve been brief indeed.

Fortunately, Dr. Robin Smith, a psychologist who was on the same program, did get it.

“It is not just being molested. We need to call it what it is: Rape.” Smith explains that by referring to the abuse as “sexual molestation,” the severity of the crime is diminished. “It is rape,” Dr. Robin continues. “It’s not just physical. It's not just sexual. It's the normal parts of life that you couldn't even do without being reminded of the filth that was brought into your life. The other piece that was raped was your spirit.”

There’s other “unfortunates” to this.

Somehow, I missed the Times story, and heard about the Oprah appearance about a week after it happened. I Googled Coles’ name, etc. and got several blog hits as well as this.

On at least one black-male oriented blog, Coles’ sexual preference was brought up, not so much by the blogger as by commenters. Some said that he was using the sexual abuse as an excuse to stay in the gay closet. Others seemed to be echoing the line of Coles’ stepfather, that the abuse had made him gay.

Bullshit.

And those posters, despite their denials, show their homophobia.

Another unfortunate was Sports Illustrated’s Michael Silver, who wrote an SI column that said, in essence: “This is interesting, but, dammit, why can’t we get a male athlete coming out of the closet.”

Way to write off a great story, Michael.

I know you meant that writing a story about the first openly gay NFLer would be a great story for its story line, not just your scoop. But still, you diminished the great story already at hand.

UPDATE Nov. 11, 2011: Let's definitely take child sexual abuse in general, whether incestuous or not, more seriously, unlike Joe Paterno.