[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 56 (Tuesday, May 9, 2000)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E684-E685]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       THE STORY OF COREY JOHNSON

                                 ______
                                 

                          HON. JOHN F. TIERNEY

                            of massachusetts

                    in the house of representatives

                          Tuesday, May 9, 2000

  Mr. TIERNEY. Mr. Speaker, every so often we learn of individuals 
confronted with enormously difficult choices who take the courageous, 
though difficult, path. The story of Corey Johnson, a constituent of 
mine from Middleton, Massachusetts, and a student at Masconomet High 
School, fits that description.
  Corey is co-captain of the school football team, a good athlete in 
several sports, and popular among classmates. Although he suspected his 
homosexuality since grade school, it was this year that he shared the 
information with family, friends, teammates and strangers--by nature of 
the publicity attendant to the circumstances surrounding a gay 
athlete's decision to ``come out.''
  Sunday, April 30, 2000, the New York Times front page carried the 
story of Corey's courage, and the community's reaction--thankfully 
mostly tolerant and supportive. Because the story is--as the article 
notes--a hopeful model, I submit the article for the Record.

                [From the New York Times, Apr. 30, 2000]

                 Icon Recast: Support for a Gay Athlete

                          (By Robert Lipsyte)

       When Corey Johnson told teammates on the Masconomet High 
     School football team last spring that he was gay, the two 
     other starting linebackers responded characteristically. Big, 
     Steady Dave Merrill, quietly absorbed the almost physical 
     shock, then began worrying if the revelation would divide the 
     team. Merrill said he decide to take it on as a challenge, a 
     test of the captaincy the two shared and a test of his own 
     character. Jim Whelan, the artist, said he looked into 
     Johnson's eyes and saw a need for instant support. He broke 
     the silence by saying, ``More than being teammates we're your 
     friends and we know you're the same person.''
       Their reactions were critical in the risky, uncharted, 
     carefully planned campaign to bring out of his increasingly 
     claustrophobic closet an American icon, the hard-hitting 
     football hero. The campaign involved Johnson's parents, 
     teachers, and coaches, as well as a gay educational agency, 
     all encouraged by the administration of a school with a long 
     history of diversity training. One measure of their success 
     will be seen Sunday when Johnson, who turned 18 on Friday and 
     will graduate in June, speaks in Washington at the Millennium 
     March for Equality.
       For gay activists trying to shatter stereotypes, Johnson is 
     a rare find, a bright, warm quick study who also wrestled and 
     played lacrosse and baseball as he earned three varsity 
     letters on a winning football team. For athletes, whose 
     socialization often includes the use of homophobia by 
     manipulative coached, he is a liberating symbol.
       ``Someday I want to get beyond being that gay football 
     captain,'' Johnson said, ``but for now I need to get out 
     there and show these machismo athletes who run high schools 
     that you don't have to do drama or be a drum major to be gay. 
     It could be someone who looks just like them.''
       At 5 feet 8 inches and 180 pounds, Johnson had to make up 
     for drama-club size with the speed and brutality of his 
     blocking and tackling. ``He hit like a ton of bricks,'' said 
     Whelan, who became his friend in seventh grade because, he 
     recalls, ``he had a strong mind, he liked to think and he was 
     unwilling to accept injustice.''
       Others in school, including the girls he refused to date 
     (``It's not fair to use people as pawns,'' he said) were 
     attracted by his friendliness and sly wit. Asked for 
     publication in the yearbook how football captains spent the 
     night before a game, he said, ``I go to sleep early with my 
     Tinky Winky.'' And he indeed has one of those purple 
     Teletubby dolls ``outed'' by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, crammed 
     in a corner of a stereotypically messy room filled with 
     trophies, athletic posters and balled-up T-shirts.
       ``This is a great kid with a mind of his own,'' said Coach 
     Jim Pugh, who faced down a booster club president who wanted 
     Johnson's captaincy revoked. ``My issues with him were not 
     gay-related. They were about who knows better how you step 
     out on certain defensive plays.''
       Johnson said he had suspected his homosexuality since sixth 
     grade but suppressed thinking about it. In the high school's 
     ``elite jock mix'' of heterosexual innuendo and bravado, he 
     came to realize ``this just isn't me.'' His crushes were on 
     other boys.
       ``In health class a teacher told us that in every large 
     group of friends, one turns out gay,'' he said. ``When I was 
     lonely and depressed and isolated, I kept thinking, `Why does 
     that have to be me?' I wanted to live a quiet normal life.''
       In the fall of 1997, in the first game of his varsity 
     career, as a sophomore starting at both right guard and 
     middle linebacker, his blocking was so effective and he made 
     so many sacks that the line coach awarded him the game ball. 
     Yet, he was so afraid that everyone would hate him when his 
     secret was revealed that he was often unable to sleep at 
     night or get out of bed in the morning.
       He would reach out on the Internet in a teen chat room on a 
     site called Planetout.com finding other gay youngsters, even 
     other gay football players. For years, he has exchanged e-
     mail messages with a gay right guard in Chicago.
       Johnson's decision to come out began taking shape during 
     his family's 1998 Super Bowl

[[Page E685]]

     party in the living room of its rented townhouse in this 
     suburb 25 miles north of Boston. One of the uncles pointed at 
     the comedian Jerry Seinfeld in a television commercial and 
     described him with a gay slur, and said that such ``sick'' 
     people needed to be ``put into institutions.'' Another uncle 
     laughed. Corey's mother, unaware at the time of Johnson's 
     sexual orientation, said she chided her brothers and asked 
     them not to use such language.
       Johnson said he went into the bathroom and cried. A month 
     later, he told his guidance counselor and biology teacher 
     that he was bisexual. He says he was a virgin at the time. 
     Later, he told his lacrosse coach that he was gay. All three 
     were supportive. They also began to understand his moodiness 
     and mediocre grades.


                  One of His Parents Wasn't Surprised

       He told no one else during that summer and the football 
     season of his junior year. He joined the school's Gay 
     Straight Alliance, which was made up mostly of straight 
     girls. Since he was known for defending kids being hazed or 
     bullied, no one found this remarkable. In December 1998, the 
     football team voted Johnson and Dave Merrill co-captains.
       After Christmas vacation, he decided to tell his parents. 
     His father already knew. He had read an exchange between 
     Johnson and a gay e-pal. For months, his father held the 
     secret; he did not want to burden his wife, absorbed in 
     ministering to her dying mother.
       ``I dropped the ball,'' he said in retrospect. ``What if 
     Corey had done something to himself?''
       A burly, 45-year-old, chain-smoking former marine who 
     drives a Pepsi-Cola truck, Rod had helped raise Johnson since 
     the boy was 1. He and Johnson's mother, Ann, who gave birth 
     to Corey when she was single, were married 12 years ago. 
     Johnson never knew his biological father, though he kept his 
     last name. (For reasons of ``privacy and safety,'' Rod and 
     Ann agreed to be interviewed only if their last name was not 
     published. They also have a 10-year-old daughter.) Ann's 
     reaction, according to both of them, was the unreserved love 
     she had always offered, but now it was tinged with fear; if 
     people found out, would they be mean to her son, would they 
     hurt him?
       That spring, Donna Cameron, a health teacher at the school 
     and a Gay Straight Alliance adviser, took the group to a 
     conference of the Gay Lesbian and Straight Education Network, 
     a national organization that works with Massachusetts' Safe 
     Schools program. Johnson attended a sports workshop led by 
     Jeff Perrotti, the organization's Northeast coordinator. 
     Perrotti talked about challenging the entitlement of athletes 
     and finding a way for all students to be treated as well.
       At the end of the session, Johnson raised his hand and said 
     he was a football captain and wanted to come out and needed 
     help.


                Player's Statement Thought to Be a Joke

       Perrotti, a 41-year-old openly gay former high school 
     teacher, said he immediately realized what this meant. ``A 
     football captain is an icon,'' he said last week, ``and one 
     coming out would raise the expectations of what was possible, 
     it would give hope.''
       Masco, as Masconomet is called up here, is the regional 
     high school of 1,300 students for affluent, predominately 
     white Boxford, Topsfield and Middleton. The phrase ``Only in 
     Masco,'' used by friends and critics, often refers to its 
     liberal commitment to diversity and alternate education. 
     Pugh, the football coach, a warm, steady 50-year-old from 
     Long Island, seems equally at home on the field and in what 
     he calls his ``touchy-feely world'' as a special-education 
     teacher.
       Perrotti said he consulted with Bob Norton, the Woburn High 
     School principal, who had been a football and hockey coach. 
     Johnson's mother came to school for meetings with the staff 
     and Perrotti. It was decided that Johnson would first tell 
     his junior classmates on the team, on April 8, 1999, more 
     than a year after he had first told some teachers.
       Three days before the meeting, Cameron, 52, the Gay 
     Straight Alliance adviser, who had been out as a lesbian to 
     friends and family, came out to her students. ``I didn't want 
     Corey to stand alone,'' she said last week. ``I wanted to put 
     a second human face on what for most of the kids was just an 
     abstract when they used gay slurs. As it turned out for both 
     Corey and me, kids found it even easier to talk to us about 
     other problems.''
       The day before the meeting, Johnson came out to Pugh. It 
     was fine with him, Pugh said, as long as everyone remembered 
     that the football season was about football and that it would 
     not become a ``media circus'' that would spoil everyone 
     else's experience. That attitude prevailed; a major magazine 
     was turned away last fall, and until now there has been no 
     mainstream national exposure.
       Ann and Rod were not persuaded about even this controlled 
     coming out.
       Rod said, ``I felt he was putting a target on his back.''
       Ann said: ``We were afraid for him that he would be hurt. 
     But if I said no, then we were acting as if we were ashamed 
     of who he was.''
       At the meeting, in Pugh's classroom, Johnson told his 
     teammates that he was gay, that he hoped for their support 
     and not to worry. ``I didn't come on to you last year in the 
     locker room and I'm not going to do it now,'' he said. ``Who 
     says you're good enough anyhow?''
       That lightly dropped remark had been scripted in the 
     preliminary meetings.
       Outside, in the hall, Merrill said players asked him if it 
     was a joke. The news spread quickly through the school. There 
     were several scrawled gay slurs, but no one was going to go 
     bashing the football team.
       ``It sort of all evolved through the summer lifting program 
     and into the season,'' Merrill said. ``It escalated and then 
     it dropped off. It got to be old news.''
       ``At first the team was meek about it,'' Johnson said. 
     ``People didn't talk to me, and when they saw it was still 
     just me they asked all kinds of questions. They wanted 
     intimate details. They thought it would be cool to know more 
     about the subculture. When they heard about a gay bar called 
     the Ramrod, they asked me to get them T-shirts.''
       Whelan, visiting his girlfriend at college, met an openly 
     gay ``fun guy,'' who he thought would be perfect for Johnson. 
     He told them about each other and tried to fix up a double 
     date.
       The most dramatic incidents were football related. Pugh 
     said the president of Masco's active booster club, the father 
     of four past, present and future players, demanded that 
     Johnson be removed as captain for ``unit cohesiveness.''
       Pugh told the father that he was the divisive one, and that 
     it was not an issue.
       The night before a game, the captain of the Lynnfield team 
     made anti-gay remarks in a pep rally speech. His coach 
     benched him.
       At the game, an opposing lineman shouted gay slurs in 
     Johnson's face.
       ``I couldn't stop laughing,'' Johnson said. ``Here, I had 
     come out to my teachers, my parents and my team, and this guy 
     thought he could intimidate me?''


                   Finding a Date For the Senior Prom

       Johnson and Perrotti like to say that the team bonded 
     through the experience, but other players are not so sure. 
     While Whelan and Merrill attended and spoke at gay-rights 
     conferences, and the team once sang the gay anthem, 
     ``Y.M.C.A.,'' after Johnson had a particularly good game, 
     there was an element of distraction. Merrill said ``some kids 
     were nervous and had to be talked to.'' Masco dropped from 
     10-1 in 1998 to 7-4, but Pugh attributes that to the loss of 
     last season's quarterback and star running back.
       Some problems never did materialize. When younger players 
     complained to Merrill about having to shower with a gay 
     teammate, he would growl, as he would to most complaints, 
     ``You're a football player, just suck it up.'' But then, 
     Masco football players have traditionally never showered at 
     school.
       Although Johnson's parents and many of his teachers and 
     coaches think he should go to college in the fall, he said he 
     has decided to ``become an activist'' for a year and to 
     intern in the network's San Francisco office.
       Merrill is going to the University of New Hampshire, 
     without a football scholarship but confident that he will 
     walk on the team.
       ``I'll know now I'll be able to make it in the real 
     world,'' he said. ``I handled it. I was mature. We were a 
     unit.''
       Whelan is going to the Rhode Island School of Design in the 
     fall. That ``fun guy'' he spotted finally met Johnson, at a 
     gay conference. Whelan was right. They liked each other. The 
     fun guy, Michael, became Johnson's first boyfriend, and next 
     month Johnson will take him as his date to the Masconomet 
     senior prom.
       The season isn't over yet.

       

                          ____________________