How a Gay High School Football Player Raised His Hometown’s Awareness of Pride

When Jake Streder was a freshman, the high school football player for the Matea Valley Mustangs in Aurora, Ill., in 2018, was outed. It was a chapter of his life that forced him to question how much he loved football, and whether he would go back and play.

He was pleasantly surprised when on the first day back at practice, his teammates publicly supported him. Two years later, the 17 year-old has become passionate about normalizing coming out and being gay in his hometown. To that end he and his mom built his reimagined closet. They took his closet doors, took out the panels, and reconstructed his childhood closet into something colorful and reaffirming says Out Sports.

So now a senior, Jake, who’s also currently applying to colleges, has taken the initiative to educate his classmates about LGBTQ issues, and most importantly, engage in dialogue. Questions don’t offend Jake. They mean others are interested.

When the morning announcements finished this pas June 1st he went to the principal’s office to ask for himself. Jake was right: the start of Pride Month wasn’t mentioned. The oversight was immediately corrected when he entered the office. “I was just like, ‘It’s not a big deal if I go in and talk about it and ask if they did it,’” he said. “As soon as I went in, they announced it.”

“I just feel like it’s a really important thing for people to know about and learn in general, and I don’t think in schools we really get much of that,” he said. “If there’s a way for people to have that outside of school, it’s good to still know, and it’s good to get out there.”

Read the full story at Out Sports here.