ROY Simmons was gay when he played for the Giants in the early 1980s, and knew even then that he wasn’t the only one, because he had sex one night with one of his teammates. It forever remained their dirty little secret.
He has been out of the closet for almost 14 years now, the second of three NFL players to reveal their homosexuality, after Dave Kopay and before Esera Tuaolo, and he is certain there are others Out of Bounds but too terrified to come out of the NFL closet.
Asked whether it is likely that there is a gay player in Super Bowl XL, Simmons says: “Was I alone? No, I don’t think I was alone.
“I’m gonna say at least two on a team.”
The choice is yours:
Listen to a 49-year-old man selling a book – Out of Bounds – about a depraved, addicted, tortured life scarred by a rape 39 years ago by a male neighbor and marred for the past decade by HIV.
Or listen to an image-conscious society eager to lavish millions upon the straight and narrow and, more specifically, to a sport that every Sunday fields a silent majority of homophobic, macho gladiators still straining, rather than bending over backwards, to be politically correct, even as their kingdom is presided over by a commissioner whose son, Drew Tagliabue, is gay.
For sure, it will take a star player on the Down Low courageous enough to give the world the lowdown on his homosexuality before the NFL and others are spurred to get their heads out of the sand.
“It would be 9.6 on the Richter Scale,” Simmons says.
How so?
“America’s not ready for that,” he says.
Is it likely to happen?
“I’ll be 50 this year; maybe in my lifetime,” Simmons says. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
Simmons was an athletic guard they called Sugar Bear. The Giants drafted him in the eighth round of the 1979 Draft out of Georgia Tech. Phil Simms was their No. 1 pick that year. “I was number 69,” Simmons says in the book. “Fitting number for me, right?” Simmons recklessly and anonymously roamed the bathhouses of the city, all the while cheating on his pregnant girlfriend with women. It was a challenge for him to subjugate his sexual appetite in the locker room. “I had to get by on peeks,” Simmons writes.
Except this one time, early in his career. “I had my first and only sexual experience with a teammate,” Simmons writes. “This guy was on the offensive line, and one night he and I went to a club out in Alphabet City where we drank too much Tanqueray. On top of that, we took some Quaaludes. Somehow we made it back to my house in Carlstadt.”
He watched one teammate snort cocaine an hour before a game, several standing in a kitchen during a freebasing party. “They spent the whole night there, huddled around a beaker that was boiling away over the gas range,” Simmons writes. Bill Parcells, remember, inherited the 1983 Giants from Ray Perkins and quickly began a campaign to weed out druggies not named Lawrence Taylor.
Simmons, mentally fatigued, informed Perkins that he needed to take a year off. Dr. Joel Goldberg, the Giants career counseling director, got him a job as baggage handler at Kennedy Airport, paying $10 or $11 an hour – not nearly enough to support his drinking and drugging, the extent of which he hid from the benevolent Giant. “I’d say he loaned me close to two grand,” Simmons writes.
When he returned for 1983 training camp, Parcells cut him. “Simmons,” he explained, “we are not a charity organization, we’re the New York Giants, our business is football.”
Simmons wound up playing in Super Bowl XVIII with the Joe Theismann-John Riggins-Dexter Manley Redskins. “So many lights and cameras and people … it was breathtaking,” Simmons recalled. He played special teams and got some Garbage Time at guard in the Raiders’ 38-9 romp.
Then he angrily snorted coke driving up I-95 that night. Then he had his Super Bowl ring stolen from his apartment by a male house guest/lover. Then, years after the Redskins cut him before the 1984 season, he moved to San Francisco, became a drag queen, prostitute and jailee, stood on the Golden Gate Bridge one night and contemplated suicide, before, mercifully, he finally stopped running and hiding. “My life is out there,” he says. “I have to walk the walk.”
He is trying now to become the father he never could be to his 24-year-old daughter Kara. He asks forgiveness of many, doesn’t necessarily expect it, hopes his story can keep hope alive and enlighten the downtrodden. After all the years in turmoil, Roy Simmons has serenity and peace of mind. “I’m getting there,” he says.
One-of-a-kind life. But hardly one of a kind.