Carolyn Moos, Jason Collins, And AIDS

It’s one week since Jason Collins penned an excellent article in Sports Illustrated and announced that he’s the first NBA Basketball player and pro sports athlete to come out as gay.

Now, Collins is a hero for taking the plunge and coming out as the first openly gay athlete in professional sports. As Baltimore Ravens linebacker and gay rights advocate Brendon Ayanbadejo said on Meet The Press Sunday, it’s just a matter of time before other athletes step forward, and some think the next person to do so may be in the National Football League.

But What About Carolyn Moos?

Lost in the hero-worship and comparisons to Jackie Robinson and Roger Banister is the consideration of the pain and confusion that Mr. Collins ex-finacee Carolyn Moos has suffered since Collins told her of his real sexual orientation four years after he broke off wedding plans one month before their ceremony was to take place.

Carolyn Moos invested eight years of her life in love with Collins, but claims no one could see anything that would indicate Jason was gay. (Something most women seem to find unbelievable.) But now that Collins is ‘out, it calls up a question she and I explored: did Collins cheat on Moos with a man? Ms Moos said that she trusted Jason (that such didn’t happen), but also believed he would be completely honest with her if it did.

Ms Moos informed that she and Collins were to meet this weekend and to “get away” and talk about his coming out, and answer questions she had about their relationship. But checking Collins Twitter account would seem to reveal that didn’t happen at all – Collins tweeted about his taping of an interview with Oprah on the OWN Network, and a birthday party he was to attend.

Part of me wonders if Jason actually feels he may not owe Carolyn an explanation given her very public interviews. I certainly hope that’s not the case.

Moos and Collins lived together for much of the eight years they dated. Did Collins have sex with Moos, and yet have a hookup with a man at some point on the NBA Basketball road? If so, then the two have to basically re-explore their entire time together and get examined to make sure they’re OK.

I’m not kidding.

That’s the hard, cold, reality of this kind. A friend of mine who’s gay said wrote that ‘all of us had girlfriends just to conform to what society expected.” I remarked that as a man who loves the scent of a woman, I never saw having a girlfriend as a social convention. In fact, I’ve not had someone who’s gay intimate that to me before.

That opens the question of what kind of sex a closeted gay may was having with his girlfriend, and then what kind of sex was he having with a man that he was keeping from her?

To put a woman through the chance that she could be an AIDS carier is just plain awful for a man to so – period. The plain, simple, and sad fact is that while hetrosexual sex has been the main way HIV has been transferred worldwide, in America most HIV sexual transmission occurred in men who had sex with men.

So the flip side of Jason Collins’ the hero is, first, the acute health risk that is attached to risky man to man sex, and, second, in the case of his ex Carolyn Moos, how her health may have been impacted by it.

It’s because of that problem that Ms. Moos deserves to know the answer to the question of when Jason’s sexual activity with a man started. It’s also a good reason that any man who’s gay should not go about keeping any woman they call a girlfriend in the dark about their sexuality, yet have sex with that person and with another man, even if it’s ‘protected’ sex.

The bottom line is, it’s important for a person to be honest with the ones they claim to love. Otherwise they’re just hurting them, and in more ways than one.

Stay tuned.