4/14/2006

in

If the statistics are true, one man in 10 is gay. In the NFL, that man has to keep quiet... till now.

Ellen Wernecke

Esera Tuaolo could run and hit with the best of them playing in the NFL for over ten years.  
  
But now Tuaolo is about to deliver the biggest hit of all: his memoir, *Alone in the Trenches: My Life as a Gay Man in the NFL*.  
  
Tuaolo writes candidly in the book about his Samoan family in Hawaii, the family deaths that marked his childhood and his first job as a bodyguard for the Mexican Mafia.  
  
But he also relates how he wanted an Easy Bake Oven at age 9, his brother's heartbreaking outing at 23 and the pressures to keep his cover as a defensive lineman.  
  
Tuaolo said he looked at the NFL as a job and was never attracted to his fellow players, but the homophobic language he had to listen to every day made him fear for his life, were he to be discovered.  
  
Lucky, this story has a happy ending: Tuaolo lives with his two children (whom, yes, he's teaching to play football) and his long-term partner in Minnesota. He hopes that having written *Alone in the Trenches*, other NFL players will be encouraged to speak out about more than their favorite flavor of Gatorade.