Michael Irvin says reaction to 'Out' magazine interview is positive

Hall of Fame receiver Michael Irvin said Wednesday that the reaction to his recent appearance on the cover of Out Magazine has been mostly positive. In the Out article, Irvin discussed his late brother, Vaughn, who was homosexual.

"A lot of people that have called and emailed said I have a lot of friends that deal with this," Irvin said on the NFL Network, for which he now works. "And to be honest with you, I have a brother that I didn't know what it was all of it.

m a young, dumb kid just like all of us; we're saying stupid things because we don't know. As we get older, we learn more about how much that hurt people and offended people, and I started thinking about what life must have been like for my brother whom I loved dearly."

Irvin says he's pretty sure he would've reacted the same way to discovering a teammate was gay when he played with the Dallas Cowboys as he would react today.

"At 25, we heard the rumors about my quarterback (Troy Aikman). And it came pretty strong because we were winning Super Bowls then at the time," he said. "We didn't respond to it, that's how I surmise we would have handled it well because everybody was talking about it. We were going to play football.

"You'd get guys in the locker room talking, 'Did you hear about Troy? It doesn't have anything to do with that; as long as he throws that bang-8 on time, that's all that matters.' That's the kind of thing that went on in the locker room, so I have to try to extrapolate from that since it didn't happen. . . . Yes I believe that team with the characters we had I believe we would have handled that well."

Asked what he would say to Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker James Harrison about his use of an anti-gay slur in reference to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, Irvin said, "I do talk with James, James is an intelligent guy. I haven't talked with him since then, but I would continue to share with him that if someone said something derogatory about your race, how does it make you feel? You have to try and bring it home. . . . What I mean by that is make it relate to you. Make it relate to you if someone said this about this, how would you feel?"

Do more NFL athletes see the gay issue as Irvin now does or do more feel like Harrison? Irvin says he thinks times are changing.

"I think there are more people that are starting to see this issue the way we are speaking about it in the magazine. I really do," Irvin says. "I certainly think athletes are falling right in that category of people. Now that we know that it is offensive, now that we know it is hurtful, people are tending to turn away from hurtful things, and I think that's a good thing."

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(usatoday.com)