In My Skin (2 page)

I guess you could say my relationship with Baylor is like my relationship with Kim and my dad. It's complicated.

THERE IS AN INTERESTING STORY
behind the SI.com video that everyone now sees as my “coming out” moment. I was in New York City for a few days after the WNBA Draft because the league had scheduled a bunch of media obligations for us—me, Elena Delle Donne, and Skylar Diggins, the top three picks in the draft—and one of our last stops was at the offices of
Sports Illustrated
, to shoot a digital video. A Mercury PR staffer was with me, along with Stephanie Rudnick, a publicist from Wasserman Media Group, the agency that represents me. They went over the ground rules with
SI
ahead of time, to make sure everybody was on the same page, and it became clear pretty quickly that
SI
's goal was to discuss sexuality. The video anchor, Maggie Gray, said she wanted to ask me about it, but Stephanie told her the topic was off-limits. We had an arrangement with another outlet (it was ESPN) to tell my full story, to talk in depth about issues that are really important to me. It was okay for
SI
to ask general questions, like everyone else had been doing, but we didn't want to get into specifics right then and there, because I didn't think a digital video with Elena and Skylar was the place to tell my story, and it wasn't fair to them. We were there trying to promote the league, not our personal histories.

Once we were on set, though, I sensed what was coming. I just didn't know when. I remember thinking,
This lady is going to make it about sexuality
. Sure enough, she brought it up, asking why it's supposedly more accepted for female athletes (like WNBA players, she said) to come out than it is for men—a topic that people could spend hours discussing. I was trying to answer as broadly as I could, but it was hard for me because I had made this pact with myself to be 100 percent open once I left Baylor. So I said, “Being one that's out, it's just being who you are. Don't worry about what other people are going to say. Don't hide who you are.” I thought I had sidestepped it because I didn't actually say, “Well, Maggie, I'm gay.” But that's when she pounced and asked me a very specific question about how I had handled my sexuality. At that point, I was, like,
Agh! I give up!
And I answered directly: “I've always been open about who I am and my sexuality.”

I was pissed off when the interview was over. Not because I didn't feel comfortable talking about my sexuality—obviously I do—but because I wanted to tell my own story and give it the context I thought it deserved, the way Jason Collins got to tell his story when he came out later that month, on the cover of
Sports Illustrated
. I didn't get to do any of that in the little digital video. I felt like they just wanted their breaking news story: “Brittney comes out to
SI
.”

When the video went up, everyone made it seem like that was my big Oprah sit-down, my coming-out confession. I was blown away by that reaction. I was following it all on Twitter and thinking,
Hello, people! I'm already out!
Anyone who didn't know just wasn't paying attention. I mean, my Twitter bio had the word
equality
in it and a photo I did for the NOH8 campaign. I had also recently committed to doing a video for the It Gets Better Project and had posted about it on Facebook. It's not like I was going to send out a press release letting everyone know I'm gay; it's my life, and I should get to choose when and how I want to talk about it to the media. In fact, I had already alluded to being gay a couple of days before the SI interview, when I spent time with a
USA Today
reporter on draft day for a story about bringing change to the WNBA. We had the same ground rules as I did with
Sports Illustrated
, so when I mentioned “coming out” to my parents in high school,
USA Today
didn't make a big deal of it, because it was part of a larger point about the importance of being authentic. If you go back and look at the article, which ran a day before the
SI
video, I actually said a lot more to
USA Today
than I did to
SI
, but people didn't jump all over that “news” and try to say I just came out—which goes to show you it's all about how the story is framed. And when it comes to dealing with gay athletes, the media still has a long way to go. As athletes, as people, we want to show who we are and how we think and what makes us tick, but far too often we get reduced to a headline. It's no wonder more athletes don't come out.

I was still annoyed by the whole thing a few days later, especially when I scrolled through Twitter and Instagram. The trolls were saying all the usual crap, but with a new twist: “How can she be a lesbian if she's a man?” and “Of course she likes girls—she has a penis!” I have a love-hate relationship with social media. On the one hand, it provides a sense of community and support; on the other hand, it gives a megaphone to people spouting cruelty and hatred. Like many things in life, the bad comes with the good. And there was plenty of bad, nasty stuff online after the
SI
video hit.

But then I started hearing from more and more people who were telling me, “Hey, you're doing a good thing.” It really clicked for me when I was back in Waco about a week later. President Obama spoke during a memorial service on the Baylor campus, for victims of the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas. There were EMTs and firefighters all over town that day, coming to pay their respects. And the EMTs from West happened to be right in front of my apartment complex. When I went outside, I was spotted immediately, and they all wanted to take pictures with me. One of the stations seemed to have a number of gays and lesbians on staff, and a man came up to me and started thanking me. He was almost crying. He told me my “coming out” was going to make things better. He also told me there was a local church that was giving them a hard time for being gay. He said they hadn't smiled in weeks, and yet here they were, smiling ear to ear while talking to me.

That moment touched me. I thought,
Okay, what I'm doing really does matter. I'm helping in some way
. By the time I sat down for my big on-camera interview with ESPN a few weeks later and the editors put me on the cover of their magazine, I didn't care that some people were still tweeting stuff like “Brittney Griner just came out to ESPN.” I'll come out over and over again if it's a positive thing for gay kids who are struggling with the same stuff I struggled with when I was younger. Because every voice matters, and being different is a good thing. Who wants to be the same as everybody else?

Not me. When I pulled on my Phoenix Mercury uniform before my first game as a pro, looking at those tattoos that everybody was about to see, I thought about how far I had come—and how different everything would be going forward.

M
y first three days in Phoenix were rough. I can laugh about it now because it seems like a little hiccup in hindsight, but I wasn't laughing at the time. I was a big pathetic lump in the middle of the desert, feeling out of place. Everything had been moving crazy fast for me, and then— bam!—it all stopped, and I was stuck in a holding pattern, looking around at unfamiliar surroundings and thinking,
This is my new life. Welcome to adulthood.
My apartment was about fifteen minutes from downtown, in a gated complex, as part of team housing. It was nice and came fully furnished, but none of my stuff was there yet because I shipped it all, so I had only the things in my suitcase, and most of those were dress clothes. I'm not sure what fancy events I was planning to attend, because the only place I ended up going was my own pity party. I didn't know anybody in Phoenix yet—training camp was still a few days away—and I just felt so sad and alone. I might as well have been on the moon. My phone was my only connection to the world, to my old life. I would call my girlfriend and say, “I want to come back to Waco.”

I didn't sleep in my bed the first three nights I was there, because it didn't feel like my bed yet. I just slept on the couch in the living room and watched TV. I was flipping channels and found this show where this dude goes to crazy areas of the world and tries to survive in the wilderness:
Man vs. Wild.
He was stranded on an island somewhere, and I was lying there on the couch, talking at him. “I feel the exact same way, mister. I'm a castaway in this apartment. I'm alone just like you!” It was probably the worst thing for me to watch.

I kept telling myself everything would be fine once my stuff arrived and I met all my teammates. And I'm happy to say it was; Phoenix was a good landing spot for me. But that didn't make those first few days any easier. The hardest part was being so far away from my friends and family back in Houston, especially my mom. I would call her to check in, and I could hear the sadness in her voice, the lump in her throat. I knew she was missing me. She is very emotional. Ever since she was diagnosed with lupus, after my freshman year at Baylor, we've been really close, and I've tried to be strong for her. But I wasn't feeling strong right then. I didn't even want to call her, because it hurt to hear her hurting. At one point, my second night in Phoenix, she called me, and I just sat there on the couch, looking at my phone and thinking,
Nah, can't do it. Can't do it. I'll call her back later.

I feel guilty remembering that now, because my mom is the one person who has always been there for me, no matter what, loving me without question, just giving and giving. She wouldn't describe herself as strong—in fact, she was sick a lot when I was growing up, in a lot of physical pain, serious back problems—and yet she has always been my rock. She has always let me be me, let me figure out who I am, when so many other people were telling me who I
should
be. I have never felt judged by her. Never.

OF COURSE, LIKE A LOT
of kids, I took that for granted when I was younger, how patient my mom was with me. Let me tell you, I gave her hell. For one thing, I had a lot of energy; I couldn't sit still for very long. I was always into something, running around outside, chasing squirrels, digging up worms, climbing trees. But the thing I did best was pushing her buttons, trying to see how much I could get away with when my dad was at work.

I spent a lot of time occupying myself as a kid. We lived in the Bellewood section of Houston until I was in seventh grade. We had a one-story three-bedroom house on a cul-de-sac in a good neighborhood. My father was a cop with the Harris County Sheriff's Office (as I got older, he worked a number of law enforcement jobs), and my mother stayed at home, taking care of me and my sister and the house. My parents are both from Texas. They met when Mom was a cashier at a Houston grocery store and Dad was doing security work there. He had a son and a daughter from his first marriage, and they were around a lot, because Dad was on good terms with his ex-wife. But my brother, DeCarlo, is seventeen years older than me, and my sister SheKera is ten years older. They have always been great to me, and we consider each other full blood, but it's not like we were all running around the yard, playing games, living under the same roof. It was just me and my sister Pier, who's five years older, and the two of us could not be more different. We're much closer now than we were then. Pier was a total girly girl, and I was all rough-and-tumble. She was always in the house, talking on the phone, playing with dolls, watching
Saved by the Bell,
while I was outside wrestling with the dog in the mud. Pier didn't like playing with me because I would usually end up doing something to make her cry. The little sister beat up the big sister.

My mom and I had our bonding moments, but it wasn't like it is now. She taught me how to sew, and I would curl up on her lap in the living room while she watched her favorite shows:
The Price Is Right
and
Family Feud
and anything on the Food Network. I love my mom's cooking. We were big meat eaters in our family, and every night we would have delicious ham or fried chicken or steak or burgers. And yes, I ate a lot of bacon for breakfast. That was something the media latched onto when I was at Baylor—“BG Loves Bacon”—and I played along with it because it felt like one of the few safe topics I could talk about. But I really do love bacon, and nobody knows that better than my mom.

When I was little, I was impossible to wake up in the morning. I was just one of those kids (and then teenagers) who would mumble and roll over and never wake up when someone first called to me. I would yell, “I'm up!”—and then I'd close my eyes and go back to sleep. Sometimes Pier would come in to wake me up, and her go-to move was to shake me, which she knew I hated. Who likes to be woken up that way? As retaliation, I would flail my arms while turning over in my bed, occasionally smacking her as she leaned down to poke at me. One time, when I thought Pier was trying to wake me, I shot my arm out while my eyes were still closed, and I clocked my mom in the head. I didn't hurt her, but I startled her enough that she didn't take any chances after that day. She would just stand in the doorway and call my name— “Brittney, Brittney, wake up!”—until she saw me finally sit up in bed. Eventually she discovered she didn't even have to leave the kitchen to get me up. All she had to do was sizzle some bacon in the skillet, and as soon as I smelled it, I was out of bed and on my way to the breakfast table.

Now fast-forward to my career at Baylor. When we were playing at home, we ate all our pregame meals at Georgia's, this great place in Waco. If we had a night game, I would always get chicken—a thigh and a leg—and a biscuit. If we had a day game, we would eat breakfast there, and I would get French toast and bacon, every time. One game during my freshman year, when we were on our run to the Final Four, all I had for the pregame meal was a big platter of bacon. That afternoon, I played really well, maybe my best game of the season, and Coach Mulkey jokingly said afterward, “Whatever you ate, keep doing it.” I'm not sure if she expected me to actually answer her, but I did; I told her I had a lot of bacon. From that day forward, our support staff made sure there was bacon at every team breakfast, including on the road. By my senior year, even the national media would ask me about bacon, and the whole thing became an inside joke with me and my teammates—the bacon sound bite. Whenever a reporter mentioned it, I would play along, especially for on-camera interviews. The anchor would ask, “Did you have bacon today?” And I would flash a big grin and say, “I sure did!”