To appreciate how much traction the legalization of same-sex marriage has gained, you can look to the Inaugural Address that President Obama just delivered, in which he used some of his precious 18 minutes to throw a spotlight on the issue and to make his support for it clearer than ever.
Or you can look in a much different direction: to the rough-and-tumble, testosterone-charged world of professional football, and to a succinct but extraordinary email that Brendon Ayanbadejo, a linebacker for the Baltimore Ravens, sent only hours after his team defeated the New England Patriots on Sunday night and gained passage to the game of all games, the Super Bowl, to be played this year in New Orleans.
It was almost 4 A.M. Monday morning Eastern time when he wrote the email. He'd just arrived back home in the Baltimore area from the Boston area, where the Ravens-Patriots contest had taken place. He was pumped up, heart bursting with excitement over the Ravens' good fortune, thoughts racing about the two weeks leading up to the Bowl. And those thoughts turned not just to a possible victory, but also to same-sex marriage and his continued efforts to promote it.
With his team now headed to New Orleans, and with sports reporters eager to lap up each player's every word, had he just been handed a louder megaphone than he'd ever possessed before?
He tapped out an email to Brian Ellner, a leading marriage-equality advocate with whom he had worked before, and Michael Skolnik, the political director for Russell Simmons, a hip-hop mogul who has become involved in many issues, including same-sex marriage.
Ayanbadejo wrote: "Is there anything I can do for marriage equality or anti- bullying over the next couple of weeks to harness this Super Bowl media?" The time stamp on the email was 3:40:35 A.M.
On the phone Tuesday afternoon, Ayanbadejo called that missive his "Jerry Maguire email," referring to the Tom Cruise movie, in which the plot is set in motion when Maguire, played by Cruise, seizes the occasion of a sleepless night to pour his heart and soul into a mission statement.
"It's one of those times when you're really passionate and in your zone," Ayanbadejo told me, referring to Maguire's movie moment and to his own real-life one, in the wee hours of Monday morning. "And I got to thinking about all kinds of things, and I thought: how can we get our message out there?"
By "we" and "our" he meant the rapidly growing number of Americans who feel passionately about the justice of same-sex marriage and care about L.G.B.T. rights in general, and by "message" he meant that equal rights for all Americans means that two men and two women should be legally able to wed.
Ayanbadejo is one of two National Football League players whose frequent public statements and gestures in support of same-sex marriage drew widespread attention during this latest football season. The other is the Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe.
The Times wrote a profile of each of them. The one on Ayanbadejo is here, and the one on Kluwe here. I also interviewed both players and quoted them in a blog post that accompanied a column last year on a former major league baseball team owner who was coming out of the closet.
Ayanbadejo's support for gay rights reflects a childhood and youth during which he mingled with a diverse group of people, including many who were openly gay or lesbian. At one point, he told me, his stepfather was the resident director of an L.G.B.T. dorm at the University of California at Santa Cruz; the family, including Ayanbadejo, lived there.
"I was raised around gay people in a very liberal society," he told me during an interview in September, when I first spoke with him. "Discrimination was never allowed."
Ayanbadejo, who has been playing professional football for a decade, first publicly voiced his support for marriage equality several years ago, and says it was a much lonelier stand at the time. He drew insults. Derision.
But that wasn't the case last year, when he landed in the news again. The legalization of same-sex marriage was being debated in Maryland, and Ayanbadejo made his endorsement clear, prompting a state lawmaker in the opposite camp to ask the owner of the Ravens to shut Ayanbadejo up.
Kluwe then rallied to Ayanbadejo's defense, also taking up the cause of marriage equality, and the two became the center of widespread media coverage. This time around, the linebacker said, what he heard back from the public and from teammates was mostly laudatory, or at least respectful.
On the phone Tuesday he made clear that not all his teammates support same-sex marriage. Some have religious objections. He said that discussions about their differences of opinion had an unlikely trigger: chicken sandwiches. On one or two occasions, he said, he turned down food from the chain Chick-fil-A, whose owner is a social conservative against gay marriage.
"I'll say, 'I'm protesting'," Ayanbadejo recalled. "No Chick-fil-A for me." And a few of his teammates, he said, would respond by saying that they actually agreed with the chicken chain's owner.
Throughout his week, Ayanbadejo has been—and will be—talking to gay-rights advocates about how to seize this moment. For example, he's been swapping emails with Hudson Taylor, the founder and executive director of Athlete Ally, a group dedicated to ridding sports at all levels—high school, college, professional—of homophobia.
"He's so excited and ready to take a stand in whatever way he can," said Taylor. "He is leveraging the biggest sports stage in the world."
He's also in conversations with Ellner and Skolnik specifically about marriage equality. Said Ellner: "He understands that as a straight biracial player in the Super Bowl, he can have a huge impact on the future of this issue."
And he's dreaming a particular dream: that a Super Bowl victory and a Super Bowl ring would land him a guest spot on Ellen DeGeneres's talk show, where the two of them could discuss the importance of treating gays and lesbians with more respect—and maybe kid around some, too. They've already exchanged mutually admiring messages over Twitter.
"That's my ultimate goal after the Super Bowl," Ayanbadejo told me. "To go on Ellen's show, to be dancing with her, to bust a move with her."
It's not precisely what you'd expect from a linebacker on one of the most fearsome defensive squads in professional football. But then this isn't the world we grew up in, and in some ways that's a miraculous and wonderful thing.
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