You don’t grow up hating yourself by accident. You don’t learn to lie about your true nature on a whim. You don’t pretend to be straight just for the fun of it. You have to learn and be taught these things and I was a good student.
There’s a song from the 1949 Rodgers & Hammerstein musical South Pacific called “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” that reminds me of my experience growing up. The first line of the song is, “You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear.” The lyrics go on to talk about prejudice and describe how children are taught to hate people who are different from them and to hate all the people their relatives hate.
My family and church would never have tolerated the kind of prejudice described in the Rodgers & Hammerstein song. But gay people were another story, and growing up I heard and saw plenty that made me think that being gay was bad, defective, and sinful. I guess if you’re straight and taught to hate gay people that’s not as big a problem, because then you don’t grow up hating yourself, although teaching children to hate anyone is wrong and I think deeply held prejudice of any kind is soul-destroying. But when you teach a child who is gay (or lesbian, bisexual, or transgender) that his fundamental nature is somehow bad, you create a situation where that child grows up hating himself and feels compelled to hide his true feelings, no matter what the cost is to him and those around him. And that’s what happened to me beginning in early childhood.
Just a quick disclaimer before I say anything more: My parents did not set out to knowingly hurt me. They were taught by their parents and church to believe certain things about homosexuality and gay people that were widely held beliefs at the time. My goal in sharing my experiences with you is not to trash them (or other family members, or teammates, or friends), but to give you insight into my experience growing up as a gay kid in a world that was filled with hate and prejudice. It was a world in which I learned to hide anything about myself that might have given anyone any idea that I wasn’t the All-American Straight Golden Boy they wanted to believe I was—and that I desperately wanted to be.
It all started with My Little Pony, a cartoon TV program I liked to watch when I was a very young boy. The show was built around a cast of characters based on the colorful and highly decorated plastic pony toys manufactured by Hasbro. I can’t tell you why I loved My Little Pony, but I did. (Ironically, my favorite pony was the blue one with wings and a rainbow-colored mane and tail—for those who don’t know, the rainbow flag is a symbol of gay pride.) The fact that I loved My Little Pony in the first place was the problem, because the My Little Pony TV show and the My Little Pony dolls that I collected and played with were designed for and marketed to girls.
I have to give my mom some credit because when I asked for My Little Pony dolls for Christmas and birthday gifts (and we each got to pick out a new toy when another sibling was born), she let me choose whatever I wanted. And what I always wanted was a My Little Pony doll and another less-than-masculine toy, this stuffed dog that had a flap on its belly with little puppies inside.
But I don’t want to give my mother—or my sisters—too much credit, because they liked to tease me about the fact that I liked to play with toys that most boys had no interest in. They used to sing a song meant to torment me about “My Little Pony and baloney,” and they’d sing it back and forth until I started crying. I was very sensitive when I was a child (I still am), so it didn’t take a lot to get me to cry. Still, I don’t remember the teasing bothering me all that much. Though apparently it’s not that way for every boy who loves My Little Pony. I recently read about an eleven-year-old boy who was a fan of the My Little Pony cartoon show and was teased so relentlessly that he tried to take his own life, which is beyond heartbreaking.
Other than the occasional teasing, my sisters were happy to play dolls with me. And my mother was content to let us enjoy ourselves. My father was another story, and on a few occasions when I was very young he made it clear that he didn’t like his namesake playing with “girlie things.” I remember one time overhearing him say to my mother in a really angry voice, “I don’t ever want to see him playing with dolls again! I don’t want a fairy for a son!”
It would be years before I understood that the word “fairy” was a stand-in for “fag” or “homosexual” and that my father was afraid that by playing with dolls I’d grow up to be gay. What was clear from my father’s tone of voice was that whatever kind of fairy he didn’t want me to be, I figured it had to be pretty bad. After that my mother deftly shifted me away from My Little Pony dolls and over to more standard toy horses, which she would buy for me at the general store. Happily for everyone, as I got older and my brother Tim and I spent more time playing together, we only wanted toys that would shoot stuff. We’d set up little soldiers and go at it the way boys were supposed to play. That must have come as a huge relief to my father.
There was one other gender-bending thing I did as a child that made my dad insanely angry, and his reaction is burned into my memory as if imprinted there by a red-hot branding iron. My two older sisters and I liked to dress up and play a game they called “Cool Girls.” I was pretty young when we did this, so my sister Alicia has more complete memories of this than I do. Here’s what she remembers:
My mom and dad both worked full-time and went on a lot of trips together, so after school and when they were away we stayed with Hilda, our adopted grandmother. She was the most amazing, loving, good woman and we were so blessed to have known her. We went to garage sales with her and we’d buy 1950s lingerie and other silky things. Then we’d come home and Hilda would do up my hair and Coco’s hair in little curls. We’d put on these slips we’d bought and Robbie would, too—he did whatever we did. So we’d get dressed up—I chose the name Sara and Robbie’s name was Robin and Coco was someone else—and we’d parade around the house and pretend we were cool girls.
One time we were playing in Hilda’s back room when my dad walked in—he was just back from a trip or came by early to pick us up to take us home. He took one look at Robbie all dressed up and I could see him getting really angry because he was grinding his teeth. He didn’t raise his voice very often, but when he did it was scary. He yelled, “My son will not be a faggot!” Robbie just froze. We all did. I remember the look of shock on Robbie’s face, and his furrowed brow just beneath his perfect bowl haircut.
When I talked with my mom about this recently she recalled being at Hilda’s house that day, too, and that dad also yelled at Hilda and said, “Don’t let my son dress up like a faggot!” Here’s what Mom remembers:
Rob was out-of-control angry and I told him that he couldn’t yell at the children like that and he said, “He’s going to grow up to be a fairy.” And I said, “I don’t care what he’s going to grow up to be. You may not do this.” I felt that as a mother I had to step in and say, “You’re not going to do this to our son. He will be who he is, and if he wants to play like this with his sisters, don’t you ever yell at him like that.” Robbie’s facial expression changed dramatically when his father yelled at him and he appeared extremely hurt.
That experience with our dad just taught us to be more careful when we played “Cool Girls,” because it wasn’t like we stopped. There was another time when my dad caught us and this time it was at home when we were still living in San Pedro. Alicia was probably eight, Coco was six, and I was four. We’d raided my mother’s closet and used her scarves and whatever else we could find to make togas. I put a shirt on my head and pretended that I had long hair. We were on the second floor playing and running around and having a lot of fun, which probably explains why we didn’t hear Dad coming up the stairs, but suddenly he was screaming at us. I was so scared that I have no memory of exactly what he said or what I said in response, but Alicia remembers that I said, “I’m pretending to be a horse. I’m not pretending to be a girl.”
I have no idea how I knew to say that, but apparently I knew enough to know that what made my dad so upset was that his little boy was pretending to be a girl. As I came to understand much later, in Dad’s mind that meant I’d grow up to be gay, which was something so terrible that the thought of it made his blood boil. (My father is now so supportive and pro-gay that it’s hard to imagine he ever had any problem with me playing with dolls or dressing up to play “Cool Girls.”) Of course, not all boys who play with dolls and play dress-up with their sisters turn out to be gay, but this boy did. And if there are any parents out there who still worry that their child’s choice of toys has an impact on the child’s sexuality, let me put your minds at ease. There is no cause-and-effect. Don’t forget, I also liked to play soccer and was a judo champion, and that didn’t make me straight.
Before I figured out what “fairy” or “faggot” meant, or that it had anything to do with my sexuality, I had a sense that I was different from other boys. In elementary school I’d hear my friends talk about girlfriends and I couldn’t relate to it. I wasn’t excited about the idea of having a girlfriend and couldn’t understand why they were. I thought that maybe I was just afraid, but at first I couldn’t put my finger on what the problem was.
One time, I remember watching an episode of Dawson’s Creek on television and seeing a gay character, Jack McPhee, and I really took notice. It wasn’t that I was attracted to Jack—at least I don’t recall being attracted to him. There was just something about his character that felt familiar, that Jack and I shared more in common than simply his hair and eye color. But even before Dawson’s Creek, when I watched movies or TV shows I was always more attracted to the guy characters than the girl characters and didn’t know why. Then, as I got older and realized that I was gay and understood why I was attracted to them, I didn’t allow myself to have those feelings.
Maybe it sounds crazy, but I never really let myself feel attracted to other guys. It felt too dangerous. I told myself that I could never date one of my teammates, or any soccer player, any friend—anyone I found even remotely attractive, for that matter. I trained myself to say no, no, no to any feelings of attraction I might have had even before they surfaced. For most of my life, when I saw a good-looking guy it was like looking at a sibling, so I’d feel sick to my stomach if I allowed so much as a flicker of attraction to slip through.
My growing sense that something was wrong with me came at around the same time (in 1997) that the character Ellen Morgan (played by Ellen DeGeneres) on the sitcom Ellen told the world she was gay. More than forty million people watched that episode (by comparison, the top-rated Modern Family was watched by around ten million viewers in a typical week in 2013). I can’t imagine that my family watched Ellen or that episode, but even if we had I don’t think I would have made any connection between what was going on with me and what Ellen Morgan (and Ellen DeGeneres herself) announced to the world.
When I was ten or eleven I also started to hear gay slur words and kids would say, “Don’t be so gay,” like gay was a bad thing, like you were doing something stupid. While I knew by then what gay people were, I can’t say I had a real understanding yet that I was gay myself—or at least I wasn’t willing to consider that possibility. But somewhere deep down I must have known because my ears perked up whenever I heard those slurs or heard about gay civil right issues on the news or debated by my family or discussed at church.
What I heard at church cut especially deep, because I didn’t want to lead a sinful life. My understanding from Sunday sermons and from CCD class (Confraternity of Christian Doctrine class—Sunday school for Catholics) was that there was no place for homosexuality, that it was a sin, that it was evil. You couldn’t live that lifestyle and go to heaven. What was a bit confusing for me was that there were lots of things in the Bible that you weren’t supposed to do, but for some reason that no one seemed to explain, homosexuality was a really bad one and I wasn’t about to ask why.
My parents would discuss gay stuff occasionally. It wasn’t a big talking point, but when same-sex marriage came up, my parents (and later my mother and her second husband) would say that marriage was between a man and a woman. They never bashed gay people, but they talked about marriage being a holy union between a man and a woman and how that was in the Bible. Polygamy and incest are sins, too, but homosexuality was somehow worse. They’d talk about what would happen if gays got married, that it was going to change all kinds of things and somehow undermine traditional families and lead to crazy stuff, like people marrying their pets.
The one time my mother said something that made me think she was really anti-gay was so incidental, at least for her, that she doesn’t remember it. But I do. Vividly. I was probably thirteen or fourteen years old at the time and we were driving in my mom’s Toyota 4Runner on our way to a sushi place she knew I liked in Torrance. That was one of the great things about my mom: she always found a way to spend time with each of her children independently. So that evening it was just the two of us.
We had the radio on and there was an Elton John song playing—I don’t remember which one—and just as we were crossing the Pacific Coast Highway Mom said something like, “I used to love Elton John until he got all weird and gay,” or “I really like that song, but it’s too bad he’s gay.” I thought, Gosh, my mom really said that? Elton John is one of the most talented musicians of our time, but then she finds out he’s gay and now she doesn’t like him?
I loved Elton John’s music. He’s a great singer-songwriter and his music is something that makes you feel good. I always thought he was gay but that wasn’t an issue for me, and I didn’t see how his being gay could be a problem for anyone, but clearly it was for my mom. That really scared me. It made me think I could never say anything to my mother about what I already suspected about myself because she would think there was something wrong with me, too. We listened to the rest of the song in silence.
The only person in my family who ever spoke positively about gay people was my Aunt Angel, my dad’s sister. As I found out later, she suspected I was gay and wanted to make a point of letting me know that it was okay if I was. She lived in Florida and still does, so I didn’t see her often, but over the years when I visited with her she would talk about her gay friends and say positive things about them so I would know it was okay with her. She was always clear that she didn’t care whether someone was gay or straight. But I was totally clueless that this had anything to do with me, especially since my aunt would also ask me if I was dating any girls. I just assumed that if she knew I was gay she would never have asked about that.
It was really thoughtful of my aunt to try to let me know it was okay with her that I was gay, but later, once she knew I was gay, I explained why I never confided in her. I said, “Angel, you could have said anything to me about gay people. It wouldn’t have made me feel any better and I still wouldn’t have felt comfortable telling you. It was about me and what I thought about myself, not what you thought about me.” The sad truth was that I was so badly scarred by then, it didn’t matter what anyone else said. For me it was an internal battle and I couldn’t recognize when someone who loved me reached out to let me know that she accepted me for who I was. I had to come to terms with myself first. I had to recognize and accept that I wasn’t a bad person and that God put me on this earth for a purpose and not just to suffer.
While no one thing set me on the path to keeping silent about my sexuality, there was one experience that helped crystallize for me how painfully difficult it was going to be to reconcile Robbie Rogers the up-and-coming soccer player with Robbie Rogers the undeniably gay teenager. Before I explain my tortured reconciliation, I want to tell you about that crystallizing experience, which came during my sophomore year of high school, when I was invited to train with the U-17 (under age seventeen) national team at the elite IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida, along with forty of the best young soccer players in the country. For the players who were ultimately selected to be on the U-17 national team, you got to compete against other national teams in your age group from around the world.
Even though it meant leaving Mater Dei, it was incredibly exciting to be invited to attend the Bradenton residency, but I almost didn’t go. First, because my mom objected to me going; she thought it wouldn’t be good for me to be away from the family. (She was right, and she wasn’t the only one—Jürgen Klinsmann, who was someone I looked up to and had become one of my mentors, thought it would be better if I was around my family, in an environment that was loving and supportive.) And, second, I almost couldn’t go because I’d developed a problem with my knee that made it excruciating for me to walk, let alone run. Here’s what my mom remembers from that time:
Robbie developed some problems associated with his muscles and his bones growing at different rates. I got him into physical therapy, and it was a long and difficult process for him to recover. One time when we were coming back from physical therapy he started crying. I pulled over to the side of the road and asked him, “What’s wrong?” And he said, “I may not get to be a professional soccer player and I want this with my whole heart. This is the first time I ever realized what it would be like in my life not to have soccer.”
So Robbie and I wound up making a deal about his going to Bradenton because I could see how important it was to him. Robbie had been on board when I originally said no to the residency program, but during this conversation Robbie made another pitch for going. He said, “Look, if I’m going to do this, if I’m going to be a professional soccer player, I need to go to Bradenton.” So we made that our goal, to get him 100% healthy, and if we got to that point, then I would let him attend Bradenton after all. And he did it, working as hard as anyone, going to physical therapy three or four times a week, until he was fit and ready to go.
Bradenton turned out to be like Lord of the Flies. It was brutal going to class with, training with, living with, and being surrounded by my teammates twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. These were guys who were always calling each other “faggot” and talking about girls in the most demeaning ways, using language I couldn’t imagine using about anyone (and couldn’t imagine repeating here). Both on and off the field I found myself swimming in a soup of raging male hormones.
Even if I’d been straight I couldn’t have imagined talking about girls the way my teammates did. I realized that they were fifteen-year-olds talking the way they thought grown men talked about women, and were just trying to live up to the stereotype. But it wasn’t like I could say to myself that they were just feeling the same things I felt for guys, because I’d done such a good job of burying my feelings that I really had no visceral sense of how I felt about guys. I mostly felt nothing.
I can look back now and see that it was just a pack mentality, that when the guys were all together they turned into a bunch of hungry and horny wolves. When you got them on their own they were much more chill, as if they’d taken some sort of antidote that turned them back into teenage boys. But back then it made me feel totally different and completely isolated because I couldn’t understand what they were feeling.
Even worse than all the talk about girls was the number of times each day I heard “that’s so gay” or “fag” or “faggot,” and it wasn’t like any of our coaches or teachers ever said anything to stop it. The slurs weren’t directed at anyone who was gay, but they were always said maliciously and felt like a punch in the chest every time I heard them. But I couldn’t react. I couldn’t give any indication that those words meant any more to me than they did to anyone else, or I’d risk someone figuring out why I cared.
What really got to me was the fact that I could never escape from it. There was no life away from soccer, so what should have been the best time in my life—a time when I got increasing recognition for my skills as a soccer player on a bigger and bigger stage—turned out to be really difficult. I was so unhappy off the field that it affected my game on the field, which was something I knew I’d have to overcome if I was going to fulfill my dream of becoming a professional soccer player. To make things worse, I couldn’t share how I was feeling with my family and began to withdraw from them in a way that left my mother, in particular, confused. I told myself that I couldn’t tell my mother how miserable I was because then she’d ask me why I felt that way. And I could never tell her. Never.
Coming off the semester in Bradenton, I could see that there was only one path for me to follow if I was going to continue playing soccer. There was no question in my mind that soccer was my life and that I wanted more than anything to turn pro. Although I didn’t think of it this way at the time, soccer had become my identity. I was Robbie Rogers the talented soccer player and I got lots of strokes for that—from coaches, from other players, and perhaps most importantly, from my family. (I knew I wasn’t going to get those strokes if I was Robbie Rogers not-the-soccer-player or gay Robbie Rogers the average high school student.) And there was another thing soccer did for me. Playing soccer actually helped me forget that underneath the surface I was this shameful and sinful person nobody would love. On the field I could push all those bad feelings aside and still experience the joy that came from stepping onto the field with some of the best young athletes in the country who loved soccer as much as I did.
When I looked around to figure out what I was going to do, it wasn’t hard to see that there weren’t any gay professional soccer players. As far as I knew there were no openly gay men playing professional team sports anywhere in the world, and that left me with only one option: suppress my feelings, pretend to be straight, pray to God to take these bad feelings away, and never share with another single human being the truth about my sexuality.
All I wanted at that age was to be like everyone else, and while I still held out hope that somehow I could figure out how I could make myself straight by praying harder or maybe even meeting the right girl, in the meantime I would put a lid on myself and seal it so securely that there was never any danger of slipping and letting someone discover I was gay. Of course, when you’re fifteen or sixteen years old, you have no idea what it means to keep such a tightly held secret about something as powerful and instinctive as your sexuality. It would take me years to realize what a painful, lonely, and ultimately impossible path I’d chosen.
After one semester at IMG I’d had enough and decided to go back to California for my junior and senior years of high school while I continued to play for the national teams in my age group. (By then my mother had moved the family south to Huntington Beach in Orange County, so I went to Huntington High School.) At least at home I could get time by myself to recover and recharge. One lesson I’d learned from the semester away was that if I was going to successfully keep a part of myself hidden, I couldn’t do it in a place far from home surrounded by other guys my age twenty-four hours a day; I needed personal downtime to relax, recharge, and get rid of at least some of the toxic feelings that came along with leading a pretend life.
When I decided after Bradenton that the only way to deal with my sexuality was to keep a lid on my feelings, it didn’t occur to me that sooner or later I was going to have to deal with girls. Girls liked soccer players, and soccer players were supposed to want to have sex with them, and by my junior year of high school the pressure on me to have sex with girls had grown to the point where I felt like I had no choice if I was going to keep people from getting suspicious. And the truth is, I was also curious to see what would happen. Would I like it? Would having sex with a girl make me want it more? I didn’t want it at all, so if having sex with a girl made me want it even a little bit that would be a big deal. Would it take away the feelings of attraction I had for men? I told myself that I couldn’t know until I tried.
Long before high school, girls had made it clear that they were interested in me. In fourth and fifth grades, girls would follow me around and they’d write letters to me saying, “You’re so cute.” It wasn’t a surprise that by failing to express an interest in girls I would attract another kind of attention that I didn’t want. At Miraleste Intermediate School in Rancho Palos Verdes, I had a friend, a girl, who said, “So many girls like you and you never date any girls. Do you think maybe you’re gay?” I didn’t know at that time if I was gay, but it really scared me and made me feel defensive. All I managed to say was “We’re in sixth grade! What do you mean?” Luckily we weren’t actually talking face-to-face because we were exchanging messages on AOL, so she couldn’t see how shocked I was.
A few months later I started to date a girl I thought was pretty. We’d hang out, go to the movies, and write each other notes. I knew deep down that I was just trying to prove I wasn’t gay, although it was also confusing because I’d think, She is really pretty and maybe I do like her. But as I got older, I realized that finding a girl attractive and liking her weren’t the same thing as being sexually attracted, that this was just me thinking a girl was pretty and that I should date her because that’s what guys my age were supposed to do.
By my junior year in high school you couldn’t get away with just talking to girls on AOL and hanging out. If I was going to seem normal I was going to have to prove myself by actually having sex with a girl. It wasn’t anything I planned, but one time when I was staying with my coach’s family two girls came over after school. They were good friends, so it didn’t occur to me that I’d hook up with either of them. We hung out for a while in the Jacuzzi and had a few beers. Then one of them left and the girl who stayed behind went up to my room with me and we started kissing. I still wasn’t thinking we were going to have sex, but we did.
After the fact, I didn’t want to hang out with her, but the sex itself wasn’t bad. For the next few weeks she called me again and again, hitting me up, wanting to get together again. I kept avoiding her because having sex once with a girl was more than enough for me. And besides, I knew that the other kids at school would hear I’d had sex with a girl, so I’d achieved my goal of giving the impression that I wasn’t gay. At least for now.
For someone who is straight it probably sounds strange to hear me complain about girls being attracted to me and wanting to have sex with me, because that’s the totally normal thing. But for me sex with a girl was so not normal. It wasn’t what I wanted, and all that attention from girls just reinforced the feeling that there was something really wrong with me.
These days, when I’ve been asked by guys what the problem is for me having sex with girls, I ask them to imagine that they live in a world where almost everyone is gay and being straight is a bad thing. I say, “Imagine that all the movies you see and the songs you hear celebrate same-sex love and the people around you are always talking about hooking up with someone of the same sex. In your heart of hearts you know that you’re straight, but to prove you’re gay—and so no one figures out that you’re really straight and rejects you—you have to fake being attracted to guys and you need to have sex with them just to prove you’re normal. And now imagine that you have to marry a guy and have sex with him over and over again for the rest of your life.” Imagine.