PATRIOT ACT PRIVACY OR SECURITY
CAMPUS COFFEE REVIEW
GORDON: INSPIRING CHANGE
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THE MASSACHUSETTS
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DAILY COLLEGIAN DailyCollegian.com
Thursday, April 10, 2014
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‘THIS IS WHO I AM’ Gordon first openly gay D-1 basketball player
Students and public supportive By Mark chiarelli Collegian Staff
By Patrick Strohecker Collegian Staff
On Sunday, March 30, Massachusetts men’s basketball coach Derek Kellogg received a phone call from sophomore shooting guard Derrick Gordon. On the other end was a trembling Gordon, who had a big secret to let out: he was gay. “He called me late Sunday night and said he had met with his parents,” Kellogg said. “And he sounded kind of nervous. He was stumbling on the phone some and I said, ‘listen, just tell me what’s going on. You can tell me anything, you don’t have to beat around the bush,’ and he came out and said ‘I’m gay, coach.’” Three days later, on April 2, Kellogg called a team meeting for Gordon to address the rest of the team. The result was Kellogg showing his support for Gordon by breaking the ice to his team. “I said, ‘I want to make an important announcement to you guys. Just want to let you know that I’m gay,’” Kellogg said. “(The team) knows me, they’ve been to my house, hung out with my wife and my son and thought it was kind of funny … he kind of broke the ice and (Gordon) said, ‘you know coach ain’t (gay), but I am.’” With the announcement, Gordon becomes the first openly gay athlete in men’s Division I basketball, coming out just two months after former Missouri football player Michael Sam came out as gay months before the NFL Draft. Gordon sat down with Outsports’ Cyd Zeigler and ESPN’s Kate Fagan to tell his story, which both became public on Wednesday morning. Gordon said he felt like he was hiding something and that “he didn’t want to hide it anymore,” in the interview with Fagan. With immense support from fellow gay athlete Jason Collins – who became the first openly gay athlete to play in the NBA when he signed with the Brooklyn Nets in February – and Wade Davis, Gordon finally worked up the
courage to tell his family. Gordon said his brother Darryl, who is currently serving four years in jail for shooting a man in the chest, took the news the hardest. The brothers have a very strong bond and Gordon, who’s always been open about doing everything in life for his brother, told him that it wasn’t his fault and it could’ve just as easily been him. “I had to have a good, long talk with him to let him know that it wasn’t his fault,” Gordon said. “This is who I am and I told him too, it’s not like I woke up one day and said ‘OK, I’m gay.’ You can’t do that. Just support me for who I am and he got it. It took him longer than my father did. “Well you tell people these types of things, you can’t just expect them to know right away and know right away.” Despite the fact that it took his family some time to understand the news that Gordon revealed to them, his teammates all supported him. In fact, they knew something was bothering him throughout the season because Gordon tended to go off on his own and, at times, didn’t seem part of the team. “This past year, he got a lot more isolated,” sophomore Tyler Bergantino said. “You could tell that there was something bothering him. Wasn’t really quite like himself like how I saw him the year before. You could tell there was like a fog about him.” But Gordon is in the right place to come out. Massachusetts is widely considered one of the most liberal and progressive states in the country, with UMass living up to that billing. There is a huge LGBT support system on campus, which can make it easier for a person like Gordon, who is constantly in the public eye, to come out and know that he has a strong support group. “In a lot of schools, even if it’s a really progressive school, sometimes the athletic department is not so progressive,” Pat Griffin said, who focuses on LGBT issues
MARIA UMINSKI/COLLEGIAN
Derrick Gordon talks with the media about the relief he felt after coming out as gay. in sports and is a UMass professor emeritus. “That’s the anomaly in the college campus. I don’t think that’s the case here, as evidenced by the great supportive response that he’s getting from the athletic department.” It’s been hard for Gordon to pick the exact time to come out as
gay. He was nearly outed last summer when a photo of him standing outside a gay bar with his thenboyfriend surfaced. Members of the Minutemen caught sight of it and began harassing him and questioning his sexuality. see
GORDON on page 3
Those that watched Massachusetts men’s basketball guard Derrick Gordon play basketball this season saw a highintensity player capable of playing ferocious defense. By season’s end, Gordon had crashed to the floor beneath the basket after finishing a layup too many times to count. He didn’t quit on plays, even taking it so far that he dove over a sideline media table and cascaded into media members covering UMass’ home opener against Louisiana State. On Wednesday, Gordon yet again crashed through a barrier, a barrier much more meaningful than wins or losses. Sporting a black T-shirt with the hashtag #BETRUE scrawled across the chest, Gordon publicly announced he’s gay, becoming the first male Division I basketball player to openly come out. “Nobody in this world should be living their life in shame being who they really are,” he said. Gordon said his announcement comes at a time where he’s comfortable and confident with himself, after wrestling with this internal emotion for the better part of the past four years. One of the biggest challenges he fretted over was delivering the news to his teammates. “I thought about it all the time like, ‘man I don’t know if I could tell my teammates this,” Gordon said. The team gathered last Wednesday with UMass coach Derek Kellogg leading the meeting while Gordon sat off to the side. Gordon’s initial plan was to deliver the news himself, but Kellogg instead eased the situation and announced to the team that he was gay. The team looked on, confused about the news delivered from a man with a wife and children like Kellogg. “(Gordon) was really nervous, more of how the guys were going to react or if there was going to be any blowback to a certain extent,” see
REACTIONS on page 2
Bone marrow drive this weekend Stockbridge program Organization to have preps future farmers tents outside dining halls By JoSh Darling Collegian Correspondent Close to 100 University of Massachusetts students will be volunteering in a bone marrow registration drive this Friday and Saturday from 9-5 p.m. that will take place in tents outside of each of the Dining Commons. The volunteers will be working with Delete Blood Cancer, an organization founded by Peter Harf in 1990. Originally based out of Germany, the organization began to spread campaigns throughout the U.S. starting in 2004, under the leadership of Peter’s daughter Katharina. The organization is tasked with building a comprehensive registry of potential bone marrow donors. Because the odds of finding an exact match can vary from 1 in 20,000 to 1 in millions, the need for
potential donors is ever-pressing. New potential donors will be administered a cotton swabbing of the inner cheek, in order to test for genetic matches. Delete Blood Cancer urges potential donors to think carefully about the decision to register. Due to the extreme difficulty of finding a match, it is extremely devastating to the patient if a potential donor backs out at the last second. “Since Delete Blood Cancer came to UMass four years ago, we’ve registered about 6,000 new potential donors, which is really great,” said Brendan Nolan, a senior who has been volunteering for this drive since his freshman year. “We’re the number one school in the country when it comes to registration numbers.” The donation process for giving bone marrow takes two forms: Peripheral Blood Stem Cell (PBSC) donation and traditional bone marrow donation. PBSC involves taking a small amount of blood from donors and
running it through a machine that isolates the blood stem cells. In order to increase the level of stem cells in the blood, donors are required to ingest a protein called filgrastim for four days leading up to the extraction. The second method, bone marrow donation, is an outpatient surgical procedure in which marrow is collected from the backside of the pelvic bone using a syringe. The donor is given general anesthesia prior to the operation, so no pain is felt during the procedure. Both forms of donation do involve some discomfort while recovering from the procedure, but as Nolan succinctly stated, it’s a “small price to pay for saving a life.” The Pike fraternity deserves special mention in regards to this event, as they have rallied around 60 volunteers who will run the registration progress at Berkshire Dining Commons. Josh Darling can be reached at jmdarling@ umass.edu.
Special topics fair held to show student projects By katrina BorofSki Collegian Staff
As the spring semester comes to a close, most classes begin to wind down and prepare for finals. For students enrolled in the Stockbridge School of Agriculture’s Farm Enterprise Practicum course, however, this is far from the case. With a 1 to 6 credit course in which students plan the farming process for a 6 acre organic farm located in South Deerfield, the students enrolled in Farm Enterprise Practicum are just beginning the implementation of their work. During the spring semester course, students partake in the planning process for the farm work that will take place over the summer. Following the summer, students
enroll in Stockbridge 498E, the second half of the Farm Enterprise Practicum. “About half of the class stays in the summer to work on the farm,” said Amanda Brown, the instructor of the Farm Enterprise Practicum. “Not only are students planning for the crops; they also each take on an area of interest and they create a research project about how they can implement this on the farm,” explained Jason Silverman, assistant manager of the University of Massachusetts Student Farm. Among the 12 students enrolled in the course, projects covered topics such as seed saving, record keeping and farm planning, organic disease management, animal rotation, flea beetle management and draft horse husbandry. Chris Raabe, a student enrolled see
FARMING on page 2