
Vice: You were America's first openly gay high school coach, right?
Dr. Anderson: This is true, yes. In 1993 I came out of the closet as an openly gay high school coach in the OC [Orange County] in Southern California. It was a very conservative period of time, and I was at a conservative school. It didn't go over very well. My runners loved me, but we experienced extreme violence from the [American] football team. Eventually, one of my runners was brutally beaten. He was beaten so bad the football player broke his pallet. All because he ran for the gay coach. I wrote about this experience in an autobiography, Trailblazing: The True Story of America's First Openly Gay High School Coach. And it was also this experience that sent me back to university to earn a PhD studying gay athletes.
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