Basketball coach comes out as gay after coronavirus pandemic made him realise he didn’t want to ‘die with the lie’

Basketball coach Matt Lynch has come out publicly as gay, saying he was afraid he could end up dying “with the lie” due to the coronavirus pandemic.

In a wide-ranging personal article for Outsports, Lynch revealed that he has spent the last few years gradually coming out to people in his personal and professional circles.

However, he had not yet come out publicly, and decided to use his time in coronavirus lockdown to tell the world that he is gay.

“This is a scary time for everyone and the unknown is always difficult to deal with,” Lynch wrote in his op-ed. “But I have made a decision to use this time to become completely open and honest with myself and the people around me.”

“I’m gay,” he wrote.

Ten years ago, Lynch was afraid that he would never even be able to say those words out loud, let alone come out publicly. He said he always assumed he would “die with the lie”.

“That is how I approached so much of my life, to keep it a secret, to never let anyone know that side of me, to hide and bury all those feelings,” Lynch wrote.

The 29-year-old threw himself into his career in an effort to bury his feelings.

“I didn’t think about being gay or that part of me as much. I didn’t date, I didn’t talk about it, and it got to the point that I almost began to believe that I could shut that side of my life ‘off’,” he wrote.

However, in that time, he started to develop what he calls “self-homophobia” and came to see being gay as “wrong”. This was manageable during the basketball season when he was too busy to focus on his own feelings, but in the off seasons, he found himself slipping into depression.

He decided to come out now because he refused ‘to die with the lie’.

“I didn’t have basketball to hide behind, and I became stuck alone with my thoughts. I was trapped in my own head, which was a very dangerous place to be,” he wrote.

He has told most people in his life, including the men he coaches, about his sexual orientation, but decided he wanted to make a public statement due to the current pandemic.

“I am probably a little crazy to decide to make this so public with everything else that is going on,” he wrote. “But I wanted to try and find a way to use a negative time for something positive. I don’t know if I will be able to get another college basketball job as an openly gay coach, but I refuse to take any job where I am not my authentic self.”

He concluded: “I refuse to die with the lie.”