Hansen: Mizzou's Michael Sam, meet Nebraska's gay pioneer

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.omaha.com/article/20140216/HUSKERS/140219007/1685#hansen-mizzou-s-michael-sam-meet-nebraska-s-gay-pioneer

By Matthew Hansen / World-Herald columnist Published Sunday, February 16, 2014 at 12:30 am / Updated at 3:07 am



Already out to his parents at age 17, Eric Lueshen decided he wasn't going to live a lie when he went to UNL.


The 2005 Athletic Department Formal was in full swing. The University of Nebraska's football players had pulled on their best khakis and taken the elevator up to the decorated lobby inside Memorial Stadium's West Stadium skyboxes. They had mowed through plates of fancy free grub and cast sidelong glances at the women's track team, the athletes every football player wanted to date.

Every football player except Eric Lueshen. As the dinner ended, the sophomore kicker sat at a round table laughing and joking with several of his football buddies, two volleyball players and a man that many of the athletes at this formal had never met. The music kicked on, and as the first slow song played, men and women started pairing off and moving toward the wooden dance floor.

Eric looked across the table at the man, who was looking right back at him. There are novels that could be written about just that look, millennia of repression, violence and paralyzing fear captured inside a single glance. And there is a shorter story bound up inside that look, the story of a college kid from a nowhere Nebraska town who a decade ago entered arguably the most exclusive, the most hallowed and the most testosterone-fueled spot in this entire state — the Husker football locker room — and decided that when they asked, he would look them in the eye and tell them the truth.

But Eric Lueshen didn't have time for stories — not at this moment at least. He had a single, simple question.

FULL story at link.

[DURHAM D]

1. Excellent story. Thanks for posting. nt

[alsame]

2. K&R nt

[shenmue]

3. Good kid

We need more people like him.

[Rhythm]

4. Thank you for finding this, Steve...

A great read, and an even better story...

I hope Mr. Lueshen wins a Nobel Prize for some amazing medical discovery someday, because he knows how to pour his all into what he does.

[Behind the Aegis]

5. kick

[Jamastiene]

6. K&R

[RKP5637]

7. K&R !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! n/t

[Rowdyboy]

8. Great story!

K&R