Shift At The Center | Sally Gary: Faith, Sexuality, And The Change at CenterPeace

Shift At The Center | Sally Gary

Faith, Sexuality, and the Change at CenterPeace

Sally Gary spent years helping LGBTQ Christians find a place in the church. But what happened when the founder of CenterPeace changed her own beliefs about same-sex marriage?

In this episode of The Secret Is OUT, host Stan Stadig tells Sally’s story—from her Church of Christ upbringing and years at Abilene Christian University to coming out, building a ministry, and finding love with Karen Keen.

For fourteen years, CenterPeace made room for honest conversations about faith and sexuality while maintaining a traditional Christian view of marriage. Sally believed that view herself. She lived it, wrote about it, and became someone conservative churches trusted.

Then years of listening, studying Scripture, and facing her own loneliness brought her somewhere she hadn’t expected. In October 2020, she told her own conference that she had become affirming of same-sex marriage. Then she introduced the woman she planned to marry.

Throughout the shift, Sally still loved the people and places that had shaped her. Changing her mind meant risking those relationships. It also meant imagining a life she had spent decades believing was unavailable to her.

Along the way, I share some of my own experience with trying to explain—and change—my sexuality. Sally’s story raises questions many of us know personally: Can I be gay and Christian? What happens when my understanding of Scripture changes? Will the people who love me still make room for me?

In this episode

• Sally Gary’s upbringing in the Churches of Christ and connection to Abilene Christian University.
• Coming out privately, then speaking publicly at ACU.
• Why Sally founded CenterPeace for LGBTQ Christians and their families.
• Celibacy, loneliness, and reconsidering beliefs about same-sex marriage.
• Her relationship with biblical scholar Karen Keen.
• The 2020 announcement that changed CenterPeace.
• Finding belonging while staying connected to Christian faith.

Written and narrated by Stan Stadig. This is a narrated account of Sally Gary’s story, drawing on her public statements, writing, and published interviews.

Content note: Discussion of suicidal thoughts, family abuse, religious rejection, attempts to change sexual orientation, and long-term isolation.

For further info on Sally Gary, CenterPeace, and the 2026 Conference:

Visit centerpeace.net to learn about the upcoming 20th Anniversary Conference as well as the ministry, LGBTQ Christian community, retreats, and support for families.

The 2026 CenterPeace Conference takes place October 15–17 in Dallas, at First United Methodist Church of Dallas. Visit the conference information and registration page for speakers, workshops, and the schedule.

Explore more:

• CenterPeace resources on faith and sexuality
• Support for parents of LGBTQ children
• Loves God, Likes Girls documentary
• Sally’s memoir, Affirming: A Memoir of Faith, Sexuality, and Staying in the Church

Support and community

If this episode brings up thoughts of suicide or you need immediate emotional support, call or text 988 in the United States or Canada.

For support around faith and sexuality, CenterPeace offers community for LGBTQ people, their families, and church leaders.

Music credits

With thanks to the musicians whose work helps tell this story:

• Aakash Gandhi: “Invisible Beauty”; “Liquid Time”
• Asher Fulero: “Hopeful Freedom”
• Dan Lebowitz: “Take Your Time”
• Esther Abrami: “No.2 Remembering Her”
• Joel Cummins: “Resolve”
• JR Tundra: “Red Hot Son”
• The Mini Vandals: “City of the Wolf”
• Wayne Jones: “A Quiet Thought”; “Touching Moment”
• Zachariah Hickman: “Leaning On the Everlasting Arms”
• TunePocket Exclusive: “All Hayle To The Dayes (Modern Pop Ballad)”
• Chris Zabriskie: “The Temperature of the Air on the Bow of the Kaleetan”, available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Mixed beneath narration and processed as part of the episode soundtrack.

Additional audio credits: “Esperanza” by bmangelo; microphone feedback and tapping by freqman; road and busy-room ambience by breviceps; small-group conversation ambience by neilraouf; car-door and engine audio by nematoki; and Zoom connection audio by rachelribeiro71.

References and further reading

• Sally Gary: “Still One of You”, CenterPeace Conference, October 23, 2020.
• Mark Wingfield: “Meet Sally Gary, the Churches of Christ advocate for gay Christians”, Baptist News Global, March 25, 2021.
• Sally Gary: “Coming Out. A Quarter of a Century Later.”, December 16, 2021.
• Sally Gary: “My Response to ACU’s Holy Sexuality Week”, November 26, 2023.
• Sally Gary and James Gorman: “Interview #12 — Sally Gary”, Abilene Christian University’s Churches of Christ in the 21st Century Oral History Project, September 6, 2022.
• Eerdmans: “Five Questions with Sally Gary”, February 23, 2021.
• Nicola Menzie: “‘Loves God, Likes Girls’ Author Talks Myths Christians Believe About Same-Sex Attraction”, The Christian Post, July 12, 2013.
• The Christian Chronicle: “Review: Authors offer insights on same-sex attraction, faith”, 2013.
• Karen R. Keen: “Will You Meet Me at CenterPeace?”, September 5, 2024.
• Guy Hammond: Response to Sally Gary’s announcement, Renew.org. Included as the non-affirming perspective discussed in the episode.
• Sally Gary: Loves God, Likes Girls: A Memoir. Leafwood Publishers, 2013.
• Sally Gary: Affirming: A Memoir of Faith, Sexuality, and Staying in the Church. Eerdmans, 2021.
• CenterPeace: Mission, history, and current programs.

Transcript

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On October 23rd, 2020, Sally Gary stood before the people who had trusted her and told them she had changed her mind. Most of them were watching from home. COVID had moved that year's centerpiece conference largely online. That may have made the announcement slightly easier. There are moments when not being able to see hundreds of Christian faces reacting in real time is one of Zoom's better features. But Sally knew what those faces might look like. For 14 years, Centerpiece had occupied a very careful place in the Christian conversation about sexuality. Sally had founded it for people like her, gay Christians who still wanted the church, even when they were not entirely sure the church wanted them. Centerpiece helped parents after a child came out. It trained pastors. It gave LGBTQ Christians a place to talk honestly about their lives without being told that honesty meant abandoning God. But the ministry had always remained within the traditional Christian teaching on marriage. Sally was openly gay. She also believed that faithfulness required her to remain celibate. And she had not merely said that from a conference stage. She had lived it. She had written a book about it. She had built a ministry that churches trusted partly because of it. Now, she no longer believed it was true. Her message that night was called Still One of You. Sally told the audience that her understanding of scripture had changed. She had come to believe that a committed marriage between two people of the same sex could honor God. Then she introduced Karen, the woman she loved. The woman she planned to marry. Sally had come out publicly as gay 17 years earlier. This was different. Now she was coming out as affirming, in love, and willing to build a life around a conclusion she had once taught against. And the risk was not only personal, it was the ministry she had spent 14 years building. And this is The Secret Is Out. Sally Geary was born in Wichita Falls, Texas, in 1961. Her family attended 10th and Broad Church of Christ, and church was not simply something they did on Sunday. It was the calendar, the community and moral vocabulary. It was where people knew your parents, your grandparents, and probably whether you had missed Wednesday night Bible study three weeks ago. Churches of Christ are independent congregations, but many share a few familiar traditions. Baptism by immersion, communion every Sunday, and a deep commitment to restoring the practices of the New Testament church. In Sally's world, worship was a cappella because the New Testament never specifically authorized instruments. Churches of Christ could disagree about quite a few things, but apparently God's feelings about a piano required absolute clarity. The Bible mattered. Getting it right mattered even more. And Sally loved that world. Her mother Betty had attended Abilene Christian and kept an old college yearbook called The Prickly Pear. Sally would sit beside her on the couch while Betty turned the pages and told stories about dorm life, classmates, and professors. Long before Sally ever set foot on campus, some part of her had already belonged there. Her family life was more complicated than those stories. In her first memoir, Loves God Likes Girls, Sally wrote about her father's anger and the tension it created at home. Years later, when the family finally talked honestly about memories they had avoided, some healing became possible. But Sally would not turn her father into an explanation for her sexuality. She had heard those explanations before: a distant or angry father, a controlling mother, a girl who did not feel feminine enough. Give a Christian counselor enough family history, and eventually somebody is going to find a theory. Sally knew her family's pain mattered. She simply did not believe it added up to a formula for why she was gay. I understand that search for an explanation because I went through my own version of it a few years ago when I was trying to get help for what we were still calling my same-sex attraction problem. We spent a lot of time digging through my childhood. My father's physical and emotional abuse, being bullied by my brother and other boys, the fact that most of my closest friends were girls. We examined every relationship, every hurt, and every childhood insecurity as if heterosexuality might be buried in there somewhere, possibly behind an unpleasant middle school memory. And we found plenty of pain. Most people will if they look long enough. What we did not find was a way to make me straight. Understanding my childhood helped me understand parts of myself. It did not explain away my sexuality, and it certainly did not cure it. Sally arrived at much the same conclusion. Her family history mattered, the pain was real, but it did not make her gay. Her childhood was complicated. So was the church. Sally grew into an outgoing young woman who was good at talking and even better at holding a room. She studied communication at Abilene Christian, earning her bachelor's degree in 1983 and her master's in 1985. She later wrote that she was the first woman allowed in an advanced preaching class there. Although women were not yet permitted to major in Bible. She coached speech and debate, went to law school at Texas Tech, and became a civil trial attorney. In other words, even before she started a ministry, Sally had spent years preparing to enter rooms where everyone was certain they were right. Eventually, she returned to Abilene Christian as a professor of communication. From the outside, her life made sense. She was accomplished, respected, and deeply connected to the institutions that had formed her. But Sally knew by early adulthood that she was attracted to women. She also knew what telling the truth appeared to threaten. Her family was respected in church. Her faith mattered to her. Her future had always included the people and places that had given her a sense of belonging. She could imagine coming out and losing all of it. So for years she did what many gay Christians of her generation learned to do. She kept going. She accomplished things. She stayed useful, and she pushed the truth down far enough that everyone else could remain comfortable. It did not make her straight. It just made her alone with it. On December 16th, 1996, Sally got up earlier than usual. She pulled on a red boys polo sweater, buttonfly guest jeans that were a little too big, and a heavy tweed coat. Snow was falling, and rain from the night before had frozen across the driveway. Her mother followed her into the garage with coffee in a thermal mug. Betty warned her to be careful. She did not ask why the appointment mattered so much. Sally was 35 years old. She was on her way to tell another person for the first time that she was attracted to women. As she drove across the ice, she began noticing the guardrails. Beyond them was a ravine. She thought about how little it would take to turn the wheel, break through the rail, and let the car roll. Then she would not have to say it. She would not have to see embarrassment on her parents' faces. She would not have to watch people revisit every memory of her and wonder what they had missed. Most of all, she would never have to learn whether the people who loved her still would once they knew her completely. That fear is difficult to explain to people who have never had to divide themselves into the parts that can be known and the parts that must be hidden. When everyone has only known an edited version of you, even their love can begin to feel uncertain. Do they love you? Or do they love the person you have worked very hard to let them see? And when someone rejects you after you finally tell the truth, it can feel like confirmation that your worst fear was right all along. Sally had planned to carry the secret to her grave. That morning, for a few terrible moments, the grave seemed easier than the appointment. Amy Grant's Christmas album was playing in the car. Sally kept rewinding the same song, Breath of Heaven, listening to a plea to be held together and have the darkness lifted. She kept the car on the road. Then she sat with a counselor and said the words. Coming out did not make Sally affirming. It did not settle what she believed about marriage, and it did not suddenly give her a picture of a future with a woman. It did something more basic. It allowed another person into the room with the truth. Over the next year, Sally began telling a small number of people. After one counseling appointment, she stood in a parking lot waiting for a taxi to take her to Love Field. She made a promise to herself that she would find a way to make this easier for the people coming behind her. She wanted gay Christians to have somewhere to speak before the secret pushed them toward a guardrail. She wanted parents to have somewhere to go to. Her own parents were leaders in their church. They were surrounded by people and yet had almost no one with whom they could safely discuss what their daughter had told them. Sally did not have a name for the ministry yet. At that point, it was only a promise she made in a parking lot while hoping the taxi arrived before she missed her flight. In 2001, Sally returned to Abilene Christian University as an assistant professor in the communication department. She loved teaching. She had spent years coaching people to stand in front of a room and say something clearly. Now she was considering whether she could do that with the truth she feared most. In 2003, Sally stood in Moody Coliseum and spoke publicly about her attraction to women. Karen Keane, who would later become Sally's wife, has described the audience as approximately 5,000 students, faculty, and staff. The university placed limits on what Sally could do from the stage. She later said she was asked not to read from the Bible and not to pray. Still, ACU allowed the address and it became a defining moment in her life. Sally was not announcing that she had rejected Christian teaching. At that point, she still believed the traditional sexual ethic was correct. The distinction mattered to many of the people listening. Sally could say she was gay, provided she also reassured everyone that she had no intention of doing anything about it. That may sound like a painfully narrow doorway now. At the time, it felt like a huge opening. Sally began speaking in churches and Christian colleges. She was welcomed into rooms that would not have invited someone arguing for same-sex marriage. She knew the language, she understood the fear beneath the questions, and she was not an outsider wagging her finger at the church. She was one of their own, asking them to stop making people like her suffer in silence. Church and university leaders spent nearly two years meeting with Sally and considering what a ministry like this should offer. In 2006, she founded Centerpiece. The name described what she wanted it to be: Jesus at the center. Peace in a conversation that Christians had become remarkably talented at turning into a fight. Centerpiece worked with gay Christians, parents, pastors, and congregations. It held workshops, retreats, and eventually national conferences. Sally listened to parents trying to understand what their children had told them. She listened to LGBTQ Christians who loved God but had begun to feel there was no place for them in the church. For conservative congregations, Sally offered a way to begin talking without first resolving every theological question. She was doing what she had promised in that parking lot. She was making room. But the room still had a boundary. Centerpiece could acknowledge that sexual orientation was not chosen. It could reject cruelty and simplistic promises that prayer would make a gay person straight. It could insist that gay people belonged in the Christian community. The answer to marriage remained no. For Sally, the faithful future was still celibacy. In 2013, Sally published her first memoir, Loves God, Likes Girls. The title was plain because the conflict felt plain. She loved God, she was attracted to women. And for most of her life, she had been taught that one of those truths would eventually have to surrender to the other. The book told stories from her childhood, her family, and the years she spent keeping her sexuality hidden. She wrote about shame, confusion, and her attempts to understand why she was gay. But she did not claim to have solved sexuality. She wanted churches to stop pretending they had. Sally's position was far more compassionate than the messages many gay Christians had heard. She did not believe attraction itself separated a person from God. She did not promise that enough prayer or counseling would produce heterosexuality. Gay Christians could tell the truth about themselves and still belong. But sex, she believed, belonged only within marriage between a man and a woman. Since a woman could not marry another woman, celibacy was the path available to her. And Sally believed that. That matters. It would be easy now to treat Love's God like squirrels as the book she wrote before she became brave enough to tell the whole truth. That is not how Sally describes it. It was the truth as she understood it then. Her parents supported the book. Her father sat with her and revisited the painful family memories. The process opened conversations they had avoided for decades. And Sally saw healing in that. She wanted readers to see the love in her family as clearly as they saw the wound. The book also gave churches a person instead of an issue. That may sound like a modest achievement. Churches can discuss homosexuality for hours. It becomes harder when the homosexual has a name, a mother, and a chair at the table. A Church of Christ minister reviewing the memoir wrote that Sally's story helped readers see through her eyes without demanding that they agree about everything first. By then, Sally had become a trusted guide. Conservative churches listened because she shared their sexual ethic. More progressive churches listened because she was creating space where almost none had existed. That trust gave centerpiece access. It also meant that if Sally ever changed her mind, a lot of people would feel she had changed the terms of the relationship. Centerpiece was created to help churches understand people like Sally. Over time, the people who came through Centerpiece changed Sally's understanding too. She met LGBTQ Christians who had done everything their churches asked. They had prayed, they had remained celibate. They had tried to make friendship and Christian community meet every need for intimacy and companionship. Some found a genuine calling in celibacy. Others were simply painfully alone. Sally recognized that loneliness in her own life, although it took years to name it. She was outgoing, she had friends everywhere. She could work a room, lead a conference, and probably leave a church potluck, knowing the life story of the woman who brought the green bean casserole. But then she still went home alone. For years, the church's answer to gay Christians had been simple: remain celibate. Sally began noticing that the simplicity existed mainly for the people giving the answer. They could state the rule and go home to their spouses. The gay person was expected to build an entire life inside it. So Sally began asking a harder question. If the church tells someone that marriage and romantic partnerships will never be available to them, what responsibility does that church have to assume for the loneliness it has prescribed? Not the loneliness of a bad weekend, a lifetime. Sally did not decide that celibacy was wrong. She still is not. Some people freely choose it and find meaning in it. But choosing celibacy is different from having it assigned to you because of the person you are capable of loving. The stories of younger LGBTQ Christians pressed on her even harder. Sally watched young people leave congregations because church had become inseparable from rejection. Some did not simply leave church. She began wondering whether the boundary she had preserved was helping or whether it was delivering the same rejection in a gentler tone. At the same time, Sally returned to Scripture. For someone formed in the Churches of Christ, this was not a detail to work out later. She could live with people disagreeing with her. What she could not do was give herself permission to ignore the Bible. She read affirming arguments and found many of them unconvincing. James Brownson's Bible, gender, and sexuality became important because it moved beyond the familiar handful of verses and asked larger questions about covenant, fidelity, kinship, and the purpose of marriage. But Sally does not credit one book, one conversation, or even falling in love with changing her mind. It was cumulative. Years of listening, studying, watching LGBTQ Christians do everything their churches asked and still conclude there was no place for them. Her understanding of biblical interpretation had already changed in other areas. Women had once been kept from certain classes and leadership roles. Instruments had been forbidden in worship. When Sally was a student, shorts were not allowed on campus. Apparently, there was a period when both exposed knees and a piano could place Christian education in serious jeopardy. Those changes did not prove the church was wrong about same-sex marriage. They showed Sally that sincere Christians could confuse an interpretation with God Himself. She worried that if she reconsidered this teaching, the whole Bible might come apart. She knew people who would use her as a cautionary tale about where one compromise leads. Instead, Sally has said that her understanding of God grew larger and scripture became more relevant to her life, not less. Eventually, she came to believe that two people of the same sex could make a faithful covenant before God. That was her new answer. Now she had to tell everyone who trusted the old one. Somewhere along that journey, Sally met Karen Keane. Karen was a biblical scholar and author who had traveled her own long road through the ex gay movement, celibacy, and eventually an affirming understanding of Christian marriage. For most of Sally's life, a relationship with a woman had existed only as something she would have to refuse. She had built her adult identity around not expecting it. Then Karen stopped being a theological possibility and became a person Sally could imagine sharing her life with. That timing gave Sally's critics an obvious explanation. She fell in love, so she changed her interpretation of the Bible to permit what she wanted. Now, I understand why people make that connection. The timing makes the argument almost irresistible. Christians are often suspicious of any theology that appears shortly after somebody meets an attractive person. Guy Hammond, founder of the non-affirming ministry Strength and Weakness, made a version of that argument publicly after Sally's 2020 speech. He praised her compassion and acknowledged that gay people do not choose their attraction. But he described Centerpiece's change as a complete reversal and argued that Sally had relied more on emotional experience than scripture. For people who had trusted Centerpiece specifically because it maintained a traditional position, her announcement felt like a betrayal. That criticism belongs in the story. Falling in love changes the way we see things. Sometimes it gives us a reason to interpret a rule in our own favor. But love does not automatically make a person's reasoning dishonest. Sometimes it exposes the human cost of an idea that had remained safely theoretical. Sally's answer is that her theology cannot be reduced to Karen. She points to years of stories, questions, study, and the damage she watched LGBTQ young people endure. Falling in love did not settle all of those questions. It made them impossible to keep at a comfortable distance. For the first time, Sally was not deciding whether some theoretical same-sex couple could make a faithful covenant. She was deciding whether she could. She concluded that she could stand before God and promise her life to Karen without standing outside her faith. Now she had to tell centerpiece. Sally called her October 2020 message, still one of you. She chose those words carefully. She knew some people would hear her announcement and decide she had abandoned Scripture. She knew churches might close their doors to centerpiece. She also knew that a ministry built around respectful disagreement could discover that this particular disagreement was one step too far. She said it anyway. Sally announced that she had become fully affirming of same-sex marriage. Then she introduced Karen and said they intended to marry. For some LGBTQ Christians who had watched Sally defend celibacy, the announcement opened a future they had been afraid to imagine. For some longtime supporters, it confirmed their fear that starting a safe conversation about sexuality would eventually change Christian teaching. And for others, it was simply painful. They had trusted Sally because they believed she had found a way to hold honesty and traditional theology together. Now, one side of that arrangement had changed. Sally understood how church backlash often works. People might remain pleasant to her face, she said, and discuss her when she was not in the room. Anyone who has spent time in church understands the system. Direct confrontation can feel unchristian. A prayer request, however, offers remarkable flexibility. Centerpiece changed its public direction. Its mission now calls for LGBTQ people to be fully affirmed and integrated into the life of the church and their families. It still works with pastors, parents, and congregations, but it no longer treats same-sex marriage as the line that cannot be crossed. The shift probably cost centerpiece access to some of the rooms Sally had spent years trying to enter. It opened different rooms too. In December 2020, during another surge of COVID cases in Dallas, Sally and Karen married quietly in a park with an officiant. Sally was 59 years old. It was her first marriage. Two months later, Erdman's published her second memoir, Affirming, a memoir of faith and sexuality and staying in the church. Karen helped edit it. The book traced the road between the two memoirs without pretending that earlier Sally had been lying. In the first book, Sally was trying to understand how a gay person could remain faithful without entering a same-sex relationship. In the second, she was asking what happens when something you believed all your life may have been wrong. And the subtitle matters: staying in the church. Sally did not become affirming because Christianity stopped mattering. She changed because she believed the church's treatment of LGBTQ people was driving them away from the God she still loved. She did not want to protect an argument so carefully that there was nobody left in the room to hear it. It would have been simpler for Sally to leave the churches of Christ. There are denominations where her marriage would require little explanation. There are churches where she would not have to spend another hour proving that she takes the Bible seriously. But faith is not always the same thing as agreement with an institution that handed it to us. Sally's mother gave her Abilene Christian through stories on a living room couch. The Church of Christ gave her scripture, communion, community, and the conviction that ordinary people should keep returning to the Bible rather than surrendering interpretation to a distant authority. Those gifts did not disappear when Sally concluded that the tradition was wrong about her marriage. In 2023, Abilene Christian held a required series of chapel messages called Holy Sexuality Week. Only a traditional view of sexuality and gender was presented. Sally responded publicly, not as someone delighted to expose the university, but as an alumna hurt by a place she still loved. She remembered how ACU had once allowed difficult conversations, including her own 2003 chapel appearance and a later dialogue with an LGBTQ advocacy. She asked the university to recover that willingness. At the end of her response, after affirming LGBTQ students and reminding them that they were loved by God, Sally added one more identity she had not surrendered. I'm also a wildcat. Centerpiece continues today with retreats, parent support, ministry training, conferences, and spiritual community for LGBTQ Christians. Sally also hosts the Centerpiece podcast where she listens to other people tell the kinds of stories she once believed could never be spoken in church. The ministry changed, but it did not disappear. Let's think about the name of Sally's ministry, Centerpiece. When Sally founded the ministry, the name described the space she was trying to hold. Gay Christians could tell the truth. Churches could keep their traditional theology. Parents could ask the questions they were afraid to ask anywhere else. And maybe everyone could remain at the same table long enough to understand one another. There was real value in that. For some churches, it was the first honest conversation they had ever allowed. But listening eventually asks something of us. It is one thing to tell another person, I hear you. It is another to admit that what you have heard may require you to change. For Sally, that meant reconsidering something she had believed, lived, and publicly defended. Her income, her reputation, and the ministry she had built was connected to it. She could have just changed privately. She could have kept centerpiece's language vague enough for everyone to hear what they wanted. Honestly, churches have survived for centuries on carefully chosen ambiguity. She probably could have gotten another decade out of it. But Sally knew what it cost to live with a carefully managed truth. She had already done that once. So she stood before her own conference and said she had changed her mind. Some people called it courage, but others called it compromise. Sally called it faithfulness. Not because she had stopped caring about what the Bible said, and not because God had become less important to her. She believed she had finally stopped asking gay Christians to prove their faith by accepting a loneliness she no longer believed God required. I'm Stan Stadic, and now the secret is out. Sally Geary's memoirs are Loves God Likes Girls and Affirming, a memoir of faith, sexuality, and staying in the church. Her documentary, also called Loves God Likes Girls, is available through Centerpiece. If this episode brought up thoughts of suicide or self-harm, call or text 988 in the United States or Canada. I have also included support resources for LGBTQ people navigating faith and sexuality in the show notes. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to follow the secret is out and leave a rating or review. Those small things make a real difference in helping other people find the show. And please share this episode with someone you think might benefit from hearing these stories. Maybe it's someone who has lived through something similar, someone who is still trying to find the courage to live honestly, or simply someone who could use the reminder that they are not alone. Next week, we're telling the story of Jason Collins, the first active male athlete in one of America's four major professional sports leagues to come out as gay. For years, he wore the number 98 as a quiet tribute to a life taken by hate. Almost no one knew what it meant. Then Jason stepped onto the cover of Sports Illustrated and changed professional sports forever. It is a story about locker rooms, hidden signals, the exhausting cost of secrecy, and what can happen when one person finally raises his hand and says, I'm ready. Thank you so much for listening. See you next time.