‘Life changes tomorrow’: What happened when pro basketball’s Isaac Humphries came out

This story is part of the Good Weekend: Best of Features 2023 editon.See all 22 stories.

On the afternoon of November 30, 2022, two weeks after Isaac Humphries told the world he was gay, the young athlete was interviewed on ABC Radio. Humphries, who is now 25, sat upright on his long white couch at home, with his phone pressed to his ear, and spent the program recalling the tearful, viral admission he had made to his Melbourne United teammates.

Speaking with bald candour to the usually convivial Melbourne host Raf Epstein, Humphries tried to convey the deep disgust he’d long felt for himself. He explained, too, the exhaustion of keeping his sexuality a secret. The way his only companion was an aching loneliness. And how this all once culminated in a suicide attempt.

Epstein praised the young National Basketball League centre for his bravery in becoming the only out male professional basketball player on the planet, and together they celebrated the overwhelmingly positive public response to the news. Then came a line of inquiry into which the veteran broadcaster could only tiptoe. “If I can put this question to you very gently, Isaac,” said Epstein. “I don’t think these questions are fair questions, but they are questions that often follow these stories … Who cares?”

To many, that’s a legitimate thing to ask, often justified with yet more rhetorical questions. We live in enlightened times, don’t we? Same-sex marriage is legal, isn’t it? Haven’t we had gay politicians (Penny Wong) and High Court judges (Michael Kirby) and celebrity chefs (Kylie Kwong) and comedians (Magda Szubanski)? Didn’t Ian Roberts come out while playing top-flight NRL all the way back in 1995? Honestly, what’s the big deal?

“It’s always the question when someone comes out publicly,” says The Sydney Morning Herald chief sports writer Andrew Webster, who has written about the pernicious question before. Webster knows better than most the way “Who cares?” ignores and minimises a trauma so strong it can drive people to death, as it almost did him, in a moment long ago when he sat in his car at The Gap, ready to end his own life. “It speaks to the naivety about homophobia. It’s like me saying, ‘I’m not racist, therefore there’s no racism.’ ”

Indeed, if your reflex reaction to such news is “Who cares?“, then please, read on: allow Humphries to meet that two-word question with a 200-word answer, given after a midweek team training session at the Hoop City practice facility in south-east suburban Cheltenham.

“The response is, a lot of people care,” he says. “You may not, but a lot of people – millions of people who don’t have a voice or representation – care a lot. Just because homophobia is not in your immediate line of thinking doesn’t mean it’s not affecting a lot of people.” Who cares? he asks again. “The little kid down the street who really loves basketball, and feels confused and conflicted and not welcome because of who he is – that’s who cares. Or someone who is battling every day with thoughts about suicide, and sees my video and has a tiny bit of hope – that’s who cares. It’s me, who had no example to look up to as a gay man in basketball – I care.

“The response is, a lot of people care. You may not, but a lot of people – millions of people who don’t have a voice or representation – care a lot.”

“I’ve had hundreds of messages from people all around the world. I’ve had people stop me on the side of the street or on the court after games. You might think being gay is normalised, but there’s still so much backwards thinking in the world. We’re not there yet. That’s the brutal reality. It baffles me when people say, ‘Who cares?’... Who doesn’t care?”

Recent estimates suggest 15 per cent of teenagers identify as LGBTQI+, yet when it comes to men in professional sport, the number at the top level who identify as such is minuscule enough that, statistically speaking, the entire cohort of elite male gay athletes is essentially zero per cent. They can be rounded down to nothing.

Globally, Humphries is the sole hooper. In soccer, there’s just young compatriot Josh Cavallo from Adelaide United. There’s one American football player. One ice hockey player. There are no such players in AFL. Or NRL. Or cricket. Or baseball. Or tennis. None.

“Why is that?” asks Monash University behavioural scientist Erik Denison. “Is that because they’re playing in the closet? Or because they never felt they could play sport in the first place? Is it because they tried but dropped out? Or because they took their own lives?”

When the sporting world collectively cheered Humphries, Denison sat quietly horrified by the absence of any broader introspection – this illusion of inclusion. A man just told us that he wanted to die because his sexuality wasn’t compatible with the game he loves. It should shock us into action. “Instead, it’s like there’s no problem to be solved, as if we just need to celebrate his bravery. But Isaac’s story is a symptom of a problem that has been ignored and ignored and ignored.”

Let’s pay attention to his story, then, yes?

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I sit with Humphries on the first floor of his sleek, modern apartment in the inner eastern suburb of Prahran, while he pets his golden retriever puppy, Kaya, and a cedar-and-saffron candle burns between us. It’s a far cry from his childhood in Cronulla, in the Sutherland Shire south of Sydney, where he felt stranded in a surface-deep silo of sameness. “Blond hair, beachy, and if you’re anything else?” he asks. “Good luck.”

He was a musical kid. Rhythm made sense in his mind and making noise filled his heart. He tried violin at four, trumpet at five, piano later. He was a beautiful singer and still writes music on the large Casio keyboard in the corner of this room. But honing your dance skills or joining the chorus of The Sound of Music makes you stand out to your peers, and not in a good way. “I was starting to visibly become a bit gayer,” he says. “Noticeably more feminine.”

A musical child, Humphries still plays piano and composes songs in his spare time.Credit: Courtesy of Isaac Humphries

An incredible growth spurt surged during his early teens, and the bullying increased. Humphries was tormented daily due to his height, unable to walk through the playground at high school without someone jostling or hitting him. (Imagine someone bringing a tomato to school, just to throw at the back of your head.) His mother took the teachers to task, and his big brother and sister closed ranks, but it did nothing. “He stopped going once for five weeks,” says his single mum, Michaela, a director of finance for a local hospital. “It just wasn’t safe.”

Fortunately, he was very good at basketball – enough that in year 8, he was invited to attend The Scots College. Schoolmate Olgun Uluc, now an ESPN Australia basketball writer, rode the same hour-long bus to the eastern suburbs nest of privilege, and remembers Humphries as pale and frail. “Gaunt, almost. And quiet,” Uluc says. “Something was holding him back, and with hindsight you can see what it was.”

But Humphries came to revere the optimism and opportunity offered by the conservative sandstone institution. When he wanted the benefits of training at 3000 metres above sea level, he could use its hypoxic chamber. And when he wanted to sing in the barber-shop quartet, he wouldn’t be mocked – instead joined by the captain of rowing and head boy. “That school changed my life. Saved my life.” Soon he was at the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra, playing around the world with the national under-17s team. Then American high schools came calling, and by 16 he was living in Indiana at La Lumiere (“The Light”), a prestigious private school where students board in forest cabins near Lake Michigan.

“Something was holding him back, and with hindsight you can see what it was.”

With no normalcy or permanence in his life, he channelled all energy into his sport. Basketball was his constant, and it grew serious. Humphries plays the game aggressively – “beast mode” is the goal – but began hating the way he appeared on game tape. He thought he looked gay. He saw himself clapping from the bench, and even that looked “super gay”. He changed the way he clapped. “To this day I clap differently, so I don’t look gay.”

At 17 he was offered a place at perhaps the best basketball school in the US, the University of Kentucky. Thrust into relative stardom, people chased him down the street for autographs. They screamed from car windows. Fellow students would sneak photos of him in class. “Stores in malls would shut down for you,” he says. “Private jets. Private chefs. Five-star hotels in whatever city you visit. You paid for nothing, wanted for nothing. It was just madness.”

It was tough, too. When the team partied, “Ice” would find himself ghosting the group, separating himself. “Where do you always go?” his teammates would ask. “What do you do?” He still didn’t know who he was, so he isolated himself. He tried girlfriends, relationships that were neither fake nor a phase but definitely a security blanket. Even if he’d wanted to explore his true self, as a 211-centimetre public figure, he would be immediately recognised. “Whatever’s going on with me,” he thought, “it has to be put on hold.”

He left college after two years, opting to turn professional. Figuring out his fit within the basketball world was difficult. He became a kind of journeyman, playing in Australia – a 2017-18 Rookie of the Year trophy earned during his stint with the Sydney Kings rests on his mantel – then briefly in Serbia, then lower-level US competitions, spending winters in places like Erie, Pennsylvania – one of the snowiest cities in America – while quietly attacking the gym and waiting for his shot. He was given a chance at 21, suiting up in five games for the Atlanta Hawks. In his first time on the floor, he was up against Giannis Antetokounmpo, the best player in the NBA at the time, and scored two three-pointers, right in the champ’s face. But that glimpse of another life was derailed by form and injury, and then the coronavirus pandemic. He flew home and everything stopped. “That’s when I started to realise, ‘I’m pretty lonely in my life.’ ”

Humphries won the NBL Rookie of the Year award in 2018 before leaving Australia to play in Serbia and the US.Credit: Getty Images

When the national league came back to life in late 2020, Humphries landed in Adelaide, playing with the 36ers. Now making a more-than-comfortable living, he moved into a lavish penthouse apartment on Henley Beach, with long hallways and a great room with cathedral ceilings and expansive windows on to the sea. He felt as though he could walk right out onto the water. He played each week in front of thousands of fans, signing their jerseys, then driving home alone. In photos from that time he sees it all so clearly now, the way his eyes betray his sadness.

Often he would just sit at his piano in solitude, writing dark music. Diminished chords and despondent lyrics. Horrifying songs with horrible sentiments. One evening that December, he played those melodies all night, tickling the ivories in his cavernous, empty home, while crying through dirges of self-hatred. I just want to hear you say “I love you”, or will you look at me the way that I do? He tried to kill himself. The attempt failed. He doesn’t know how. “I got up and went to practice.”

“It would have to be a unicorn – someone who doesn’t exist for half of my life, someone okay with us never being able to do anything publicly – and that just seemed unrealistic.”

He found a therapist and said the words out loud – “I’m gay.” He considered parsing his secret out to a select few. One option was to have his family and friends know, and not to tell the team or the public. But would he be filtering and juggling, constantly afraid his truth might slip out? Could he even find a partner under such constraints? “It would have to be a unicorn – someone who doesn’t exist for half of my life, someone okay with us never being able to do anything publicly – and that just seemed unrealistic.”

He came out first to his mum. His sexuality seemed obvious to her when he was little, but she wasn’t certain and didn’t press the matter. “I thought I would let him bring that to me,” she says, softly. “But I knew when there was something wrong, something deeply troubling him.” Humphries gave her the news within a song, which he played for her, through both their tears.

He told his big sister, who was full of pride, and who has since lent him unwavering support. He told his big brother, who had protected him from bullies at school but who also came to understand that his brand of masculinity had sometimes made Humphries feel unwanted.

Close friends came next. They always asked the same question – “Why didn’t you tell me sooner? I wouldn’t have cared” – never seeming to grasp that it wasn’t about their reaction. Humphries had to be fine with himself first. How do you look someone in the eye when you can’t stand your own reflection?

“Just because homophobia is not in your immediate line of thinking doesn’t mean it’s not affecting a lot of people,” says Humphries. Credit: Josh Robenstone

A year passed. Josh Cavallo became the only out gay male soccer player in the world, while Humphries was busy organising a charity concert for 500 people. He does those occasionally, booking a theatre and band, selling tickets and giving the profits to Ronald McDonald House. He knew Cavallo’s personal video had gone around the world, but couldn’t watch it yet. “It was too real,” he says. “I wasn’t ready for it to be real for me.”

There was something else he needed to do, too. A knee injury had shut down his second season in South Australia, so he flew to LA to do his rehabilitation – but also to explore a new world, with a few guides. One picked him up at the airport. “Firstly, finally!” said his mate. “Next, I love you, and let’s do this. Let’s show you the world!” That night they went to The Abbey – possibly the most-famous gay bar in the world – and Humphries mingled and moved, sensing no judgment or hate. This was the beginning of what he calls “my little experiment”.

He got an Airbnb in a building that could pass for the Melrose Place set. He dyed his hair platinum blond and bought bougie clothes. He dated, and wrote lovely new music. Introducing himself only as Isaac, he told people he doesn’t believe in last names the way Mariah Carey doesn’t believe in birthdays. “I wanted to explore what it meant to be gay, so I put myself right in the heart of the gayest place in the world, West Hollywood, where the streets are lined with rainbow flags and people are unapologetically themselves.”

He decided he wanted to go public, and had heard about a guy who could help with that. David McFarland was once an American national-level distance swimmer, but remained in the closet while competing. He came out during his subsequent career in entertainment and LGBTQ+ advocacy, producing a documentary about the problem – Alone in the Game – and leading the suicide-prevention body The Trevor Project. “We accept things in sport that we would never accept in any other aspect of society,” McFarland tells me from California. “Things that in other places would see you reprimanded, fired or arrested. It all starts with this issue of hypermasculinity: ‘Man up’ and ‘You throw like a girl.’ ”

From left: NRL player Ian Roberts came out in 1995; Adelaide United’s Josh Cavallo, the only openly gay top-flight male soccer player in the world; Carl Nassib, the only out gay player in the NFL.Credit: Getty Images

McFarland has worked with the likes of R.K. Russell (the first active out bisexual NFL player) and Cece Telfer (the transgender hurdler recently denied the chance to compete for the US Olympic team), and in the past 18 months added Cavallo and Humphries to his stable. He’s in constant communication with closeted athletes all over the world.

“They’re there. They’re competing,” he says. “And if they felt comfortable coming out, they would be coming out.” What about here? Is he talking to AFL players? NRL players? Rugby players? Cricket players? McFarland pauses. “Let’s just say that out of the top five big professional sports in Australia, I’ve had conversations with athletes in all of them.”

Humphries and McFarland had coffee and hatched a plan for an announcement. Humphries drove first to Las Vegas, where the NBA world converges for its summer league, knowing his agent Daniel Moldovan, and his friend, Olgun Uluc, would be there. The air-conditioning in his black Ford Mustang was broken, and it was 50 degrees as he raced through Death Valley, but if he was going to break the news to Moldovan and Uluc, his closest contacts in the basketball world, they had to hear it in person, over old-fashioneds. “I was so scared to intertwine those two lives,” he says. “I sat on my porch the night before and thought, ‘Life changes tomorrow.’ ”

“They’re there. They’re competing. And if they felt comfortable coming out, they would be coming out.”

Not long after, Moldovan won him a contract with United, and within days he was on a plane to Australia. He found his new place in Prahran, not far from the queer enclave on Commercial Road. Did Humphries intentionally choose a place five minutes’ walk from … “Poofdom?” he says, laughing. “Yep, I was told it was a gaybourhood.” Not that he could enjoy it. In LA, he’d grown accustomed to being himself – now he wore his old mask, until the time was right. “I’ve been hiding my entire life,” he reasoned. “I can hide a little while longer.”

Humphries asked Uluc to move in with him, to help navigate the announcement and address all the doubts that daily popped into his mind. They war-gamed different scenarios, like what he would do if he heard a homophobic slur on court. Do you throw a punch? Do you say something back? Do you say something later? Do you go to the ref? Or to the coach? The media maybe? Or do you do nothing at all?

“There were so many questions,” says Uluc. ” ‘Is it okay to have your arm around teammates in a huddle?’ Of course it is, but it’s heartbreaking, because no other player has to ask these questions.”

Humphries playing for Melbourne United last October, under pressure from Bul Kuol of the Cairns Taipans.Credit: Getty Images

Breaking the news became an exacting, exhausting feat of planning. Key people had to be told in a weeks-long wave of conversations, so Humphries practised his preamble, perfecting it with each new reveal, from chairman to chief executive. Some hugged him, others cried, and still others tried to react casually – “Cool, nice one” – as if trying to tell him it shouldn’t matter at all. Marketing boss Tom van de Vusse was one of the latter, before he realised the gravity of the moment: “Then I just beamed.” Immediately he set to work on a new club pride logo, using smoke and mirrors to avoid any leaks,
making sure communications and branding and merchandising were all quarantined.

Sporting careers are often lived on the fringe, with athletes fighting to eke out a place in a team, and the last thing Humphries wanted to be was a distraction, so he sought out the coach, Dean Vickerman, at home in Elwood. “Look, any time you do anything a little different you ask, ‘Will this impact performance?’ ” admits Vickerman. “But it was clear to me it could only bind us together even more.”

Vickerman is planning at some point after a game to tell the boys to have a great weekend with their wives and girlfriends … or boyfriends. “I haven’t thrown that one out there yet,” he says, grinning, “but it’s in the back of my mind.”

Melbourne United coach Dean Vickerman. “It was clear to me it could only bind us together even more,” he says of Humphries’ announcement.Credit: Getty Images

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On the morning he chose to come out to the rest of the world, Isaac Humphries was tired. It’d been one of those nights where you wake up after a few hours knowing that’s all you’re gonna get. He made brekkie, popped it on the front passenger seat and headed to training. He knows his way there by the things he eats, like the traffic light where he starts munching his peanut-butter toast, or the corner where he inhales his bowl of folded eggs.

Before he got to either one, a dark grey Mercedes coupe smashed into the side of his car. The eggs and toast flew into the windscreen and dashboard, and the Mercedes sped off. Humphries stopped to gather himself, and to gather witness details from a truck driver and a dog-walker. Then he took a breath and took off, only to find the Mercedes abandoned, all doors open, a machete and drugs and alcohol strewn on its seats, details he would repeat to police while choppers searched for the fugitive. “Well, universe,” he thought, “you either don’t want me to do this and are doing everything in your power to stop it. Or you’re showing me that life is so fickle and weird and to just go for it, because anything can happen in this world.”

At least the plan was set. He didn’t want to do a press conference – too difficult to control. He didn’t want to do a video directly to camera – too forced. He didn’t want to write his story in a social post – too composed. Instead, he spoke directly to teammates in their briefing room, with van de Vusse surreptitiously filming from the corner.

“‘Will I be okay? Does my career stop? What do the people in big important rooms decide for me?’ I had no idea what my teammates would say.”

Coming out is hard and messy – Humphries wanted to allow people into that space, to show them how difficult it is. And perhaps how beautiful? “But I was f---in’ scared. I was terrified,” he says. ” ‘Will I be okay? Does my career stop? What do the people in big important rooms decide for me?’ I had no idea what my teammates would say. I was hoping for ‘We know Ice, we love Ice.’ ”

In the briefing room, the players assumed he was going to address them about their form, so they continued taking off moon-boots and sucking down water. When Humphries uttered the words “mental health”, a collective gaze lifted to meet him. The captain, Chris Goulding, was locked into his eyes the whole time. “What a moment,” says Goulding. “We all knew that how we took the news was going to be really, really important, and hopefully we did it in a way that made him feel comfortable and safe, and happy, too.”

Humphries was fully embraced. Teammates sought him out to thank him, and others quietly inquired to see if they’d ever said anything to make him uncomfortable. An idea had been floated that everyone wear Pride T-shirts for a group photo. Humphries quashed that: “Absolutely not. Not gonna happen. What if someone’s not comfortable? I don’t want to force anyone to do anything.” They all came back and collected one anyway, and wore them that week.

The video was posted publicly the next day, and shared locally by the likes of Lauren Jackson, Dylan Alcott and Andrew Gaze. It now has almost 10 million views. Club No. 1 ticket holder Tones and I sent her love, as did devoted fan Dannii Minogue. Stories began filtering into the club and to Humphries personally, of boys struggling with their sexuality, coming out to their families that very afternoon. “You can obviously see how free he feels now. It’s in his face, in his body,” says Marcus Lee, a teammate who once played with Humphries at the University of Kentucky. “Everybody threw this positivity at him, and that’s great for him. But it’s even better for the kid who comes next.”

The trolls stayed mostly at bay, the haters’ representing a bare fingernail of the overall response. He was surprised just two weeks ago, when the Cairns Taipans opted out of wearing a rainbow logo on their jersey during the NBL’s inaugural Pride Round: “We have to acknowledge there is a problem.”

But a very specific silence stung much more. While the NBA issued a public message of solidarity for Humphries’ coming out, guess how many active NBA players showed their support? Zero.

It did not go unnoticed. Humphries would never seek to judge someone for that, but not one American teammate even messaged him privately. That hurt. He has a tattoo on his arm that reads “silence is loud”. It’s a reference to his depression – to sitting quietly at home alone when his mind was all chaos and noise. “In that moment,” he says, “the silence was super loud.”

On game day, Isaac Humphries usually takes a nap, chats to his mum, and eats. Today it’s pesto penne with a crumbed chicken cutlet. “Fuel. It’s just fuel. Gotta feed the machine.” He looks over a checklist on his phone, to make sure he’s packed his shoes, socks and knee tape, and that he’s wearing his lucky stripy game underwear. That’s the extent of his superstition. “I used to be, like, ‘No one speak to me before a game’, but you just grow up a bit and realise life’s not really revolving around this.”

On the drive into the game he plays big tunes with soaring vocals, and we listen to those as his white MG SUV rolls into John Cain Arena for a Thursday-night game prior to Christmas. It’s almost a month since he came out. Back to business as usual, back to the dizzying lexicon of the coaching staff, focusing on point-guard denial and hard basket cuts. Cheerleaders dance and six G-Flame units belch fire into the arena. He steps onto a “sticky mat”, removing grime from his sneaker soles, and then he’s on the floor. Back where he belongs. Back in beast mode.

He needs that. This is how he makes a living, after all. Going public might actually help. Professional athletes who come out often report playing more freely. Then there’s the “pink dollar”; LGBTQI+ people and allies are an important consumer market, characterised by brand loyalty and discretionary income. No wonder, then, that corporates from finance, fashion, telecommunications and sport are sniffing about to partner with Humphries.

Humphries is passionate about promoting kids’ mental health and awareness for LGBTQ+ issues in the community.Credit: Josh Robenstone

But that’s not why he’s come out. What’s most important to Humphries is aligning soon with a suicide awareness campaign, or an organisation that promotes kids’ mental health. He wants to play in the NBA again, too – but realises it mightn’t happen.

Suiting up for the Boomers is on his bucket list – but if his greatest success comes off court, so be it.

Friends and neighbours try to set him up on dates constantly, but he’s not comfortable chasing love just yet. There’s too many moving pieces in his life. Besides, he’s got games to win.

He casts his mind back to the team’s toughest defeat in a tough season. United were beating the Tasmanian JackJumpers all night long, until Humphries’ direct opponent threw two last-gasp shots over the top of him. They lost, one of a string of heartbreakers, and Humphries trudged upstairs to talk to the members, as he’s required to do. “I was so shitty. They warned me not to speak, just to sign autographs instead.”

Then a little boy stopped him. He’d seen the video of Humphries telling his teammates his secret and crying, and the little boy had mistakenly believed this sorrow was ongoing. He handed Humphries a gift, a drawing of a rainbow flag with “ISAAC” written across the middle. It sits on his shelf at home. The boy said that he didn’t want Humphries to be sad any more. “And I was immediately okay. The score didn’t matter at all. We lost a basketball game,” Humphries says, shrugging. “Who cares?”

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