Former Aston Villa, West Ham and Everton player Thomas Hitzlsperger has came out of the closet today and in our world, where this sort of news is taken at face value. It´s old news. Shocker: even people who host celebrity awards programs are gay. Around 10-15% of the football players you currently adore, one or two players on whatever squad you support, the ones you would think who trim their eyebrows or wear ¨product¨ or pose for men´s magazines, sure, but more than likely they're the ones that eschew any recognizable metro-sexual tendencies and are just as ordinary in our affectations as any of us.

These are people who show up for work everyday and don't want anything else but to be afforded the same protections under that law that any of us have. They want to love, marry, inherit, live and share this life with whomever they want. They are not taking anything away from you or whomever you are with at the moment. They are not ruining sport, or society, or your circle friends or that neighborhood where you live. This should not be news, but it is most definitely is news. Who cares that Thomas Hitzlsperger is gay?

There´s this Russian celebrity, Ivan Okhlobystin, who said that gays should be gassed, in ovens, like Jews were in WWII. There are countries where this is equated with bestiality and child molestation. They are made to feel inhuman and worthless. They are people like any one of us. They are our friends, our family and most definitely the people that entertain us on and off the football pitch. It should be a time where we shrug our shoulders and say ¨who cares who he wakes up with¨ but that´s not the world we live in.

Applaud Hitzlsperger and write columns on major websites about his courage for coming out after his career was over, but until we get a Cristiano Ronaldo at the apex of his sporting life, kicking that closet open (and by the way my gay friends are way down with that), you would still probably have people afraid to be who they are, afraid that the society they lived in was not at all comfortable with who they were or who they slept with, but it would mean a little less stigma for them and that would be a better day. For all of us.