Reviews Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary? Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting

Getting Hooked on Quitting

Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous

Is College Necessary?

Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear

Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters

‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Reviews Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary? Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting

Getting Hooked on Quitting

Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous

Is College Necessary?

Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear

Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters

‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

The complicated yearly renegotiation of being a queer NFL fan

Football is hypermasculine and often unwelcoming, but I keep coming back anyway

Published September 9, 2026 9:00AM (EDT)

The NFL’s regular season is back this week, and these days the game barely leaves. When I was a kid, it was a Sunday religion with a Monday night encore. Now there is Thursday too, and Saturdays late in the year, and games beamed in from London and Germany and São Paulo at breakfast time, until football season feels less like a weekly appointment and more like a tide that comes in every few days and soaks the whole calendar.

I am not complaining. I have loved this sport my entire life, and a version of it that spills into more of the week is, to me, simply more of a good thing.

But by the usual accounting I have never quite belonged to this world. I am a queer man, and I root for the New England Patriots, which I have done for a quarter century from 300 miles away, in the heart of Philadelphia Eagles country. I am not the fan that the NFL pictures when it imagines its fans. But I have never once felt like an outcast because of it. Not for a single Sunday. I love the game too much and, if I am being candid, my team has usually been better than the one everyone around me worshiped, which does wonders for a boy’s sense of belonging.

I did not inherit the Eagles, which is the strange part. I grew up with a soft spot for the Miami Dolphins but no real allegiance to speak of until, at........

© Salon