{"id":4780,"date":"2019-03-04T03:01:14","date_gmt":"2019-03-04T11:01:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/?p=4780"},"modified":"2019-03-04T03:01:14","modified_gmt":"2019-03-04T11:01:14","slug":"a-gay-morman-cougar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/blog\/2019\/03\/04\/a-gay-morman-cougar\/","title":{"rendered":"A Gay Morman Cougar"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A gay popped up in the strangest place \u2013 at a&nbsp;<strong><em>Brigham Young University&nbsp;<\/em><\/strong>football game!&nbsp;&nbsp;<strong>Charlie Bird&nbsp;<\/strong>is not a football player \u2013 he\u2019s the team\u2019s mascot.&nbsp; Or, rather, he was \u2013 from 2015 to 2018.&nbsp; He says, \u201cI never planned on coming out as&nbsp;<em>Cosmo the Cougar<\/em>.&nbsp; I never dreamed I would one day have enough courage to come out publicly as gay.&nbsp; Today I did both in an article with&nbsp;<em>Deseret News<\/em>.&nbsp; I hope that by some of my experiences I can help start conversations that increase empathy and understanding between the LGBTQ community and members of&nbsp;<em>The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints<\/em>.&nbsp; Even more important, I wish to give hope to other people in my situation that may feel isolated and alone.&nbsp; Please check out the article and let me know what you think.&nbsp; Huge shout out to my teammates, coach, and&nbsp;<em>BYU&nbsp;<\/em>athletics for their love and support.&nbsp; I will forever bleed blue.\u201d&nbsp; Which leads to the obvious question \u2013 what do you call a gay cougar?&nbsp; I think&nbsp;<em>chicken hawk<\/em>&nbsp;will suffice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A gay popped up in the strangest place \u2013 at a&nbsp;Brigham Young University&nbsp;football game!&nbsp;&nbsp;Charlie Bird&nbsp;is not a football player \u2013 he\u2019s the team\u2019s mascot.&nbsp; Or, rather, he was \u2013 from 2015 to 2018.&nbsp; He says, \u201cI never planned on coming out as&nbsp;Cosmo the Cougar.&nbsp; I never dreamed I would one day have enough courage to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-breaking"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4780"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4780\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4781,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4780\/revisions\/4781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}