Watch: Excellent ESPN Mini-Documentary Shows Tom Ammiano Getting His Long-Overdue Varsity Letter
You’re gonna need a bigger box of Kleenex for this emotionally charged ESPN Pride month mini-documentary about Tom Ammiano’s varsity letter saga, which includes the moment he received the sweater he’d been denied for 63 years.
One did not expect flamboyant blue-haired gay rights crusader Tom Ammiano to show up on ESPN
SportsCenter Sunday night, particularly in a segment inspired by a memoir entitled
Kiss My Gay Ass. But readers of this blog know that in March, the trailblazing former SF Supervisor and state Assemblymember recently received the 1958 high school track varsity letter he had been denied at Immaculate Conception High School in Montclair, New Jersey. Now 63 years later, Ammiano details that it was one particularly homophobic high school coach who orchestrated the dismissal of his varsity letter — the same coach who’d punched him in the kidney earlier in the season — as Ammiano told his story in the seven-minute documentary