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
Tom Ammiano earned his varsity letter in 1959. It finally arrived this week
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Tom Ammiano in his backyard in San Francisco on Saturday, March 27, 2021.Santiago Mejia/The Chronicle
More than six decades after he earned his varsity letter, Tom Ammiano finally got to wear it this Tuesday, with a full ESPN camera crew in his Bernal Heights kitchen.
The arrival adds some joy to a bitter chapter in the 79-year-old San Francisco supervisor and assemblyman’s life. It was a literal chapter in Ammiano’s memoir, “Kiss My Gay Ass,” where the politician talked about earning the letter in 1959 as a track athlete at his New Jersey high school, but being denied the honor by students and a teacher who had bullied him with anti-gay rhetoric.
He Won a Varsity Letter at 16. He Finally Got It When He Was 79.
Carol Pogash, New York Times
Feb. 28, 2021
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Tom Ammiano at his home in San Francisco, Feb. 21, 2021. Ammiano, an early openly gay comedian and a prominent California elected official, believes his effeminate mannerisms led his New Jersey high school to deny him his letter in track. At the age of 79, he’s finally getting it. (Christie Hemm Klok/The New York Times)Christie Hemm Klok/NYT
He was a skinny high school student who had asthma, a high-pitched voice and effeminate mannerisms. He kept his distance from football players, who he said bullied him, but when his Catholic school in New Jersey formed a track team, Tom Ammiano decided to join.
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