“Maybe I sinned too much. Maybe I wasn’t living right. I tried to live my life right. You could spend the rest of your life trying to figure out why. I stopped trying to figure it out.”
TRQ: Ray McDonald, Born May 7, 1944
Washington Redskins running back, Ray Douglas McDonald, one of the first gay athletes in the National Football League (NFL), was born in McKinney, Texas. Known as “Thunder Ray,” McDonald played fullback for the Idaho Vandals, the football team for the University of Idaho. He also ran track and field and competed in discus throwing for the university. Outside of sports, McDonald played the piano and sang in the choir.
After graduating from university with a degree in physical education in 1967, McDonald was drafted by the Washington Redskins in the first NFL Draft round, a personal choice by team owner Edward Bennett Williams. McDonald signed a three-year contract for $100,000. Even though the owners had investigated McDonald’s sexuality, controversy struck the following year he was arrested for having sex with another man publicly in the District of Columbia. McDonald went from twelve games in the first year, to one game the year after.
McDonald would go on to face open homophobia and hate speech from players like quarterback Sonny Jurgensen. David Kopay, America’s first openly gay team athlete, describes McDonald’s difficulties with the Redskins. According to Washington offensive lineman Walt Rock, “Physically he had everything you needed [to succeed in the NFL] but there was something missing… Everybody thought he was gay before [the arrest], and then they knew he was gay.”
By 1969, with his relationship with the team now toxic, and with injuries sustained on the field, McDonald left the NFL. He returned to school to earn a degree in music education at the University of the District of Columbia. He later earned a master’s degree in education at Harvard University. He returned to Washington to teach music at the Patricia Roberts Harris Educational Center. He was also the Minister of Music at the Christ Holy Tabernacle.
In 1986, McDonald learned that he was HIV positive, when he was hospitalized for four months following being stabbed in the lung by a lover. His brother Clifford said about the violent attack, “It nearly killed him. If he hadn’t had the strength to stumble out of house and fall on the curb, he wouldn’t have made it.”
By 1992, McDonald’s health was failing and he returned to spend his final days in Texas. Reflecting back on his final days, his sister-in-law Phyllis said to the Idaho Statesman,
“It was sad. He couldn’t be himself and be accepted. I think things would have been totally different for him if he could have been open. It would have been better for him and the family. He wouldn’t have had to move away. He just opened up and started talking about gay pride. I totally agreed with him that gays should have civil rights. It caught me off guard, but I just listened and made him feel comfortable. I didn’t ask questions.”
Former teammate, the Idaho quarterback Mike Monahan reached out in McDonald’s final days. “We ended up talking for an hour,” Monahan says. “Just talking about old times. He said he was a music teacher all his life.”
“It’s to this day one of the most pleasing things to me that I was able to do, was talk to Ray, because I don’t know that anybody had all those years. If he was disgruntled with what happened in the NFL, he didn’t tell me.”
Only three days before his 49th birthday, McDonald asked that his feeding tube be removed while he lay in a bed at Parkland Hospital, dying. His obituary read that he died of sickle cell anaemia and not AIDS.
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