My interview with Chris Kluwe: ‘I’m still the same person. I guess more people are paying attention now’

I’ve been writing so much about Chris Kluwe of the Minnesota Vikings in recent months so it was very exciting to find myself face to face with him last Saturday night at the Family Equality dinner.

He is taller than I thought he’d be and even more handsome.

He says life hasn’t changed too dramatically for him since he became a well-known LGBT activist last fall.

‘Mainly just more interviews (laughs). That’s about it,’ he said. ‘I’m still the same person. I guess more people are paying attention now.’

Kluwe had already been working to defeat the Minnesota ballot initiative that would have banned same-sex marriage in the state where he plays football. But he was propelled to greater fame when a withering profanity-lace letter he wrote to Maryland Assembly Delegate Emmett C. Burns went viral. That letter included such memorable phrases as ‘lustful cockmonster,’ ‘colossal foot-in-mouth clusterfuck,’ and ‘Holy fucking shitballs.’

Kluwe was incensed when Burns complained, in a letter written on official state letterhead, to the owner of the Baltimore Ravens when linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo made public statements in support of same sex marriage.

To Kluwe, LGBT equality is a no-brainer, simply something that’s time has come.

‘There’s a famous quote that the arc of history tends to bend towards more freedom, not less. You are really seeing that right now,’ he said. ‘Our generation’s civil rights struggle is for gay rights because there’s a subset of America that pays their taxes, serves in the military and is not treated the same as everyone else. That’s discrimination, that’s not what America is built on.’

Kluwe also talked about his upcoming book which comes out on June 25.

‘It’s called Beautiful Unique Sparkle Ponies,’ he said. ‘It’s some of the things I’ve written already but mostly new writings. The letter to Delegate Burns will be in there but a lot of new stuff mainly dealing with empathy and how there is a distinct lack of it in the world nowadays. Hopefully, it will be entertaining.’

‘I was just writing it and I hoped that people would be entertained and also educated by it,’ Kluwe said. ‘While it’s great that people latched onto it, it’s also kind if sad, the fact that we have to celebrate someone doing the right thing as opposed to pointing out when someone does the wrong thing. It should be news when someone does the wrong thing, it shouldn’t be news when someone stands up to someone else.”