LGBTQ Breaking News Service

(CBS News) – Sales of Carl Nassib’s jersey are jumping after the Las Vegas Raider this week became the first active player in the NFL to say that he’s gay.

Nassib’s No. 94 shirt was the top selling football jersey on Monday and Tuesday across all Fanatics-owned sports apparel websites, the company said, while declining to disclose specifics on sales. The jersey retailed for $120 at NFLShop.com.

Elsewhere, the demand for Nassib’s autographed rookie card, game-worn jersey and other sports memorabilia has soared this week as well, said Jordan Gilroy, acquisitions director for New Jersey auction company Lelands. The eagerness for buying a lesser-known NFL player’s merchandise typically lasts a month at max, Gilroy said, but if Nassib plays at a high level this fall for the Raiders, the auction bidding for his jersey and other memorabilia could climb even higher.

“His demand right now is at an all-time high,” Gilroy said. “A jersey of his, if it were to sell at an auction like ours, it could go for thousands upon thousands of dollars when it probably was worth, you know, mid-hundreds last week.”

Don’t be surprised if a Nassib game-worn jersey or helmet or even an autographed football appears on an auction site soon and sells for a record price, Gilroy added.

Making NFL history

Nassib made history by becoming the first openly gay active NFL player. The defensive end said in an Instagram video that he hoped that announcing his sexuality would increase tolerance for LGBQT people.

“I just think that representation and visibility are so important,” he said. “I actually hope that, one day, videos like this and the whole coming out process are just not necessary, but until then I’m going to do my best and do my part to cultivate a culture that’s accepting, that’s compassionate.”

In the video, Nassib, 28, also announced a $100,000 donation to the nonprofit Trevor Project for its work in LGBTQ+ suicide prevention.

In 2014, Michael Sam became the first openly gay player to be drafted by the NFL, but he was cut by the St. Louis Rams before ever playing a regular-season game. Other players have come out after retiring from the league.

Since November, the top-selling NFL jerseys have been for Lamar Jackson of the Baltimore Ravens, Patrick Mahomes of the Kansas City Chiefs and Dak Prescott of the Dallas Cowboys. It’s unclear how those compare with recent purchases of Nassib’s shirt.

President Biden applauded Nassib’s coming out video in a tweet Tuesday, calling the player an inspiring athlete. He also cited Washington Spirit soccer star Kumi Yokoyama for her recent coming out.

“Because of you, countless kids around the world are seeing themselves in a new light today,” Mr. Biden said.

The NFL and many individual players also have expressed their support for Nassib since his announcement.

Copyright 2021 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved.

Luxembourg’s Prime Minister Xavier Bettel arrives on the second day of a European Union leaders summit in Brussels, Belgium October 2, 2020. Olivier Hoslet/Pool via REUTERS

The Times is committed to reviewing theatrical film releases during the COVID-19 pandemic. Because moviegoing carries risks during this time, we remind readers to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and local health officials.

“They hate us over there.” That’s Gerardo (Christian Vázquez), alarmed to hear that his boyfriend, Iván (Armando Espitia), is thinking of leaving home and crossing over into the United States. For a moment, under the circumstances, you’d be forgiven for not knowing exactly what he means by “us.” Is he referring to Mexicans seeking a better life in a country that’s sure to regard them with fear and loathing? Or could he mean gay people, likely to encounter ignorance and hostility even in an ostensibly more tolerant society than the one they’re living in?

The answer, at least in this instance, is the former. But one of the sad ironies of “I Carry You With Me,” Heidi Ewing’s emotionally direct, formally complicated new movie, is that in attempting the dangerous journey across the border, Iván and Gerardo would effectively be exchanging one form of persecution for another. We’ve already seen them lock eyes for the first time across a gay bar in 1994 Puebla, Mexico, a refuge from a world that forces them to suppress their true desires. Moving to the U.S. would require them to don another kind of mask and live under constant threat of exposure, arrest and deportation.

A time-shifting, form-blurring romance that spans two countries and as many decades, “I Carry You With Me” means to peer behind those masks, to lay bare the unvarnished inner truth of Iván and Gerardo’s life together and apart. You can feel the weight of that purpose in every frame, even when cinematographer Juan Pablo Ramírez gently shakes and rattles the camera in studied pursuit of a raw, kinetic spontaneity. Iván and Gerardo aren’t just fictional constructs but real-life individuals, and Ewing, a close friend of theirs, shows an almost palpable commitment to capturing their love story in all its intimate and epic proportions.

Christian Vázquez in the movie “I Carry You With Me.”

(Alejandro Lopez Pineda / Loki Films/Sony Pictures Classics)

Its topical ones too. Best known for the documentaries she’s directed with Rachel Grady (including “Detropia,” “12th & Delaware” and the Oscar-nominated “Jesus Camp”), Ewing embraces the conventions of dramatic narrative without entirely abandoning the trappings of nonfiction. The issues at stake here — the perils of migration, the persecution of undocumented immigrants and sexual minorities — are hardly unique to Iván and Gerardo, but as Ewing reasonably intuits, they might well be the ones best equipped to address them here. And so the two men appear as themselves, mostly in the present-day New York scenes that occupy the movie’s final third.

In the first two acts, largely set in mid-’90s Mexico, we follow their younger counterparts — beautifully played by Espitia and Vázquez — as they enact a tender, touching forbidden romance. Their bond, forged under the warmly caressing light of that gay bar and often accompanied by Jay Wadley’s lovely score, is later consummated in secret on the grounds of Gerardo’s family home, barely out of earshot of his gruffly authoritorian father (Pascacio López). Gerardo, a schoolteacher, has a charming defiant streak; though he keeps his sexuality hidden from his family, he’s otherwise raffishly at ease with it in ways that his new boyfriend is not. Iván is shyer and more cautious by nature, and he has a young son he fears he would never see again if the boy’s mother (Michelle González) found out the truth.

These differences in class, temperament, family and worldview are sketched in with a light, glancing touch that seems reluctant to settle or linger, sometimes at the expense of a more concrete sense of place and character. Ewing, who wrote the script with Alan Page Arriaga, captures fragments on the fly, moving from the exuberant spectacle of a drag performance by Gerardo’s best friend, Cucusa (a delightful Luis Alberti) to a restaurant where Iván, a janitor and aspiring chef, struggles to get a kitchen job. She throws in flashbacks to Ivan’s and Gerardo’s very different childhood experiences of ingrained homophobia, moments that are almost evocative enough in their details — a bright yellow quinceañera dress, a dark night on a family farm — to make you overlook the tidiness of the contrast.

Eventually Iván sets off for the U.S. in search of better opportunities, money for his kid’s future and a life that he hopes he might one day share with Gerardo. As he begins the harrowing trek north with his friend Sandra (comedian Michelle Rodríguez, very good), “I Carry You With Me” shifts registers from wistful romantic melodrama to tense border-crossing thriller, then leaps ahead to find Iván, Sandra and others sharing a cramped apartment. Notably, our early glimpses of the U.S. are mostly confined to such nondescript interiors, as if to suggest that while Iván’s surroundings have changed, his sense of entrapment has not.

Armando Espitia in the movie “I Carry You With Me.”

(Alejandro Lopez Pineda / Loki Films/Sony Pictures Classics)

Eventually the scope of the frame widens, as Iván gradually finds his way and pursues his culinary dreams, and the shimmering lights and vibrant streets of New York begin to feel like home. Twenty years pass in a flash, and Ewing, working with editor Enat Sidi, begins interweaving the real-life, present-day Iván and Gerardo with their fictional younger counterparts. It’s a daring gambit if not an entirely successful one, partly because of the wobbly physical resemblance between the two sets of leads but mainly because two decades — full of their own struggles and hard-won triumphs, including Gerardo’s decision to join Iván in the States — seem to have fallen by the narrative wayside.

There’s something admittedly poignant about that abrupt leap forward; one piercing scene shows Iván watching a video of his now-grown son, whom he hasn’t seen in years. But a fuller sense of time’s passage — of what the older Iván means when he says, “The American dream happens in slow motion” — is precisely what’s missing. Still, if past and present, fiction and nonfiction never fully cohere, that formal disjunction nonetheless achieves its own strange power. It literalizes the chasm — cultural, geographic, emotional — between the lives Iván and Gerardo are leading in the present and the lives they sacrificed to make that present possible.

Increasingly dreamlike in its swirl of associations and images, “I Carry You With Me” becomes a bittersweet ode to restlessness, a fractured evocation of lives and identities that have been uprooted and torn apart many times over. Its imperfections and its beauties are inextricable from each other, and also from the sad, inspiring real-life story it has to tell.

Ruth Coker Burks never intended to be an advocate, activist or even an angel. She just wanted to do the right thing.

“Oh, I’m no angel,” Coker Burks, 62, told TODAY. “I’m just a person.”

But that’s how her legacy has been defined when one fateful day in 1986, at just 26 years old, she was visiting a friend, Bonnie, at a local hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas, who had been suffering from oral cancer. Bonnie had her tongue removed, and Coker Burks was her interpreter. This was their fifth extended hospital stay, but this time there was something different. Out of the corner of her eye, Coker Burks spotted a door down the hall with a bright red tarp across it, food trays piled up outside and a group of nurses at the door, unwilling to go in.

“I had been in hospitals a lot of times and so I thought that was really bizarre,” she said of the biohazard red door. “The nurses were literally drawing straws to see who would go in and check on this person. They would draw straws and it’d be best out of three, and then they didn’t like that and so then it’d be best 2 out of 3 and then no one would end up going in to check in on this person. They just walked away.”

Her curiosity overcame her, so when the nurses left their stations, she snuck into the room to see who was there. She struggled finding the person at first, who was so frail and near death, she couldn’t even tell he was in his bed. “I had to look for him,” she explained. “I thought maybe he was in the bathroom. You couldn’t tell the difference between him and the bedsheets. It was just horrible.”

This was the first time she would encounter a person dying from AIDS, but it wouldn’t be the last. Over the next decade, Coker Burks would care for over 1,000 gay men dying of the disease who were abandoned by their families.

In honor of LGBTQ Pride Month and the 40th anniversary of the beginning of the HIV and AIDS epidemic in 1981, TODAY had the opportunity to talk with the accidental activist to look back on her incredible story that above all else, shows what happens when someone overcomes fear for love and life.

June 2, 202105:56

Prior to that fateful hospital visit, Coker Burks had heard rumors about the then-unnamed disease when visiting her hairdresser cousin in Hawaii. A devout Christian, single mother of one and real estate agent working in the timeshare industry, Burks pretended to know a lot more about the gay community than she actually did.

“Oh honey, don’t worry about that,” her cousin told her about the disease soon to be labeled HIV and AIDS. “Just the leather guys in San Francisco are getting that.”

But it was that day while caring for her friend Bonnie when she encountered AIDS for the first time in person — and knew it wasn’t just affecting the “leather guys” in California.

“I went over to the bed and I didn’t know what to do but I took his hand and I said, ‘Honey, what can I do for you?”’ she remembers of the fateful encounter. “He looked up at me and he didn’t have any more tears to cry. He was so dehydrated there was nothing left to produce any tears. But he looked up at me and he said he wanted his mama.”

June 10, 202111:11

Coker Burks felt this was something she could do: Get his mother to come to the hospital and then go back to Bonnie and get back to minding her own business, something she admits she’s never been “very good at doing.” But what she quickly realized is that his mother knew where he was, and she had no intentions to visit him.

“I went over to speak with the nurses, and they backed up like I had them at gunpoint,” she said. “They said, ‘You didn’t go in that room, did you?’ Well yeah, I noticed that y’all weren’t going in. So they started fussing at me and then they just backed up even more.”

She recounted what they said to her: “His mother’s not coming. Nobody’s coming, he’s been in this hospital for six weeks, nobody’s been here and nobody’s coming and don’t you go back in that room.”

Well, Coker Burks didn’t listen.

The man’s name was Jimmy, and his experience was more common than not. Many gay men who became sick with HIV and AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s were shunned by their families, abandoned and left to die alone.

Coker Burks tried calling Jimmy’s mother numerous times, but each time his mother refused to take the call. After a few attempts — and a heated threat to put his obituary in her local newspaper — his mother answered her questions. “My son died years ago when he went gay,” she told Coker Burks. “I don’t know what thing you have at that hospital but that’s not my son.”

Coker Burks knew that was the best she was going to get out of her, so she stayed by Jimmy’s side until he died the next day.

“I thought he would be the only one and I would get back to going to church every Sunday and you know, being a good Christian living the best life I could,” she said. “I had a young daughter, her father and I were divorced, and I was just trying to be the best mother and set the best example I could for her. I thought I’d just go back to that.”

But after leaving Jimmy’s hospital room after he passed, she learned that the homophobia these men experienced lived on well after their final breathes. The nurses said the body needed to be dealt with, and that the hospital’s morgue didn’t want him because they were scared the other bodies would get contaminated. (She jokes, “Of course, you don’t want a dead body contaminated with anything, especially imagination.”)

The nurses insisted she take him. It was difficult to find a funeral home who would take Jimmy, but after many attempts she was able to find a place that would cremate him and she buried him with her own father. With her daughter Allison by her side, they got a cookie jar for his ashes, dug a hole above her father’s coffin and planted flowers to mark the spot.

“We had a little do-it-yourself funeral, said the Lord’s prayer, put the flowers and a big rock on top of him and we left,” she explained. “And I thought, you know, that’s going to be the only person I ever have to do this for. I mean, who would think you would ever have to do it twice in your life, right?”

She went back to selling timeshares. Then more and more local men in Arkansas began getting infected with HIV and becoming sick with AIDS. Nurses started giving out Coker Burks’ number to their patients, telling them, “There’s a crazy woman in Hot Springs who isn’t afraid of you.”

No matter what, Coker Burks answered their calls. She buried 39 others in her family’s cemetery, and cared for hundreds more for over a decade.

While applying for jobs, 20% of LGBTQ Americans have experienced discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, according to research by Catalyst.org.

At work, 46% of LGBTQ Americans are closeted.

To help eliminate those kinds of issues, Sacramento’s LGBT Community Center is hosting its first job fair Thursday afternoon to connect people with employers who support and welcome workers in the LGBTQ community.

Koby Rodriguez, the chief program officer at the center, joined Sonseeahray to speak about the opportunity, as well as ways that employers can remedy environments that may make some on staff feel isolated or targeted.

The event will be at the Sacramento LGBT Community Center from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.

To register for the job fair, click or tap here to fill out the application.