And his faith has helped him navigate this new path. Since graduating, Bird says he’s taken off both masks, and misses being Cosmo like nothing else he’s ever felt. “I began spending an increasing amount of time working with a small group of students and members of the university administration to cultivate a more inclusive campus environment,” he wrote. In Bird’s senior year, he decided to work to change BYU’s ranking as the second-most LGBTQ-unfriendly college in the United States, based on student responses to a Princeton Review survey. And then there was “Michael,” an anonymous BYU football player, track star and closeted gay student who didn’t realize until senior year that keeping his secret had left him without a single friend on campus. He certainly was not the only closeted gay student Andrew Evans revealed in his memoir, excerpted on Outsports, how his college roommate turned him in after seeing him kiss another man, and how BYU forced him to choose between immediate expulsion or reparative therapy. I was hyper-aware of what some of my peers said about the gay community, how they viewed same-sex attraction and the often unkind and insensitive words they used to describe LGBTQ people - people like me.”īird attended BYU after serving a full-time mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As I grappled to develop a better understanding of myself, I felt immense pressure to hide my sexual orientation. “I wore another mask while I was at BYU - a mask to cover the shame I felt for being ‘different.’ For years I pleaded with God to change my sexual orientation, but after returning to BYU from a full-time mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I began realizing that being gay is an integral part of who I am. His reasons for hiding his orientation will no doubt hit home for many, Cosmo’s dance video netted hundreds of millions of views. He performed live on ESPN at the College Football Awards, and NBC Sports dubbed 2017 to 2018 the “Year of the Mascot” in honor of Cosmo’s viral influence. In Bird’s world, “the same community that made me feel like a superstar often simultaneously made me feel broken, unloved and defective.”Īnd he was a superstar. “As scary as it seemed to dance in front of 60,000 people,” wrote Bird, “an even scarier thought often crept into my mind - ‘If they knew who I really was, would they hate me?’”
We never know who around us might be wearing a mask.”īird explained why he waited until after graduation to come out to the world. There are many who feel misunderstood and heartbroken. “There are many people like me who suffer in silence, struggling to reconcile complicated ideas with thoughts, feelings and religious beliefs. “When I was Cosmo, I felt invincible.” And he said that costume shielded him from having to show his true identity, something he came to realize was not limited to mascots. “I kept the best part of my life a secret from everyone around me by wearing a mask,” Bird wrote, in a heart-wrenching op-ed in Tuesday’s Deseret News. As Cosmo the Cougar, he danced his way into fans’ hearts, all the while concealing his face, and a secret that he is only now ready to share: Charlie Bird is gay.īird wore the Cosmo the Cougar mascot costume from 2015 until 2018, and became the face of Brigham Young University - one of the dozens, if not hundreds, of NCAA member schools with policies that target LGBTQ students.