The goalie on Georgia’s club ice hockey team first told a couple of members of the squad personally, and then made an update on his Facebook page that indicated he was gay. Then he went to talk to his coach about it.
“It’s kind of unreal how different it is and how much easier it is,” Fisher said. “It certainly is difficult on an individual level, but on a societal level, we’ve seen a sea change of acceptance. … It’s absolutely getting easier every day.”
Fisher waited until his junior season to come out to the team because he said he didn’t know how his coaches or the players would react and didn’t want to risk how it might impact his playing time, but he felt by then he had enough standing with the team.
“They knew me as an individual,” said Fisher, who until recently was a UGA systems administrator and who now works for a web-based company in San Antonio. “They didn’t know me as the gay guy. They knew me as Joey.”
It turned out the Georgia Ice Dogs were “100 percent supportive, which I was really kind of shocked about because the world of athletics is probably a little behind the gay rights movement.”
Fisher came out publicly to the website Outsports back in 2007 and took part in a panel discussion in Atlanta on gays in sports.
