Dennis Rodman Was the Queer Icon the NBA Wasn't Ready For
It started April 1 with an urgent social media post that rocketed around the internet, the news built around a somber, black-and-white portrait from the Instagram account @memerungpt.
“BREAKING NEWS: Dennis Rodman was found in his apartment today,” read the post from the account @memerunnergpt, announcing the death of the 64-year-old NBA phenomenon. “Police reports indicate the former Chicago Bulls star met his fate due to a tragic autoerotic asphyxiation accident. Rest easy Dennis, heaven has another angel now!”
The news that Rodman — a five-time National Basketball Association champion, a peerless rebounding specialist and an integral member of the legendary, Michael Jordan-led Chicago Bulls of the 1990s — temporarily broke the sports internet. Fans poured out tributes to an extraordinary athlete who built a Hall of Fame career on grit, desire and hustle. Given his legendary explorations of sex and gender, it was easy to believe Rodman accidentally strangled himself while masturbating.
The April Fool’s Day prank ended, however, when Rodman himself took to social media a few hours later, posting a selfie and declaring that reports of his demise were greatly exaggerated.
"Yesss Sirr Alive and Well,” he wrote, with a thumbs-up emoji. “What’s up.”
Though his death was fake, the reaction to the tasteless hoax demonstrated something real, and perhaps unexpected: Rodman, nicknamed The Worm during his playing days, could be considered a queer sports icon: the first, and only, Black professional athlete to date whose public identity and image centered on queer culture.
Rodman's Radical Self-Expression
In the macho, hypercompetitive and unapologetically Black NBA locker rooms — where hyper-masculinity is celebrated, homophobia is the norm and weakness is sometimes defined by gay slurs — Rodman was an iconoclast.
He dyed his hair in bright colors, including signature leopard-skin and rainbow patterns. He wore nail polish, had multiple piercings and occasionally sported a feather boa or two. He hung out at gay clubs, and pop megastar Madonna — a gay icon herself — encouraged him to keep pushing gender boundaries. He wore lingerie in a cover photo for a 1995 Sports Illustrated profile; when his autobiography dropped a year later, Rodman, 6-foot-7 and 220 lbs., showed up for a book signing in a wedding gown and full makeup.
Rodman’s nose ring, dyed hair, and experiments with drag, decades before queer culture went mainstream, weren’t just fashion statements. They were acts of defiance, a living dare, that forged him into an advocate.
“I actually brought the gay community to the forefront for sports because of the things I was doing,” Rodman told the Associated Press in a 2019 interview. “I was so flamboyant when I was doing it and stuff like that and people are, like, ‘Wow, we like this guy because he's not afraid to go out the box.'”
He also called out the rigid NBA culture that keeps gay players in the closet.
“I wouldn't be surprised, literally, I've said it all along, if 10% or 20% of people in the NBA, or any sports, [are] gay,” he said in a 2019 interview with Business Insider. “I don't know why people haven't come out before. It's cool that people are coming out being, you know, gay or homosexual or whatever, lesbian and stuff like that.”
“I actually brought the gay community to the forefront for sports because of the things I was doing. I was so flamboyant when I was doing it and stuff like that and people are, like, ‘Wow, we like this guy because he’s not afraid to go out the box.’”
Douglas Hartmann, who teaches the sociology of race and sport at the University of Minnesota, said Rodman courageously challenged locker-room norms and single-handedly changed aspects of NBA styles and aesthetics. But for all his gender-bending and allyship, Hartmann says, Rodman didn’t move the needle that much on the sport’s entrenched homophobia.
If teams are winning or an athlete is successful, for example, “there's always going to be room for individual outliers and exceptions and flamboyant folks that can take advantage and create identities and brands that play off of the dominant types,” like Rodman, Hartmann says. “But the question is whether there's a shift in the broader [cultural] types: as much as [outliers] transgress the norms, there become moments where they have to reassert their own normativity and dominance and traditionality.”
Such was the case with Rodman: a wiry and aggressive player, he had a bad-boy reputation, unafraid to dive for a loose ball, throw hands with an opponent or get in a referee’s face if they made a call he didn’t like. Days before playing in an NBA championship game, he skipped practice to participate in a live pro wrestling match. A reputed womanizer, Rodman’s tabloid-fodder relationships included Madonna and Playboy model Carmen Electra. He has three children from two of his three failed marriages and owned up to being an absent father.
Yet despite his embrace of gay clubs and culture and experimentation, The Worm never publicly self-identified as queer or bi, and never openly dated another man.
“As much as he played with the norms, there were moments where he was still a tough, aggressive guy, and didn't want you to forget that,” Hartmann says. “And I think you see that a lot of times with men who are playing with gender identity and expression, especially athletes.”
In other words. Rodman, who led the league in rebounds for 7 years and won five titles with two different teams, made it OK for players to dye their hair, wear ponytails, even carry a handbag. But a quarter-century after he retired, it’s still not OK to play and be gay: in league history, just one active player has ever come out of the closet, and he retired a year later.
The Legacy of The Worm: Has the NBA Really Changed?
Still, Rodman's flamboyant style and openness about his identity made him a unique figure in the NBA. In the Sports Illustrated profile, he wasn’t shy about his affinity for the local gay bar scene, and said he enjoyed hugging and kissing other men. But he also spoke admiringly about the LGBTQ community, declaring its hard-working denizens deserve respect and acceptance.
“When you talk to people in the gay community, someone who does drag or something like that, they’re so f’ing happy,” he said in a 2019 interview with GQ magazine. “They hold their head up so high every f’ing day, man. They’re not ashamed of shit. They’re not trying to prove anything, they’re just out there living their lives.”
“As much as he played with the norms, there were moments where he was still a tough, aggressive guy, and didn’t want you to forget that.”
That seemed to echo Rodman’s own improbable journey: a skinny, awkward kid from a single-parent household in the Dallas projects, to an obscure Oklahoma college not known for producing pro basketball talent, to outworking better players for a spot on the Detroit Pistons roster, to hoisting the team’s first championship trophy. Along the way, though, Rodman had demons whispering in his ear: the NBA’s doubts about his value as a player, and Rodman’s own doubts about himself. He hit bottom in 1993, when Chuck Daly, the Pistons’ head coach and Rodman’s foster father, left the team just as Rodman was going through a nasty divorce.
It was that moment, he says — sitting in his pickup truck in the darkness outside Detroit’s suburban arena, a gun in his lap and suicidal thoughts in his head — when Rodman chose to press on but vowed to live his truth, come what may. Traded to the San Antonio Spurs, he was reborn as the NBA’s first neon-haired, pierced, tattooed, nail-polished queer icon.
“In San Antonio I started going to gay clubs,” he said in the GQ interview. “I started going to drag clubs. I started bringing drag queens to games.”
Rodman began appearing at events in drag himself, and told GQ that his lifestyle in San Antonio echoed a time from his childhood when his sisters dolled him up in girls’ clothes: “I guess it kind of made me have a sense of awareness of, like, ‘Man, I used to dress like this as a kid,’” he said. “Wearing a dress made me feel good.”
Not everyone was a fan, however: playing for the Spurs, Rodman’s no-filter behavior led to multiple fines and suspensions. He was traded again to the Chicago Bulls, joining Jordan, teammate Scottie Pippin and coach Phil Jackson — all three, like Rodman, future Hall of Famers — as the final piece of a team that would win three consecutive NBA championships.
Since his retirement 25 years ago, Rodman has largely kept a lower profile, relatively speaking (his high-profile friendship with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean dictator, notwithstanding). But a quick tour of his Instagram page shows he hasn’t toned down his style or allyship. He created a stir when he showed up for Houston’s 2023 Pride parade in a green miniskirt, he rocks acrylic nail extensions in a rainbow of colors, dyes what’s left of his hair in wild patterns and colors — and often has a beautiful woman on his arm.
Which Hartmann, the Minnesota sports sociologist, says is ultimately the point.
“For men, as much as they might play with their gender identity, it's sexuality that they really control and have to police, and I think that's why there's so few gay players that are active,” he says. “I think other stuff [has] superficial cultural explanations, but deep down, they're really guys. The way that that gets conveyed and expressed is sexuality and a traditional heteronormative vision. That does not leave room for ambiguity, much less transgression.”
Joseph Williams is The Reckoning’s Race & Health Editor. A seasoned journalist, political analyst and essayist, Williams has been published in a wide range of publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, and US News & World Report.
A California native, Williams is a graduate of the University Of Richmond and a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. He lives and works in metro Washington, D.C.