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The "who's out" of sport sometimes seems like a who's who: NFL players such as Carl Nassib and Michael Sam, divers Greg Louganis and Tom Daley. Welsh rugby union player Gareth Thomas. And in Australia, soccer player Josh Cavallo, Olympic diver Matthew Mitcham, swimmers Ian Thorpe and Daniel Kowalski, footballers Ian Roberts, Andy Brennan and Mitch Brown and more.
It might sound as if it's filling a room, but it's not filling a stadium and, in truth, out gay (or bisexual) male sportsmen are very rare. Rarer still while on the field of play. Many came out after their professional careers - and any risk to their viability in competitive or sponsorship terms - had passed.
The new television series Heated Rivalry - based on the book of the same name by author Rachel Reid, the second in her Game Changers young adult fiction series - is hoping to smash some of those perceptions to pieces, set in the seemingly hetero-inflexible world of Canadian ice hockey.
In it, rival professional hockey players Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie) become famous for their on-ice animosity, while they are concealing an eight-year passionate romance away from prying eyes. But not, as chance would have it, prying television cameras.
"There's no doubt that professional male sport is a deeply traditionally masculine place where it is not easy [and] hockey is particularly difficult for whatever reason," says the show's creator, Jacob Tierney. "There is not one out professional player, not even a retired one.
"But this is a Harlequin romance, this is a fantasy, right? And that part of what makes it appealing as a fantasy is that one of the things that is explored, in quite a serious way, in this world of male/male romance - written by women and consumed by women, largely - is male vulnerability.