Wrestling Ally's Catholic College Talk

Hudson Taylor, former championship college wrestler and outspoken straight ally, spoke to students in the controversial same-sex marriage course being offered at Seton Hall University, a Catholic college in New Jersey.

The first of its kind to be offered at the Catholic institution in South Orange, "The Politics of Gay Marriage" undergraduate course drew widespread attention last spring when Newark archbishop John J. Myers, chairman of the university’s board of trustees and president of the board of regents, urged the regents to reconsider the course because he believed it ran contrary to Catholic teachings. Taylor, now an assistant wrestling coach at Columbia University, said he heard about the uproar and reached out to W. King Mott, the associate professor of political science teaching the course, to offer his time as a guest speaker.

“We talked about where I came from, how I got to where I am today, and how we can encourage and promote the unlikely allies to be not only allies but advocates, real advocates,” said Taylor after the talk on Tuesday. The university closed the class to press, and a school spokesman did not return a request for comment asking why.

As a wrestler at the University of Maryland, where he won the 197-pound class at the Atlantic Coast Conference wrestling championships in March, Taylor attracted notice for speaking out for gay rights and wearing a Human Rights Campaign sticker on his headgear. While coaching and applying to law schools this year, he is using his free time to shop a proposal for a book, The Athlete Ally: Empowering a New Era of Leadership and Inclusion in Sports, and to launch a nonprofit dedicated to increasing inclusion and safety for young LGBT athletes in sports. He and his fiancée, Lia Alexandra Mandaglio, a law student in Washington, D.C., recently posed for the No H8 campaign.

“I’m trying to put together some resources to empower a new era of leadership in sports geared around the idea of equality and inclusion,” he said, “because I really think it’s the straight allies who are going to make the most impact, especially when it comes to bullying. A lot of the kids in high school and middle school who have the most social capital are the athletes.”

His next speaking engagement is scheduled for November 10 at Rutgers University in Newark, part of the state university system where, on the New Brunswick campus, two students face charges for invading the privacy of freshman Tyler Clementi, who committed suicide last month after video of him in an encounter with another man was broadcast on the Internet. Taylor said the talk was scheduled before the tragedy.