Trigger warning: This blog touches on sensitive topics, including attempted suicide. We encourage you to skip these sections or seek professional support as needed. We hope you find this blog valuable.
An essay for the Canadian Centre for Diversity and Inclusion
For most of my life, visibility felt dangerous.
I grew up inside the world of competitive hockey, a culture built on toughness, silence and a very specific version of masculinity. From the outside, it looked like everything I had ever dreamed of, the wins and losses, the locker room, the shine of fresh ice, the feeling of belonging to a team, a family, chasing the same goal.
But there was a part of me that knew, even as a teenager, that belonging came with a condition.
Staying small. And staying quiet.
Silence, masculinity, and belonging in hockey
I spent twelve years playing competitive hockey while hiding the most fundamental part of who I was. A gay athlete in a culture that had very little room for that reality. Locker room conversations became something to navigate. Jokes that were seemingly harmless, comments among buddies and every casual slur reminded me that the safest version of myself was the one I had to create to survive.
Eventually the weight of that silence became too heavy. I walked away from hockey entirely. Not because I stopped loving the game, but because I could not imagine a version of the sport where I could exist honestly inside it.
For years, that felt like the end of the story.
But life has a way of forcing new chapters on you.
A different kind of fight
Years after leaving the game, in 2021, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Suddenly the battle I thought I had escaped, fighting for my place in the world, returned in a completely different form. MS is unpredictable.
For a long time I had a choice in front of me, to retreat or rebuild.
As my disease progressed, I started to make some very dark and dangerous decisions. I was starting to lose control of my body, I would eventually become a burden to those I loved, and I did not want to see how this story ended.
I made the decision to take my own life.
Days after, while walking on painful feet, I stumbled upon a sign tied to a lamppost that simply said, “One day you will tell your story about how you overcame what you went through, and it will be somebody else’s survival guide.”
My mind shifted.
I knew I needed to stay. I knew I needed to fight. I knew I needed to survive.
So I chose to rebuild.
Running became the place where I started to reclaim my relationship with my body.
What began as short walks, turned into jogging and ended with long distance running. Within a year, I became a marathon runner, chasing the goal of being one of the only people to complete all six World Marathon Majors with multiple sclerosis, and qualifying for the Boston Marathon under the able bodied qualifying times.
Every mile became an act of defiance against the idea that my body or my past would define what I was capable of.
But the physical challenge was only one part of the journey.
From silence to visibility
The much harder decision came when I chose to start telling the truth about my life.
For most of my adult years, the parts of my story that felt the most defining were also the parts I felt the most ashamed of. I was a closeted hockey player for over a decade. I spent years hiding a relationship with another player. It was a relationship that lived entirely in the shadows, defined by secrecy and constant fear that someone might find out.
When I walked away from the sport, I rarely talked about why.
The silence felt safer. It allowed me to move forward without reopening wounds I had spent years trying to close.
But the truth has a strange way of finding its way back to you.
One night I sat down to watch Heated Rivalry, the television adaptation of the popular hockey romance novels by Rachel Reid, that had quietly developed a following among fans who saw themselves reflected in a version of the sport that allowed queer hockey players to exist freely and openly.
I was not prepared for what happened next.
Within the first fifteen minutes, I had a full panic attack that lasted five days.
Watching two hockey players express themselves in that way cracked open something I had buried for years. It was not just a television show. It was a mirror I had spent most of my life avoiding.
Suddenly the memories came rushing back. The secrecy. The fear. The constant calculation of how to survive inside spaces where telling the truth about who you were felt dangerous.
I sat there unraveling.
In the middle of that unraveling, I made a decision that I still struggle to fully explain.
I picked up my phone.
With my hands shaking, I opened Instagram and began writing the story I had spent years hiding. I wrote about being a closeted hockey player. I wrote about the relationship I had kept secret. I wrote about what it felt like to walk away from the sport I loved because I believed there was no place for someone like me inside it.
Then I hit post.
Almost immediately, panic set in.
I remember staring at my phone, wondering what I had just done. Throughout the night I woke up, opened the app three different times with the intention of deleting the post entirely. One click would have erased everything. The story could disappear back into the silence where it had lived for years.
But I did not delete it.
By the time I woke up the next morning, the post had over 25,000 likes and tens of thousands of comments. Thousands of people had read it. Messages were flooding in from athletes, fans, parents and strangers who simply wanted to say that the story meant something to them.
And suddenly I had a choice.
I could delete the post and retreat back into safety.
I could pretend the moment had never happened.
Or I could take a deep breath and finally step into the light.
That morning, I chose the light.
That decision changed everything.
Why visibility creates connection
When you choose visibility, you lose control over how people respond. Some people will celebrate you. Others may criticize you. Some simply try to understand something they have never encountered before.
What I discovered almost immediately was something far more powerful.
People began sharing their stories with me.
Former hockey players wrote to say they had lived through the same locker room culture. Parents shared stories about children struggling to find their place in sports. People living with disabilities reached out to talk about navigating spaces that were never designed with them in mind.
Visibility creates connection.
And sometimes that connection appears in moments you could never predict.
Not long ago I attended the NHL Unites Pride Cup in Vancouver, an event celebrating the LGBTQ+ community in hockey with Stanley Cup champions in attendance. Players whose accomplishments defined the highest level of the sport.
In the middle of the event, a nine year old boy walked up to me. His eyes wide with excitement and nervousness. He asked if he could take a picture with me.
Later that night his mother sent me a message. On the drive home he told her that meeting me had been one of the best moments of his life.
He told her I was his hero.
And my breath caught in my throat.
There were Stanley Cup champions in the room. Players who had achieved everything a hockey player could dream of.
Yet he connected with me.
Not because I won championships.
Not because I scored goals.
But because I told my story.
Visibility changes what people believe is possible.
For that nine year old, hearing my voice, maybe seeing someone who had lived through the things I had experienced meant something. A gay athlete who once believed he had no place in hockey. A marathon runner competing with multiple sclerosis. Someone who had chosen to tell the truth about parts of his life that once felt impossible to speak out loud.
That moment reminded me that intersectionality is not just an academic concept. It is the lived reality of many people navigating the world.
I am a gay man.
I am an athlete.
I am someone living with multiple sclerosis.
I am someone who spent years hiding inside environments that did not feel safe.
Each of those identities shapes how I move through the world.
Together they form the story I now choose to share.
What resilience really looks like
Resilience is often misunderstood as the ability to endure hardship quietly. In my experience, resilience looks very different. Resilience looks like telling the truth about your life even when that truth feels uncomfortable. It looks like allowing yourself to be vulnerable so someone else might feel less alone.
Being visible is terrifying. There is no way around that fact. When you share your story publicly, you open parts of yourself that you once protected carefully.
But I can say with certainty that it is worth it.
Choosing visibility has allowed me to transform the parts of my life that once felt like burdens into something meaningful. The experiences I once carried in silence now create space for conversations that did not exist before.
The world does not become more inclusive because policies exist on paper. It becomes more inclusive when people see themselves reflected in the stories around them.
Every time someone shares their story, the boundaries of what feels possible expand.
For me, that journey began with a closeted hockey player who believed his truth had to remain hidden forever. Today it continues with a proud gay athlete running marathons with multiple sclerosis, using his story to advocate for a more loving, inclusive world.
If there is one thing I have learned along the way, it is this.
The stories we are most afraid to tell are often the ones someone else is waiting to hear. They are the ones that will set us free.
Visibility is not easy.
But it is worth it.
Because somewhere out there, a young person might be watching, trying to understand who they are and where they belong.
And sometimes all it takes to change their future is seeing someone who chose to turn their face towards the light and let the shadows fall where they may.
BIO:
Matt Kenny is a recovering hockey player turned marathon runner, LGBTQ+ and disability advocate and ambassador for You Can Play Project. After spending more than a decade as a closeted hockey player, Matt now uses sport and storytelling to advocate for visibility, inclusion and resilience. Living with multiple sclerosis, he is pursuing the World Marathon Majors while sharing his journey to remind others that the parts of ourselves that feel the most frightening to reveal are often the parts the world needs most. He is currently writing a book about his experience growing up as a closeted hockey player. When he is not running or speaking, you can usually find him in a backward hat trying to convince people that they are already perfect and already loved.
IG: @matt__runs
