ISAAC HUMPHRIES HAS spent a lifetime standing out. The square peg in a round hole, as a tattoo on his hand once symbolised, before Humphries began adding other shapes to it. Standing out, or apart, is something that at times has caused the 27-year-old unimaginable angst and frightening feelings of despair and alienation. At others, it’s been a source of strength. Ultimately, it would become a point of pride.
Yet, two years on from coming out, Humphries continues to stand out.
“I’m still the only out player in male basketball and it still weighs very heavily on me,” says Humphries, who’s speaking to Men’s Health today from his apartment in Adelaide, ahead of the NBL’s Champion Pride Round, an initiative launched in collaboration with the league’s on-court apparel sponsor back in 2023 to promote inclusivity in sport. “And, of course, that’s still crazy to think about. Not that anyone needs to rush to come out or anything. I just mean, yes, it’s normalised for me and I’m in amongst the community and I can be a very openly gay male. No one bats an eyelid. But then I think, Well, I’m still the only one in my profession. There’s no one else that’s done it yet. And that brings it back to reality. That was a really big day. You did a really big thing and it’s still a pretty big thing.”
Of course, that ‘pretty big thing’ was the moment when Humphries came out to his then teammates at Melbourne United, back in November 2022. That day, as Humphries told Men’s Health last year, had an air of fatefulness about it, after he was hit by a stolen car on the way to the training facility where he would open his heart to his teammates. “I thought, If the universe is trying to tell me something, it’s either don’t go and do this or life’s way too short and just be yourself and do it.”
Humphries chose the latter and the following day a video of the moment went viral, making headlines around the world. His life since has been a whirlwind of heartwarming fandom and heavy responsibility, as he’s become the de facto – and very willing – spokesman for representation in basketball and sport more broadly. Free from the shackles of his double life, he’s also embraced his first love, performing on stage, selling out shows at the Adelaide Fringe last year, with more dates lined up in 2025.
At his Men’s Health cover shoot a week or so later, Humphries happily chats about his Mardi Gras plans with our grooming artist, who’s preparing him for the camera. The two exchange stories from previous experiences at the event, Humphries joking that he’s “on the Mardi Gras diet”. Humphries appears totally at ease and it’s with a jolt that I realise that only a couple of years ago such a conversation would have been unimaginable to him.
Life is good, then. Could it be better? Does Humphries wish he had the same kind of easy affiliation within his sport? Does he long for a time when he no longer stands out?
He nods, breathing a little deeper as he contemplates the question. “I’m very proud to be the first in some areas of my life and the only one right now, and I take that very seriously,” he says. “I’m so proud I get to spearhead that and pave the way for others. But on the other hand, I would love what I’m doing and the work I do to influence someone else to give it a go as well. I’ve had my moment, and I think it’s time someone else can have their moment too. It’s such a weight off your shoulders and so refreshing and I would just love someone else to feel that. Because it really does change your life.”
HUMPHRIES’ APARTMENT IS filled with artwork he’s gathered from across the globe in his life as a basketball vagabond. Two little statuettes he bought in Indonesia traverse the wall to his right, while behind him is a vertical rainbow piece he found in a gallery in Montreal. “It’s actually nothing prideful at all, to be honest,” Humphries is quick to tell me. “Everyone that comes to my house wants desperately for it to be a rainbow thing.”
Humphries loves art, on an aesthetic level, of course, but also for the portal it can offer to deeper thoughts, debate and discourse. “Everything [in my apartment] has got a meaning and a story,” he says. “Even my Nutribullet’s got a story. I love to tell stories and share my life.”
Collecting these totems, and the tales that come with them, is perhaps fitting for a man whose life hasn’t followed a traditional script. A man who’s become a symbol – of pride, representation and inclusion – but boasts a story that remains singular.
Humphries grew up in Cronulla in Sydney’s Sutherland Shire, the youngest of three kids. He describes himself as a unique kid, who had a gift for music. “I was one of those dance-to-the-beat-of-his-own-drum sort of kids,” he says. Fittingly, or perhaps accordingly, he has a tattoo that says ‘Lone Wolf’ on his arm and today he’s dressed in a black T-shirt, as he huddles over a screen in a way that barely betrays his towering 7’ 1” (213cm) frame. “I loved music. I could pick up any instrument and just figure it out. Most kids would be over there doing something together and I’d be over there chasing a butterfly or riding a bike. Just fully my own person at all times. Always.”
He was also sporty, initially following his older brother into rugby league. But he couldn’t quit the stage, even if it made him a target for bullies. “I was always the only boy in the dance group,” he says. “It was the non-acceptance because you were the different kid. I was bullied for being friends with the girls and the gay kid, which is where a lot of my self-homophobia developed.”
Those scars would last a lifetime. “I know that now, looking back, because it [homosexuality] was made to seem so, so negative to me growing up. It very much shaped why and how I felt about myself and sexuality moving forward.”
Around puberty Humphries experienced a growth spurt – he was 6’ 4” (193cm) by the time he was 13. The extra size made him a bigger target. “Once I became tall, it shifted from that [homophobic abuse] into ‘you’re a freak’.” The bullying intensified as Humphries entered high school. “It was just atrocious. I would walk through the playground and have things kicked at my head and eggs thrown. People would bring a whole carton of eggs and tomatoes to throw at me.”
It was scary, he says, not knowing what was going to whiz past his nose or brand him squarely on the back. “I’d come home with just shit all over me: tomatoes, eggs, apples. And my mum would just be like, ‘What is going on?’”
Sticks and stones – or fruit and eggs – may not break your bones but in concert with the names and insults that accompany them, they do something worse: corrupt your self-perception and bayonet your sense of self-worth. “That turned into a life of insecurities,” Humphries says. “It shapes so much of who you become.”
Eventually, it was deemed unsafe for Humphries to go to school, a friend dropping off his homework on the front porch. And yet, with things seemingly at their bleakest, a change of environment transformed everything. Humphries transferred to Sydney’s prestigious Scots College, where he was encouraged to pursue his creative aspirations and celebrated for them.
“It absolutely saved my life,” says Humphries, looking back. “Just being in this environment where all your differences were recognised as positive, I just thrived. I got my music back and at one point I was captain of basketball, singing in front of the whole school in a play. That was the first taste of what I do now.”
It’s but one of Humphries’ little stories, but it points to the power of inclusion to give those with differences the opportunity to flourish. The story would find echoes a decade or so later in the NBL’s Champion Pride Round, an initiative that Humphries is very much at the forefront of. Whether you want to be a member of a barbershop quartet, or a punishing low-post presence – or both – as Humphries was at Scots, in a safe space, you can be whoever you wish.
BACK AT HIS MEN’S HEALTH cover shoot in Sydney, Humphries is dressed in a red mesh shirt and shorts by Champion, the company that invented the nylon mesh jersey pro hoopers wear and the official outfitter of the NBA and WNBA from the late eighties to early naughties. As he dribbles a ball between his legs, Humphries stares intently into the camera lens. For one so tall, his movements are fluid, even balletic at times, as he rises into the air for a mock dunk, putting our photographer in danger of being posterised.
Of course, with his height and the co-ordination he possessed from dancing, it was perhaps inevitable that basketball would become Humphries’ sport of choice. He took up the game at 12 and immediately excelled, quickly rising through the representative ranks. So good was he that in year 11 he transferred to the Australian Institute of Sport for a year. From there, he was recruited by top US prep school, La Lumiere in Indiana.
Humphries enjoyed the American high school experience – he even had a girlfriend at one point because “I thought that’s what you do”. He was playing the role of the All-American, five-star recruit, and playing it well. His dominant performances in the paint made him a target for colleges across the nation, eventually seeing him land at the iconic University of Kentucky. But despite the prestige of the program, it’s an experience Humphries looks back on with mixed feelings.
“Was it the best thing for my basketball? Probably not, but whatever. I learned so much and I was the youngest player in NCAA history. I made incredible friends and incredible memories.”
He didn’t know it at the time but one of those friends, Marcus Lee, would become a lifelong ally.
I ASK HUMPHRIES about his basketball heroes, anticipating a LeBron/Jordan debate, or maybe some love for a fellow big man, like say, ‘The Big Fundamental’, Tim Duncan. But Humphries tells me he never had heroes growing up. He always wanted to blaze his own trail.
“I’ve never really been one to look at anybody,” he says. “I’ve always wanted to forge my own path. That was always something that helped me make decisions.”
Humphries would begin his professional career back in Australia at the Sydney Kings, where he played well enough to win the NBL’s Rookie of the Year award. From there, he went all out trying to make a career in the NBA, playing on a succession of G-League teams, before eventually landing a spot on the roster at the Atlanta Hawks.
“That’s where my NBA debut was made,” he says. “I got to start a game, it was a very short stint, but I’ll take it.” Injuries and COVID would bring his NBA tenure to an end, as Humphries returned to the NBL, this time with the Adelaide 36ers.
Humphries would play well enough, but his long-held secret was beginning to curdle inside him. His ‘self-homophobia’ still haunted him, he says. Humphries had gone as far as changing the way he clapped as a teenager, after seeing a video of himself that he felt looked “super gay”.
“My mental health, my brain, had created a narrative in my head that wasn’t true or was true to only me,” he says now. “I felt it, for years and years and years, and I know it starts before you can even understand what these thoughts even are. It is so rooted and primal and it’s very hard to navigate.”
The distortion wasn’t helped by the macho culture pervasive in male sporting teams, including basketball.
“Basketball is quite a homophobic environment,” he says. “It just is. And I’m okay saying that. I’ve experienced it many, many times. There’s always something where it’s like, Oh, I should go now. It’s daily. Or it’s always in the back of your head. I never in my life thought I could exist as a gay man in this environment.”
ISAAC HUMPHRIES’ LIFE changed the day he woke up after a suicide attempt. A day when he looked around his apartment at what had occurred the night before and asked himself the questions he’d spent a lifetime avoiding.
“That day it got very serious and very real,” he says. “Looking around the room and seeing what had gone on, I was like, Okay, are you going to try again? Or are you going to figure this out?“
Humphries thought about his nephew and how his actions might impact a young boy. “I didn’t want to be a memory to him,” he says. “A lot of people who I talk to who have been through suicidal depression, we always have that one thing. Something just outside of yourself that brought you out of that mindset.”
Humphries began seeing a therapist, for the first time in his life uttering the words, “I’m gay”. He then told family and a select group of friends. And he told his agent the truth: “Things aren’t okay”.
He decided to walk away from the game he loved, ostensibly to rehab an injury, mostly though, to try out being a gay man. He flew to LA, where for the first time in his life, he was able to live freely, if anonymously.
“My little social experiment,” Humphries laughs. “I was finally just learning who I was in an environment where I could do that. I didn’t want to tell anyone who I was or what I was or anything like that. No one cared, it’s LA, everyone only cares about themselves anyway. It was an unreal experience. It’ll forever be life-changing for me.”
Humphries had been given a taste of what his life could look like if he was bold enough to be himself. No matter who you are, once you experience that, there’s usually no going back.
MARCUS LEE WAS on a plane, on the way to joining Humphries at Melbourne United, when he heard the news that his former Kentucky teammate had come out. He was happy to be there for his friend.
“Honestly it felt like perfect timing,” says Lee, a power forward/center, who hails from the Bay Area in San Francisco. “You need someone who knows you and who you trust completely by your side when you’re going through something like that. I was so glad that he was able to be himself. He was free in the best way possible.”
It was after he came out, Lee says, that Humphries began playing the best basketball of his career, something that’s continued to this day – Humphries is averaging 12 points and 6 rebounds a game this season for the 36ers. “Everyone knows how well he’s playing and it’s because he can be his genuine self,” Lee says. “When you don’t get to be yourself it puts a hindrance on your whole life.”
In the days and weeks after Humphries came out, the pair talked a lot about the pain and anguish that had led up to his decision. “We’ve talked about it [mental health] quite a bit and it’s brought us closer together,” says Lee, who adds that his wife and Humphries have become best friends too. “It’s hard stuff to talk about as friends, and as men, but talking through that stuff is something you need to do.”
The power of allies to share the journey and possibly ease the burden, is crucial in creating a safe space. It’s one of the key messages of this year’s Champion Pride Round. The most recent Pride in Sport Survey, using data collected from 32 organisations across 26 sports, showed the positive impact of visible and active allies has grown by 43 per cent over the past three years.
“It’s about showing acceptance,” says Lee. “We want you to be you. The more we talk about things like inclusion and acceptance, the more it will filter down to other parts of society. As athletes, we’re put on a pedestal, we have a platform, so we should be the first to bring things up and encourage people to have those difficult conversations.”
Humphries is in no doubt that allies have helped make his journey possible. “Looking back and seeing how far I’ve come, it comes from professional help, but it also comes from friends that I’ve made who have taught me things and teammates that have allowed me to understand that it’s okay to be yourself.”
At this point, I have to ask Humphries the obvious question. Why is he still on his own in his sport? Why is he still an anomaly? Is it because the overly masculine environment of professional sports forces many gay male athletes to opt out early? Or are there others who are hiding who they are and leading a tortured double life, as Humphries was?
“I think they both have yes answers,” Humphries says of these chicken-and-egg questions. “Of course, there are people that would’ve felt uncomfortable early on in that environment and maybe wouldn’t have made it to the spot that I’m in. But there’s no way that there’s not others who are in my position as well. Statistically there just has to be.”
If that’s the case, it has damaging consequences. The Pride in Sport Survey revealed that LGBTQIA+ athletes who are not ‘out’ about their sexual orientation or ‘open’ about their trans and/or gender-diverse experience continue to score lower in measures of health and wellbeing.
Humphries understands that pain, and the prism of negativity that accompanies it, better than anyone.
“It’s crazy to look back on and think how negatively I saw myself,” he says. “I think I notice it most when I’m speaking to someone who’s going through it, in the moment. People who have played sport growing up or people, like tradies, who work in a masculine environment. Hearing the same words, same sentences, same thoughts, that I had, come out of other people’s mouths, it hits me like a wall. And I think, I thought that exact same thing. I know exactly how you feel. Because I felt it, for years and years and years.”
The response from fans, Humphries says, has been overwhelmingly positive – something that’s no doubt helped by initiatives like the NBL’s Champion Pride Round. He doesn’t receive much abuse, even online, and if he does, he ignores it. A mark of how far the NBL has come is that if Humphries does cop it these days, it’s usually related to his play.
“Usually if you play well, you don’t get abused,” he laughs. Just like any other player, you might say.
Only Humphries isn’t just another player. Or he’s certainly not your typical player. Since coming out, he’s gone back to performing, his first love. It’s another kind of double life, you might say, the seeds of which were planted all those years ago at Scots. “I’m not a regular athlete where I just hone in on my sport,” he says. “I have a lot of stuff that I do off the court and I literally can’t do one [basketball] without the other [performing]. So, there’s just no point in people trying to stop me doing this anymore. And I think people have realised that.”
But as much as Humphries has embraced who he is, his journey continues, his story has much that’s yet to be written. “There’s still a long way to go for me,” he says. “I don’t date. I don’t have that yet. I don’t know how I would go being in a relationship in public. I don’t know that yet. So that’s probably some internalised homophobia that I still have that I will have to work through whenever that time comes. Some people are all good with it, but I don’t think I would be, I don’t know. It’s not black and white, it’s not easy. Nothing is. It’s a constant journey.”
As it is for all of us. But as Humphries has shown, journeys, stories, they have to start somewhere. Even if you don’t know exactly how they’ll end, where they’ll take you, or who you’ll eventually become.
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What is Champion Pride Round?
NBL Champion Pride Round is returning for its third season in 2025, with the NBL further emphasising inclusivity and celebrating diversity within basketball. The NBL Champion Pride Round is a collaborative partnership between the NBL, Champion, Pride in Sport and the Queer Sporting Alliance (QSA), which aims to show meaningful allyship and improve the understanding of the barriers impacting the LGBTQIA+ community in sport.
This year’s round sees a special focus on allyship in helping make the league and the sport a more inclusive welcoming environment. “It can’t be underestimated how important active allyship is to everyone in the community,” says Humphries. “That allyship and support helps generate safer environments for everyone, and it’s paramount that we all continue on this journey.”
Champion, the naming rights sponsor since the inaugural NBL Champion Pride Round, will have its Champion Pride Progress flag x ‘C’ logo on the court for all NBL Champion Pride Round games, while players have the choice to wear jerseys featuring the same logo.
“We’re proud to celebrate the return of NBL Champion Pride Round with the NBL as the official on-court apparel sponsor,” says Sarah Flynn, general manager Champion Australia and New Zealand. “This year, we’ve explored the importance of active allyship and what it means both on and off the court. From players to spectators and the broader sporting community, together, we champion pride.”
NBL Champion Pride Round will take place in Round 19, with the Cairns Taipans and Brisbane Bullets celebrating their NBL Champion Pride Round home games in Round 18, and the Illawarra Hawks doing so in Round 20.
For more information on Champion Pride Round, visit here. For Isaac’s Champion looks, visit champion.com.au
Words Ben Jhoty
Photography Steven Chee
Styling Aubree Smith
Head of Social Arielle Katos
Producer Sofia Sallons
Grooming Kristyan Low
Fashion Assistant Laura Annis-Brown
Art Direction Evan Lawrence
Video Jasper Karolewski