Once she connected with a new side of her racial identity, she began to explore her sexual identity. \u201cI was faking being straight for years\u2014it was so annoying. I hated it,\u201d she said. She\u2019d had a childhood sweetheart from sixth grade all the way until college, and had always had an appreciation for good-looking men, but her heart wasn\u2019t in it. \u201cI can appreciate men, but all the other stuff that comes with y\u2019all\u2014I can\u2019t,\u201d she laughed. \u201cAnd I tried. I really tried.\u201d While she had always found women attractive, it took her until her early 20s to consider actually dating them. \u201cI don\u2019t think I was ready to navigate that space until I felt very secure in myself,\u201d she said. That finally happened when she got to the WNBA, where she was surrounded by powerful, outspoken women who were totally unapologetic about who they were. Yet for a few years, she still publicly said she was bi, not gay. \u201cThere\u2019s still this pressure to sell to the male demographic and have sex appeal,\u201d she said. By age 24, though, she was done pretending. Once she came out as gay, everything got better\u2014including her skills on the court. \u201cI was like the Hulk who just got superpowers,\u201d she said. \u201cWhen you hide or suppress a part of yourself, you\u2019re not fully you. You limit yourself in so many ways. If I can\u2019t be confident in who I am as a person, how can I be confident in who I am as a player?\u201d<\/p>\n
Cloud also thanked her family for giving her a strong emotional and moral foundation. \u201cIn this league, you have families who take advantage of players and use them as a cash cow,\u201d she said. \u201cMy family has never taken anything from me. I truly have the best parents in the world, and even my siblings who voted for Trump\u2014I\u2019m like, \u2018Y\u2019all irritate my ass,\u2019 but I know that if I ever needed to be defended, they would.\u201d Cloud also recounted how her conservative-leaning family has never made her feel judged. \u201cI never even told my dad I was gay. I literally just brought my girlfriend home, and he was like, \u2018It\u2019s nice to meet you,\u2019\u201d she says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Once she connected with a new side of her racial identity, she began to explore her sexual identity.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":290572,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[19795,99,434],"class_list":{"0":"post-290571","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wnba","8":"tag-shes-got-game","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-wnba"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290571"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290571\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/290572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}