Steve Buckley, the sports columnist for the Boston Herald, announced in a column on Thursday that he is gay. More from The Advocate:

Buckley said he wished he had written the column while his mother was still alive. She urged him to come out publicly before she died seven years ago, although she initially wanted him to keep the information to himself.

“My mother and I had already had the gay talk, during which she had told me that nothing had changed, that she loved me, asked if I was seeing anybody, and so on,” writes Buckley. “What she didn’t like was the idea of me coming out publicly; she was of the opinion that it was really nobody’s business, and she worried that prejudice might disrupt my career.

“But like an NFL referee, she had overturned the original call. ‘Do it,’ she said. I thanked her. She smiled. And then I made the biggest mistake of my life: With a vacation lined up for the first week of December, I told her I’d get to it when I returned to Boston — just before Christmas.”

Buckley’s mother died shortly after he returned from vacation.

Tags: Boston Herald sports columnist gay. gay sports writer, Steve Buckley