Football Wrap-up - In tangentially related news, a Pennsylvania town has paid $100,000 in settlement of claims about a high school football player who committed suicide in 1997, the Wash Blade reports.

A town patrolman came upon the underage youth drinking in a parked car with a male friend, supposedly in the possession of condoms. He then lectured them for allegedly planning to engage in sex and quoted passages from the Bible. After the cop threatened to tell the player's grandfather that he was gay, the young man went home and shot himself in the head. Despite protests from family and girlfriend that the victim was not actually gay, LGB groups took up the cause.

This family tragedy led to one important legal victory. In a 2000 ruling, the Third Circuit held that people have a privacy interest in their sexual orientation that is protected by the U.S. Constitution. This appellate ruling allowed the case to go to trial and ultimately led to settlement, when plaintiffs decided pursuing a greater award from a jury might bankrupt the town. Delivered nearly three years before this summer's Lawrence decision, the Sterling opinion has come into play in many "forced-outing" situations, especially confrontations between kids and school authorities.