‘HOMOPHOBIC BUT HOMOEROTIC’: Colton Underwood worried he’d be outed if he got ‘excited’ in locker room

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Colton Underwood used to avoid showering with his NFL teammates because he worried he would get “turned on” and they would figure out he was gay.

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The former defensive end was still in the closet during his NFL days, a tough time considering other players would walk around the locker room naked and make penis jokes and comments.

“At the time, there were no other gay football players,” he explained during Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast.

“The locker room is extremely homophobic, but it’s also very homoerotic,” he explained. “It’s like (they’re) slapping (each other’s) a—-, commenting on each other’s d—-, and then all of a sudden being called a f– or queer, and all of these derogatories.”

Players would comment on other guys’ penis sizes like, “Dang, that’s big,” or comment on someone’s “nice a–.”

But then he says it’s like “a flip switches,” where “if you stare at the d— too long, it’s like, ‘What are you doing, f–?’”

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The former Bachelor found it “super confusing” and wondered if others in the locker room were questioning or struggling with their own sexuality, as he was.

“And then as soon as that flicker of hope for me (was ignited), it flipped to slurs and homophobia,” he said. “And I’d be like, ‘OK, never mind. It’s just me.’”

So he kept to himself, avoided looking at his teammates and never showered or changed around them because he feared he might get “turned on.”

He admitted he was never attracted to anyone on the teams he was a part of between 2014 and 2016 – the San Diego Chargers, Philadelphia Eagles and Oakland Raiders – but he “wanted to avoid any chance of being outed.”

He added: “I didn’t want questions to start being asked. I played it very safe because I didn’t want to give anyone a reason to come at me.”