From Boos to Go Birds: The Gay Men Changing What an Eagles Cheerleader Looks Like

Jackson O’Brien had just walked across the stage at his Stockton University commencement when he found out he was going to be a Philadelphia Eagles cheerleader.

Seconds later, he called his mom.

He filmed it. The video went everywhere, and it is worth watching for one specific reason: nobody in that clip is performing. It is a kid in a cap and gown, still holding a diploma, telling his mother that the thing he has worked at his whole life just happened.

O’Brien graduated in 2026 with a performing arts degree focused on dance. He served on Stockton’s Arts and Humanities Dean’s Student Leadership Board and performed publicly through the school’s dance program. He is one of nine rookies on this year’s Eagles squad, chosen out of hundreds of people who auditioned.

He is also openly gay, and he has been unusually plain about what all of this means to him. After making the squad, he said dance had saved his life, and that he intends to keep showing people exactly who he is.

He is not standing out there alone

This is the part that gets lost in the noise. O’Brien is not the gay male Eagles cheerleader. He is one of four men on a 32-person squad, alongside returning cheerleaders James LeGette, Dalton Walsh and Alex Fan.

LeGette has been on the squad for years and has talked openly about being a gay man in professional cheer, describing the male rookies as his brothers and helping them find their footing in a job that comes with very little roadmap. Walsh has spoken publicly about it too.

So the honest version of the story is not that Philadelphia hired a gay cheerleader. It is that gay men now have an established, unremarkable place inside one of the biggest sports institutions in this city. Four of them, on the field, at once.

Getting here took 42 years.

Kyle Tanguay opened the door in 2019

O’Brien’s most obvious predecessor is Kyle Tanguay.

Tanguay grew up in New Hampshire and came to Philadelphia in 2017 to study dance at the University of the Arts. He had competed, trained in Los Angeles, performed in a benefit alongside working professional dancers, and appeared as a dancer, actor and choreographer in Luca Fogale’s “Half Saved” video. In 2019, at 21, he made the Eagles Cheerleaders. He was openly gay, and he was the first man on that squad in 35 years.

Tanguay understood the assignment immediately. He told the Eagles that parents of young boys in cheer and dance were reaching out to him, because their sons were usually the only boy on the team. He wanted those kids to know it was fine to be the one who stood out, and he hoped it would keep them in the arts instead of quitting to avoid the comments.

His family history is the best detail in the whole story. His great-grandmother, Shirley Hodgdon, became the first female cheerleader at Portsmouth High School in New Hampshire in 1937, back when the activity still had deep male roots.

Read those two facts together. In 1937, a girl was the strange one for becoming a cheerleader. Eighty-two years later, her great-grandson was the strange one for the same reason, in reverse. The rule did not protect a tradition. The rule just changed sides.

Philadelphia booed the first two

When Tanguay was announced, some coverage called him the first male Eagles cheerleader. He was not.

In 1984, Paul Kramer and Mark Merschen joined what was then the Eagles’ Liberty Belles. Their origin stories are pure Philadelphia. Kramer grew up in Wallingford, loved to dance, and was working with children with special needs when he answered an Eagles audition ad on a dare. He survived the first cut and figured he might as well keep going. Merschen was a professional roller skater from Maple Glen who happened to be at JFK Stadium prepping for a skating show when rain postponed it. He wandered over to Veterans Stadium, realized auditions were happening, and asked whether men were allowed to try out. The woman running the audition basically said: why not. He performed his skating routines without the skates and made the squad.

The two of them worked alongside about 30 women, and contrary to the assumption that early male cheerleaders existed only to lift people, they danced. Their choreographer later recalled that Kramer and Merschen did everything their teammates did: games, parades, promotional appearances, all of it.

Then, on August 23, 1984, their images went up on the screen at Veterans Stadium during a preseason game.

The crowd booed.

It was bad enough that the Eagles reportedly considered scrapping the whole idea. The men stayed. They performed the entire 1984 season anyway.

Men were cheerleading first

There is a bigger misconception underneath all of this, and it is worth putting on the record.

Cheerleading started as a men’s activity. Organized American cheerleading grew up on college campuses in the late 1800s, and for its first several decades male students largely held the role. Women moved into it in growing numbers through the first half of the 20th century, particularly as men’s participation shifted during the world wars. By the time NFL cheerleading took its modern shape in the 1960s and 1970s, teams were marketing it almost entirely as a women’s profession.

So men did not invade anything. Men were there at the start, disappeared, and are now coming back. Every argument that male cheerleaders violate some ancient tradition has the history exactly backwards.

The strange road back into the league

The route from 1984 to now runs through a federal lawsuit and a sitcom.

In 1978, a man named Glenn Welt tried to audition for the Miami Dolphins cheerleading squad. The Dolphins would not let him compete, and the fight became a national story and a federal sex discrimination case. It got famous enough that Robin Williams spoofed it on Mork & Mindy in 1979, dressing as a Broncos cheerleader and turning up on the field with Denver’s squad. It worked as comedy because the idea of a man cheering in the NFL was considered absurd.

Baltimore brought men back in 1998, though mostly as part of a co-ed stunt team doing lifts and tumbling rather than dancing in the line. The Ravens are still the most male-heavy cheer program in the league. In 2009, Dallas created Rhythm & Blue, a co-ed hip-hop dance team and drum corps that performs separately from the famous Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.

The dam broke in 2018. The Los Angeles Rams put Quinton Peron and Napoleon Jinnies on their regular cheerleading squad, not as stunt specialists but as dancers doing the same routines in the same role as the women. Both were classically trained.

The New Orleans Saints followed with Jesse Hernandez, who had danced since he was two and had already been bullied for becoming the first boy on his high school dance team. He was the first of that 2018 group to actually perform in an NFL game.

Then it accelerated. In 2019 alone, men joined squads in Philadelphia, New England, Tampa Bay, Seattle, Tennessee and Indianapolis. Tampa framed its decision as part of a commitment to diversity and inclusion. New England picked Driss Dallahi and Steven Sonntag, the first men on the Patriots squad in decades, and both said watching the Rams’ male cheerleaders at the Super Bowl is what pushed them to audition.

That is the whole mechanism, by the way. Somebody sees it, so somebody else tries it.

The representation has also grown past gay men. In 2022, Justine Lindsay joined the Carolina Panthers TopCats and became the first openly transgender cheerleader in the NFL. She spent three seasons with Carolina.

Where the league actually stands

This is not a proposal anymore. It is the current state of professional football.

Heading into the 2026 season, 11 franchises again have men in their cheer programs:

• Baltimore Ravens
• Los Angeles Rams
• Minnesota Vikings
• New England Patriots
• New Orleans Saints
• Philadelphia Eagles
• San Francisco 49ers
• Seattle Seahawks
• Tampa Bay Buccaneers
• Tennessee Titans
• Washington Commanders

Seven teams do not field a cheerleading squad at all: Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, the Los Angeles Chargers, the New York Giants, the New York Jets and Pittsburgh. Green Bay has no in-house squad either, relying on college cheerleaders from UW-Green Bay and St. Norbert. Counting only the organizations that actually have cheer programs, men are far more common than “11 of 32” makes it sound.

Some of these men are straight. Some are gay. Some have never discussed it, which is their business. But a striking number of the most visible male cheerleaders in the league are openly LGBT+: O’Brien, LeGette and Walsh in Philadelphia, Jose Capetillo and Eswinn Diaz with the Rams, Jon Reyes with the 49ers, Randolph Rivera with Tampa Bay, and Blaize Shiek and Louie Conn in Minnesota. Kyle Tanguay in Philadelphia and Quinton Peron with the Rams opened that door a few seasons earlier.

The boos just moved online

In 2025, Shiek and Conn, both gay, became the target of a giant social media pile-on as the Vikings’ first male cheerleaders. It got exaggerated enough that stories circulated about season ticket holders supposedly canceling in protest. The two of them mostly answered with jokes and came back for a second season in 2026.

Now some of that attention has swung to Philadelphia. This week, O’Brien and his teammates have been mocked across social media, with Fox News host Laura Ingraham among those piling onto footage of a male Eagles cheerleader.

Which, honestly, only sharpens the point.

In 1984, the boos came from people sitting in Veterans Stadium, close enough that Paul Kramer and Mark Merschen could hear them. In 2026, they come through a phone. The men are still on the field. And instead of two men the organization thought about cutting, there are four on a 32-person squad, and the city that booed in 1984 just watched a rookie’s diploma-day phone call to his mother go viral.