The LGBTQ+ Card Players Who Never Got Their Spotlight

Every June, sports media scrambles to find its LGBTQ+ stories. Baseball slaps a rainbow on its logo. Basketball digs up a retired player who came out after their career ended. The NFL runs a thirty-second ad. Then the month ends and everyone moves on.

Poker never really got that memo. The casino world has always had a complicated relationship with visibility. It is an industry built around late nights, side rooms, and people who prefer not to be asked too many questions. And yet, inside that world, a handful of openly gay and queer players have built careers that would make any athlete envious. They just rarely get the celebration they deserve.

This is a small attempt to fix that.

Vanessa Selbst: The Greatest Player Nobody Talks About Enough

If Vanessa Selbst played basketball, she would have her own documentary series by now. Instead she played poker, and she played it better than almost anyone alive.

Selbst, who is openly gay and married her wife in 2013, is the highest-earning female tournament poker player in history, with over $11.9 million in verified live tournament winnings. She is the only woman to win three World Series of Poker bracelets in open events, not ladies-only fields, but the same tables where the world's best men compete. She is also the only woman ever to hold the number one ranking on the Global Poker Index.

The greatest female poker player of all time, and arguably one of the ten best players of any gender in the modern era, is an openly gay woman from Brooklyn who went to Yale and then Yale Law School and then decided to go beat everyone at cards. She is not a household name outside of poker circles. That is genuinely strange.

Selbst retired in 2018 to build her family. She and her wife adopted a son that year. She has since moved into finance and civil rights work. She was inducted into the Women in Poker Hall of Fame in 2022. She deserves to be talked about the way people talk about athletes who broke barriers in their sport. She is not.

Jason Somerville: The First Openly Gay Male Pro

On Valentine's Day 2012, a poker player from Long Island named Jason Somerville published a blog post coming out as gay. He was a WSOP bracelet winner with nearly $4 million in career earnings at the time. He was also, as he noted in the post, doing something that apparently had never been done before: becoming the first openly gay high-stakes male professional poker player.

Somerville wrote that poker welcomed people of all backgrounds, different races, different genders, different walks of life, and had somehow still arrived at zero openly gay male professionals. He decided that was going to change.

The response was positive. His fellow players embraced him. Rather than keep grinding tournaments quietly, Somerville built something new. He launched Run It Up, a streaming series that eventually moved to Twitch, where he helped invent live-streamed poker as a format. His streams drew tens of thousands of viewers. He later signed with PokerStars as a Team Pro.

What he proved, more than anything, was that authenticity builds audiences. That lesson aged well.

Ryan Laplante: A Bracelet, a Speech, and a Room That Went Quiet

On June 13, 2016, Ryan Laplante won the largest live non-hold'em tournament in WSOP history, a $565 Pot-Limit Omaha event with 2,483 entries, and took home $190,328 and his first gold bracelet. It should have been the best day of his career.

Hours earlier, a gunman had opened fire inside the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.

Laplante, who grew up in rural Minnesota in constant fear of being outed, stood on the WSOP stage the following day with his fiance beside him and gave a bracelet acceptance speech nobody was expecting. He told the room he was proud to be a WSOP champion. He told them he was proud to be an openly gay man. He asked everyone to treat each other with love and respect.

The room applauded. CNN interviewed him. His hometown paper ran the story. Over the following year, Laplante said roughly 2,000 people had come up to thank him personally for the speech, including, more than once, fellow gay poker players who said it had meant everything to them.

His point was simple: even with all the progress that had been made on gay rights, there were still states with no workplace protections for LGBTQ+ employees. Being openly gay in public still matters because the work is not done.

Alexandre Vuilleumier: The Bracelet Winner You Have Not Heard Of

In 2023, Swiss player Alexandre Vuilleumier won the $25,000 No-Limit Hold'em Six-Max at the WSOP for $1.2 million. He is gay, and he has talked openly about navigating homophobia at the table, specifically what he calls a "double dose" of aggression from opponents who read him as both a softer target and an opportunity to prove something.

He has said he would like to see dedicated LGBTQ+ poker events tied to charitable causes, covered the same way any other event gets covered. His $1.2 million score in one of the WSOP's most prestigious fields makes him one of the most decorated openly gay players in the history of the game. Most casual poker fans have never heard of him.

Butch Cordora: Building Safe Tables Outside the Casino

Not every story is about the World Series. Butch Cordora is a Philadelphia poker organizer who found Texas Hold'em in 2005 in a dive bar and, within a few years, had turned that into a small business and a book.

His 2020 book The Gay Guyde to Poker is a strategy guide written for LGBTQ+ players navigating tables where they are often perceived as weak or are outright harassed. The subtitle is about how to use your minority status as a weapon. It covers game strategy alongside practical advice for dealing with homophobia mid-session.

Cordora also runs poker retreats and cash game nights built specifically so LGBTQ+ players do not have to navigate any of that. His observation is blunt: gay people like everything straight people like, but the poker room has long been coded as a heterosexual space in a way that quietly tells certain people they do not belong there. He has spent twenty years building the alternative.

Why the Gambling World Is Slow to Celebrate

The gambling world has a split personality on this. On one side, it has historically been more socially permissive than mainstream culture in certain ways. Outlaws and gamblers tend not to ask too many questions, and the poker table has long attracted people who did not fit neatly into polite society.

On the other side, the live casino environment, especially the older, more established poker rooms, can be exactly as hostile as you might expect from a space historically dominated by older men with money to prove. Laplante once described a player filing a floor complaint for seeing him check a gay dating app during a cash game. Another player received a homophobic slur after busting a final table.

The progress that Somerville and Laplante experienced when they came out was real. The WSOP and the major poker outlets have done meaningful Pride Month coverage. But the broader casino industry has been slower to catch up in its marketing, its events, and its culture. These players are not obscure. Selbst is one of the ten best tournament poker players in history. Somerville helped invent a format that millions of people watch every day. Laplante gave a speech that made a room full of poker players cry. They deserve to be part of the conversation year-round, not just in June.

If You Want to Find a Table

The queer poker scene is more organized than most people realize. Dedicated LGBTQ+ poker nights now exist in several major cities, and organizations like Queer Poker have built communities specifically designed to give new and experienced players a comfortable place to play.

If you are looking for a physical casino near you, Gambler's Atlas has listings for over 1,100 casinos across the United States, including details on amenities, location, and casino type. The tables are open to everyone. They always have been.