Kevin Lanflisi has been Aaron Rodgers' roommate and personal assistant for years. The question is whether he and the NFL star are, or were, a couple.
This week, Aaron Rodgers gay rumors arose after The Fame Driven received a "spy" email tipping them off to "bitter subliminal tweets on Lanflisi's Twitter.
Those tweets certainly allude to a relationship much deeper than a friendship, but is it pure conjecture to assume Lanflisi was intimate with Rodgers?
The "evidence" is thin, but it is intriguing enough where you can see how rumors arose. In a 2008 interview, Rodgers was asked if he lived with anybody. He replied:
"I've got a roommate, a guy I met in town. He works for the Packers now as an athletic trainer, but he was interning when I met him and we just hit it off."
"He's been great for me as far as great conversations outside of football. Our friendship goes a lot deeper than what we do," the athlete said of Lanflisi.
Hit it off they did, platonically or otherwise.
Aaron Rodgers has attended numerous sports award shows with Kevin, always color coordinated and without any female dates, including the ESPYs.
Strong attachment to a male roommate does not a homosexual relationship make, but a series of recent events really got the rumor mill churning.
Kevin was the first person Aaron embraced when the Packers won the Super Bowl in 2011, and he once remarked that he sizes up other celebs based on:
"How they are to people like Kevin ... Kevin, he's not a famous person. I want to see if they give Kevin the time of day, or if they try to big-time him."
Clearly, the two are, or were close until Lanflisi left Wisconsin for California this fall, which is when their relationship really started generating buzz.
A few weeks ago, he published some uncharacteristically bitter, cryptic tweets.
Implying he'd suffered a rough break-up, he wrote: "All that time spent on 'us' is now spent on 'me.'" Sources say he's never mentioned a girlfriend.
"I wish you would learn to love people and use things... Not the other way around," he also Tweeted, along with "silence has an expiration date."
Some observers then connected these remarks to a report that this past summer, four gay NFL players were contemplating coming out simultaneously.
An unnamed source claims Rodgers was involved, but backed out "at the last minute," infuriating Lanflisi, and possibly inspiring his enigmatic tweet(s).
Kevin's subliminal tweets aside, the biggest argument against the theory that Aaron Rodgers is gay is that he's been in a relationship with a woman.
He and Daisy Newton, who he reportedly met at a church camp, have been an item for a few years. Fans have wondered if they're secretly engaged.
The obvious explanation for that, if you're determined to think Aaron Rodgers is gay, is that Daisy's his "beard" or he's confused about his sexuality.
As we saw when NBA player Jason Collins came out, he had been in a long-term relationship with - and engaged to - a woman, Carolyn Moos.
These things are rarely cut and dried, and assuming Rodgers is gay - still a stretch, despite any of these details - it has to be a personal and complicated issue for him.
Some believe homosexuals in privileged cultural positions have an obligation to come out, to make life easier for those closeted by more trying circumstances.
But the pressures of coming out in pro basketball or football are starkly different than, say, Robin Roberts at ABC or Anderson Cooper at CNN.
Needless to say, the 30-year-old has not commented on the rumors.
Gay or straight, and regardless of what we think, Rodgers will lead the Packers against San Francisco in the first round of the NFL playoffs this weekend.
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