There are very few people in the world, if any at all, who can relate to Luke Prokop.
The 24-year-old Edmonton native, who just wrapped a season on a farm team for his hometown Oilers, is the first openly gay hockey player under an NHL contract in history. There was no one before him—Brock McGillis, widely credited as the first openly gay professional hockey player, was never contracted in the NHL—and there has yet to be anyone after.
You might find that shocking; it is 2026, after all. And surely—statistically, even—there must be someone else, another player preparing to soon follow in his wake. But Prokop isn’t holding his breath.
“I am surprised because [my coming out] was so positive and I did it at 19 years old,” he recently told Sports Illustrated. “I hadn’t even played my first professional hockey league game yet. I wasn’t established at all. I had a lot of things to worry about, [like] if it was going to affect my career. Someone who might be established in the NHL wouldn't necessarily have to worry about those things.
“But on the other side of it, there’s a lot of pressure and responsibility and maybe some attention that they don't really want on themselves. So I can also understand it from the flip side of why someone might not want to come out.”
Now five years removed from that pivotal pronouncement, and with an NHL debut still in his sights, Prokop reflects on it all in The Hockey Player, a new documentary chronicling the defenseman’s winding journey through the messy, machismo-driven world of ice hockey as one of the sport’s only openly homosexual men.
“I knew, personally, that [coming out] was gonna help me as a player, as a person, just being more confident [in general], being more confident on the ice,” he said. “But one of the main reasons I wanted to do it was, I remember growing up as a kid, and I wasn’t able to look at the TV screen and see someone playing in the NHL or in the AHL who was like me. Who was gay and playing. And I knew that if I came out, I was going to be able to be that for someone else out there.”
Producer Taylor Prestidge and director Jacqueline Doorey spent three years filming the project, which took the film crew to six different cities—Seattle, Edmonton, Toronto, Milwaukee, Atlanta and Bakersfield—and yielded so much footage that “we could make two movies if we wanted to,” Prokop quipped.
The former third-rounder’s mixed-but-mostly-positive experience as the only openly gay and active player in the North American men’s game carries the lion’s share of the film’s tension, and rightfully so. But a smaller storyline—the relationship between him and his father—might be what impacts viewers the most.
As far as coming out stories go, Prokop’s was indisputably positive, even by his own admission. On July 19, 2021, about a year after he had shared his secret with his family, friends and agents, he posted a statement on Instagram announcing to the world that he was gay. The hockey community then rallied behind him swiftly and staunchly, and that was that.
It was an almost fairytale outcome for the then-19-year-old, who had already made peace with himself privately but was nonetheless nervous to share this news with the world. Still, there was one part of the experience that didn’t go as planned.
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