HOBART “HOBEY” BAKER, who died on this date (b: 1892) was an American amateur athlete of the early twentieth century. Considered the first American star in ice hockey by the Hockey Hall of Fame, he was also an accomplished American football player.

Born into a prominent family from the Philadelphia area, he enrolled at Princeton University in 1910 where he excelled on the university’s hockey and football teams, and became a noted amateur hockey player for the St. Nicholas Hockey Club in New York City.

He was a member of three national championship teams, for football in 1911 and hockey in 1912 and 1914, and helped the St. Nicholas Club win a national amateur championship in 1915. Baker graduated from Princeton in 1914 and worked for J.P. Morgan Bank until he enlisted in the United States Army Air Service.

During World War I he served with the 103rd and the 13th Aero Squadrons before being promoted to captain and named commander of the 141st Aero Squadron. Baker died in December 1918 at the age of 26, after a plane he was test-piloting crashed, hours before he was due to leave France and return to America.

Baker was widely regarded by his contemporaries as one of the best athletes of his time and is considered one of the best early American hockey players. When the Hockey Hall of Fame was founded in 1945, Baker was named one of the first nine inductees, the only American among them. In 1973, he became one of the initial inductees in the United States Hockey Hall of Fame. He was also inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1975, and is the only person to be in both the hockey and college football halls of fame.

F. Scott Fitzgerald idolized Baker and based Allenby, a minor character in the 1920 novel This Side of Paradise, on him. In 1921, Princeton named its new hockey arena the Hobey Baker Memorial Rink. The Hobey Baker Award was introduced in 1980, awarded annually to the best collegiate hockey player.

Andy Reynolds, a leading academic and researcher of LGBTQ history and politics has contributed to a podcast about Baker, in which he reaches the conclusion that Hobey was, indeed, gay. Reynolds served as executive producer and co-writer of the “Searching for Hobey Baker” podcast, along with executive producer and co-writer Tim Smith and executive producer Ross Greenburg.

They found copious amounts of information that points to one conclusion for the researcher and the ESPN team: Baker was in a same-sex relationship, and he was gay (or, in Reynolds’ words, “queer”).

“We basically gathered together the letters, the remembrances, and dug up a lot of new stuff as well,” Reynolds said. “This is a 90-minute podcast, but there’s a lot of other stuff under the bottom side of the iceberg.”

Reynolds pointed, as mentioned in the podcast, to what clearly seem to be love letters, bursting with emotional and physical affection, between Baker and Percy Rivington Pyne II, son of one of the country’s richest men at the time and himself a Princeton alum. Baker and Pyne lived together in Pyne’s swank Manhattan house for two years and were reportedly inseparable, becoming fixtures on the New York social scene.

“If we presented this evidence of a man and a woman, there’s no doubt we’d see them as a romantic couple,” Reynolds said. “In this case, the experts told us that they see this as a very strong loving relationship.”

Hobey Baker was gorgeous. Even teammates would comment on how physically beautiful he was. “With his lean but well-muscled figure and his handsome, manly yet boyish face, he was someone who would appeal to both men and women alike,” a former roommate wrote to Baker biographer John Davies.

And yet, according to the reporting on the podcast, he had zero interest in women. In one anecdote, a classmate recalls Baker fleeing the hockey arena at Princeton via a back entrance to avoid a woman who wanted to go out with him.

This is, of course, not apples to apples. In 1915, no man and woman would live together outside of a romantic relationship. Yet many men had at the time, and have today, male roommates. Still, Reynolds insists there is far deeper evidence, and the podcast shares much of it.

The language most used in the podcast, and in the media outreach from ESPN, is that Baker was “queer.” Yet in the podcast are moments (as mentioned above) of Baker hiding and running from women, to avoid their romantic advances. While there is mention of the term “gay” maybe not working in cultural context in the early 1900s, the podcast does call his contemporary, the composer Cole Porter, as well as Baker’s alleged lover Pyne, “gay.” While the podcast uses the term “queer” for Baker, the inference of the podcast is clearly that he was “gay.”

While it’s easy to prejudice research with the selection of experts on a topic, Reynolds assured Outsports that was not the case here. “Their views were consistently shared across all the experts we spoke with. We didn’t receive any feedback saying, ‘No, you’ve got it wrong here.’ And I was careful not to prejudge their evaluations — we set out what we had, and said, ‘based on your expertise what do you think?’”