Cowboys great Michael Irvin appears shirtless on the cover of this month's gay men's magazine Out and discusses his passion for equality issues. Irvin publicly acknowledges that the impetus for taking a stand comes from his relationship with his gay brother, Vaughn, who died of stomach cancer in 2006. In the article, Irvin describes how his brother's sexual orientation contributed to his own issues. He says that he found out his brother was gay sometime in the 1970s, when he found Vaughn wearing women's clothing. Michael Irvin was rattled by the experience and has figured out since that it contributed to his own womanizing behavior. "And through it all we realized maybe some of the issues I've had with so many women, just bringing women around so everybody can see, maybe that's the residual of the fear I had that if my brother is wearing ladies' clothes, am I going to be doing that? Is it genetic?" Irvin said. "I'm certainly not making excuses for my bad decisions. But I had to dive inside of me to find out why am I making these decisions, and that came up." Irvin says that his father, Walter, helped him learn a tolerant form of Christianity because the elder Irvin accepted his gay son.