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IT WAS HOT and impossibly muggy in St. Louis on June 3 when the Rams opened their organized team activities. So it must have happened at some point that afternoon. On the far left side of the locker room, in front of his stall, Michael Sam wrapped himself in a towel, grabbed some shampoo and walked across the room that during OTAs can reach nearly twice its normal capacity. Then he arrived at a pattern of tiny gray-and-blue linoleum tile, thereby breaking the ultimate taboo in men's team sports: an openly gay man showering with his NFL teammates.

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The barrier that Sam strolled through in June was long considered an unbreakable cultural obstacle to acceptance for gay players, even in a society in which, according to Gallup, 78 percent of people under 30 support same-sex marriage. There's just something sacred about the ritual of the team shower, we were told -- the outside world would never understand. Sam wasn't the first, of course: Jason Collins showered with his Nets teammates after coming out last year. But this was unprecedented in an NFL locker room, our culture's ultimate temple of masculinity.

When stinky teammates strip down to their most vulnerable state, it conjures, for some, a range of emotions: their most awkward memories (middle school gym class), deepest insecurities (size), purest symbolism (baptism) and most ignorant defense mechanisms (homophobia). The refrain has always been: I'll accept a gay teammate, I just won't shower with one. 'Imagine if he's the guy next to me and, you know, I get dressed, naked, taking a shower, the whole nine,' then-Saints linebacker Jonathan Vilma said in February. 'And it just so happens he looks at me. How am I supposed to respond?'

Vilma can start by not being so coy. Getting clean next to a gay teammate is probably one of the more ordinary things that happens in the team shower. And if there's one universal certainty in a sports shower, it's this: Everyone's looking.

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NFL TEAMMATES SPEND at least 20 hours together in the shower each season. Without the use of horse blinders, it would be virtually impossible for Vilma, or anyone else, to go more than 20 minutes without a penis, or six, crossing his line of vision. Nether-region glancing in showers is so commonplace, according to scores of athletes interviewed for this story, there's even a crude term for when the eyes linger just a tad too long: meat peeping.

Visit any locker room now or throughout history and administer sodium pentothal, and you would find that every player knows exactly which player has the largest, and smallest, penis on the team. You could start in Greece -- birthplace of the Olympics and the gymnasium (in Greek: 'to exercise naked'). In Roman community baths, it was customary for men to stand and applaud when a well-endowed peer entered the water. In a recent book on masculinity and sports, British sociologist Chris Morriss-Roberts wrote: 'The activity of checking out each other occurred irrelevant of sexuality and the type of sport; all participants noted that they looked at each other's [penises] in the locker room.'

When former NFL cornerback Wade Davis, the executive director of the LGBT athletes' advocacy group You Can Play, speaks to teams about tolerance inside the locker room, he uses this very reference to break the ice: 'Let's just stop with this idea that 'Oh, gay guys are looking at everyone's penises,' because you straight guys -- admit it -- you all know you're looking too,' he tells his audience. This is invariably followed by tense moments of silence and sideways glances until the room busts out in laughter. 'Then,' Davis says, 'all the inside shower jokes break out.'

The team shower, in fact, is one of the few places in our culture where men objectify each other in the cruel manner normally reserved for women. One former Tennessee Titan was so poorly endowed that every time he stepped into the shower, teammates would ask him, 'Have you pissed on your balls today?' Well-endowed players (sometimes referred to as Hall of Fame members) get it even worse.

'I'm in the shower the first day, and everyone's looking but not looking, ya know?' says an NFL linebacker. 'I got my head down, washing my hair, and I look over to the side and I see, like, an extra limb flopping around. This was the biggest penis I have ever seen. I was like: 'Dude, what the f--- is that thing?' And he was so shy and reserved about it. He was like, 'Come on, man. Cool it.' That just made it worse. 'Donkey D--k' became a running thing on the team for years. It was like, 'Donkey, you gotta own that thing! If any of us had that, the whole world would know about it!'

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The barrier that Michael Sam strolled through in June was long considered unbreakable. Jeff Roberson/AP Images

When it comes to odd behavior in the bathroom, though, comparing penis sizes is not the half of it. Hall of Fame pitcher Greg Maddux used to mosey up to rookies in the shower, engage them in conversation and, while pretending to listen to them talk, secretly pee down their legs. (Players describe so much peeing in showers that it's a wonder teams even bother to install urinals in locker rooms.) And many teams use the shower as Maddux did, to establish hierarchy. On the Titans, Jason McCourty always takes the last showerhead on the left, while Bernard Pollard likes the pressure and temp of the middle shower. 'If anybody is in it,' warns Pollard, 'they are going to move.'

Besides marking territory, interaction in showers can go from the occasional naked dance-off to towel-snapping, ass-slapping and the miming of various sex acts.

In a literal sense too, the shower is often the filthiest place in the stadium. There are tales from Oakland of raw sewage seeping up through the shower drains. Breakouts of MRSA, a form of staph infection resistant to many antibiotics, have made hitting the showers in Cleveland and Tampa a matter of life and death. Purposefully spartan in design, team showers are usually a simple open-ended 300-square-foot rectangle lined with plain tile and 15 or so shared industrial spigots -- they're designed so that no one wants to spend an extra second in there. It's almost always crowded, uncomfortably steamy and dangerously slippery. Some sociologists hypothesize that one reason teams don't provide individual showers is that the more privacy you provide, the easier it is for behavior to escalate from homosocial to something sexual.

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As a culture, we have always struggled to reconcile the idea that such an intimate, homoerotic ritual is being performed by men who epitomize the culture's heterosexual ideal. 'A bunch of athletic men, all naked together, lathering themselves up and bonding in a shower room -- I m