Don’t you see how your vision of what masculinity can be still focuses on his military service and his love of football?
Maybe he could be accepted by patriarchal heterocisnormative society as an example of masculinity. Maybe. I don’t think it would go that way. I think he’d be treated like a model minority and “one of the good ones”, used to denigrate other gay men for not being sufficiently masculine. His traditionally masculine qualities would be played up and anything that subverted that would be downplayed and ignored.
Play up his role as husband and father, play down his actually existing husband, etc.