Breaking the Surface (11 page)

P
ARTICIPATING IN THE
O
LYMPICS
was a major rite of passage for me, and not only as an athlete. Montreal was where I remember telling someone for the first time that I was gay, where I fell in love for the first time.

I don’t really know how I knew what a gay person was, but by the time I got to the Olympics, I had no doubt that I was one. I really wanted to talk to someone about what I was feeling, because I was having trouble dealing with it. When I met Scott Cranham, the Canadian diver who helped Sergei defect, I thought he might be the person I could confide in. For one thing, I thought he too was gay. He was studying psychology in college, so I hoped that even if he wasn’t gay, he would be a sympathetic ear.

We had been hanging out together occasionally since we had both arrived in Montreal, and one afternoon, walking in the Olympic Village, I took him aside and told him I thought I was gay. My heart was pounding because I had never told that to anyone before, and I was afraid of how he might react. I explained to him that there was no one else I could talk to about it.

Well, Scott couldn’t handle it. After that day he came near me only if there were lots of other people around. He avoided any sitI was very disappointed and sad and angry. When you’re sixteen and you reach out, you’re taking a huge risk. I felt totally vulnerable and totally alone.

What made it even worse was that I didn’t just like Scott, I had a crush on him. But what I felt for Scott was nothing compared to the crush I developed on one of the Soviet divers; I fell for him like a boulder off the ten-meter platform.

The first time I saw Yuri (not his real name) was at an international competition in 1976, a few months before the Olympics. He was older than I was and absolutely beautiful, and I was instantly attracted, with a breathless, overwhelming desire you read about only in romance novels. I’d never experienced anything like it before.

I spoke no Russian and he didn’t speak a whole lot of English, but all I knew was that I wanted to be with him.

I spent a lot of time with the Soviets in Montreal because several of them were around my age. Yuri and I were introduced to each other by one of the other Soviet divers whom I already knew. It was more fun for me to be with the younger Soviet divers than with the American divers, but the fact that Yuri was there probably had something to do with it.

It didn’t go unnoticed among my American teammates that I was spending a lot of time with the Soviet divers. I was doing things with the Soviets and having meals with them. This was still during the period when the Russians were supposed to be our enemies. But I didn’t really care about politics. They were athletes, no different from any of us. Unfortunately, most of my teammates had a knee-jerk negative attitude toward the Russians because of all the propaganda. One of them started calling me a Commie fag.

It was right after I’d told Scott Cranham that I was gay that I got called a Commie fag. I assumed he’d broken my confidence and I was mad at him for years, although I never asked him about it until I visited with him recently in Canada. Scott told me that the only other person he told was his girlfriend and that she didn’t tell anyone. He also told me that the reason he ran away from me was that he couldn’t accept the fact that he himself was gay. It terrified him when I first went to him to talk about being gay. It was the last thing he wanted to deal with. Scott’s been out of the closet for years now, and he said it was okay to mention it in my book.

Of all the Soviets, Sergei Nemsonov spoke the most English. He didn’t do much translating for me, but I’d hear the word
cinema
in a conversation and I’d chime in, “Oh yeah, let’s go to the cinema.” Or I’d hear the word
disco
and say, “Yeah, let’s go to the disco.” I listened very carefully, but generally I didn’t know what the hell they were saying. I suppose they could have been saying, “Let’s go blow up the disco,” and then I would have been guilty of espionage, but generally athletes come to the Olympics to compete in their sport, to meet fellow athletes from around the world, and to have a good time. That’s the true Olympic spirit.

At some point, my Russian friends tried to fix me up with Tatyana, one of the female divers. I wasn’t interested—I just wanted to be near Yuri—but it gave me another excuse to hang out with them. Tatyana must have figured that American boys were just shy.

One time I got to spend a few hours alone with Yuri. After the team dinner at which Dr. Lee said I was like a son, I went back to the Soviets’ room to hang out. The diving events were all over, and it was time to party. They’d brought cases of vodka, cognac, champagne, and caviar to Montreal, so for three days we stayed up late, drinking, carrying on, and crying on one another’s shoulders about not doing as well as we were supposed to. A lot of the Soviets didn’t come close to doing as well as they were supposed to, so there were plenty of sorrows to drown.

Yuri had been openly affectionate with me during the Olympics. He’d give me big hugs to greet me and say good-bye, and he thought nothing of putting his arm around me, which to me was wonderful.

On the last night of the marathon party, I stayed down in the Soviets’ room well past midnight, just to be near Yuri. By the time everyone passed out it was very early in the morning, and only Yuri and I were still awake. I had my head in Yuri’s lap and I had my arms around him and he was holding me. We had most of our clothes off and we cuddled.

Being with Yuri was wonderful. It felt wonderful to be held by him and to caress him. It wasn’t bad or sinful. It was the most natural thing in the world, and I felt no guilt. He wasn’t repelled by me and it felt great to know that he found me attractive. I wanted to stay there forever.

Not only was I sexually attracted to Yuri, but also I felt protected and taken care of by him, like with an older brother. It was easier to think that I was simply looking for a big brother to put his arm around me and protect me from the world than to think of myself as gay. But of course I was, and my feelings for Yuri were both emotional and physical.

That night was the only sustained physical contact I ever had with Yuri. After that, we saw each other periodically at competitions and he always greeted me with a big hug and a kiss. I found the Russians, in general, to be affectionate, but the affection from Yuri was new to me.

Yuri was my first crush, but he was not the only man to catch my eye at the 1976 Olympics. During the opening ceremonies, I wanted to sneak a cigarette. The only other smoker I knew of, Robert Cragg, was talking to this other American. I didn’t know who the other American was, but as I took some drags off Rob’s cigarette, I thought, “God, what a hunk!” I found out later that the handsome hunk was Bruce Jenner. I must have been the only person in the world who didn’t know who Bruce Jenner was.

Long before I met Yuri, I can remember being attracted to men, as far back as age seven or eight. I didn’t understand what it meant, but I knew what my feelings were. At that age, I just assumed that’s how everyone felt.

I remember being very attracted to one of my older cousins and doing everything I could to spend time with him. He was in his teens, with an athletic physique and brown hair. He was taller than I was, but everybody was taller than I was.

I was in acrobatics at that time and I was pretty agile. My cousin would toss me around and hold me up in an arm stand while he was underneath me. It wasn’t as if I was sexually active at that age or even thinking in those terms, but I loved the physical attention and I wanted to be with him as much as possible.

By that age, I was already being called sissy and faggot, but I didn’t associate those names with being attracted to men. All I knew at first was that being a faggot was a bad thing and that there was some type of shame in being one. At some point I asked one of my classmates what a faggot was, and he told me that it was a man who walked and talked like a woman and dressed up in women’s clothing. By the sneering way the words were said, you knew it had to be bad. But sissy and fag were just two of the many sneering things I was called. They all blended together to make me feel that I was truly worthless and had no right to live.

When I was around twelve or thirteen, I began to understand that sissy and fag meant homosexual. I don’t remember how I came to know that, but I knew immediately that it was something to be ashamed of. I don’t remember hearing anything about it from my parents or in church or on television, but I must have, because I knew what it was and I knew it was bad. Now I feared that I was one, but I couldn’t accept it and tried not to think about it.

Before that night with Yuri, I had a few adolescent experiences of playing around with other teenagers, the kind of thing that happens when boys stay over at each other’s houses. I didn’t think anything of it, and neither did the guys I played around with. Most of them are married now, with kids. At the time, I didn’t think of it as sexual, because it was just kind of wrestling and rolling around with our clothes off. It was exploration and experimentation. But I was definitely intrigued and excited by the whole thing. I never told anyone and barely acknowledged to myself what I was doing. If I had, I wouldn’t have been able to dismiss it as just playing around. I wasn’t emotionally prepared at fourteen or fifteen to acknowledge what my real feelings were and what they meant.

However, there was one guy, when I was in my mid-teens, with whom it was definitely more than just playing around. We were both curious and we both enjoyed it, and things got sexual. I’m sure it was a lot more significant to me than it was to him, and for a long time I worried that I “made him” gay. I also introduced him to cigarettes and pot, so I didn’t think of myself as a good influence.

But at that age, I assumed that these feelings were something I’d outgrow, that this was the kind of thing all teenage boys went through. I tried hard to believe that, because I didn’t want to believe that I was gay.

What made things even more confusing was that I found girls attractive. I thought that if you were gay, girls were supposed to repulse you, but that wasn’t the case. I was sexually involved with one girl from a very early age. We began to have sex in junior high school, and she’d kill me if I used her real name, so I’ll call her April Jordan.

We were both twelve years old when we began. We liked to go to the movies, hang out in the canyons, hike, and catch lizards together. There were a lot of houses under construction in the area, and we liked to explore foundations and basements. One day, April found a book called
101 Positions for Sex
. She suggested that we try them, starting with number one. I was still too young to ejaculate but not too young to have intercourse. Also, I was still taking acrobatics at that point, so I could do just about anything. We’d look at the positions and say, “Oh, let’s try this.” I think we got through about ninety of the positions before we lost interest.

It was just something to do after school, something that was a lot more fun than reading. We’d do it just about anywhere we could: in her house, in my house, in the canyon, in the basements of the unfinished houses. This went on for about two years, and the only time my parents almost caught us was in my dad’s office, when we didn’t hear them pull up in the driveway. Fortunately, we were already getting dressed when we heard them walk in the house. We just pretended that we were sitting in my father’s office, talking. From then on, we were careful to listen for the car pulling up in the driveway.

To us, sex wasn’t really a big deal. I don’t think we ever thought of it as lovemaking, although we were wonderful friends. It was like playing duck-duck-goose. It was physical activity, so it was fun, and it had a certain danger, because we knew we weren’t supposed to be doing it. This was for grown-ups. But we didn’t realize the significance of what we were doing. We only knew that we shouldn’t tell anyone about it.

Later, when the heterosexual boys at school began talking about doing it, I came to find out that I was probably the first one to begin “doing it.”

April was the only girl I ever had an extended sexual relationship with, but there were a few other women I had relationships with as I tried to sort out my sexuality. Even when I didn’t have a girlfriend, the sports reporters who wrote about me often made it seem like I did. When I came home from the Olympics, the local newspaper published a big story about my arrival back in El Cajon, including a picture of a friend of mine, whom they identified in the caption as my girlfriend. She and I used to ride horses together and sometimes we kissed, but that was as far as it went. This friend had made it very clear that she was going to wait until she was married. Generally, we had fun doing things together, and eventually I asked her to go steady. I thought that was what I was supposed to do. We went on dates but never had sex, so perhaps we
were
boyfriend and girlfriend, after all.

The only other girl that reporters seemed to speculate about was Megan Neyer, a diver who remains one of my closest friends to this day. We were on the same team, and every four years, in ’80, ’84, and ’88, the sports reporters were suggesting that Megan and I were having a torrid affair. They’d publish photos of us together, with Megan rubbing my shoulders. It was never reported that we were an item, but it was implied, and we didn’t try to discourage the speculation. Megan always thought it was good for my image, and we laughed about the whole thing. But the truth was, Megan and I were incredibly good friends and we did spend a lot of our free time together. It’s just that we spent a lot of time talking together about the guys we were both interested in.

Megan and I also joked about getting married. We talked a lot about how it might hurt me if I came out publicly. She thought it would be a lot better for my image if we got married, but I didn’t think it would fool anyone. Anyway, it was never more than talk, but our kids would have been great divers.