Breaking the Surface (12 page)

Not long after I got back from the Olympics, I got involved in a relationship with a man for the first time. I was still confused about my attraction to men, but after my experience with Yuri, I longed to be held by a man again. The problem was, I had no idea where to meet other gay people. There wasn’t exactly a gay teen center in El Cajon in 1976. There was no place I could meet other gay kids like me, no place to sort out my conflicts over my sexuality, and no way to start going out on dates with boys my age.

So, because I couldn’t find other gay people, someone found me. During the fall semester of high school in 1976, my classes ended shortly after noon, and I’d gather up my books and drive to the beach. I told myself I was going to do my schoolwork there, but I rarely opened a book.

One afternoon a few weeks into the semester, this guy at the beach kept staring at me. He looked very similar to a guy who worked at the pool, rather attractive, in his late thirties, with brown hair and a stocky build. He looked similar enough to the guy I knew that I went over to talk to him. He told me his name, which I didn’t recognize, and then he asked if I wanted to get a drink at his place, a Coke or an iced tea. I told myself that he was just being nice, but I thought he was attractive and in the back of my mind I hoped that something
would
happen, so I went. At that point, I still couldn’t admit to myself that this was what I wanted. I couldn’t deal with what that would mean about me.

He wanted me to go with him in his car, but I suggested that I follow him in my car to his house. I was smart enough to know that I’d better take my own car, smart enough not to get myself into a situation where I might be stranded.

During the drive there, my mind was racing with different thoughts: Should I really do this? Is this proper? What if I’m caught? What does he really want? Is he just being nice, or is he a murderer? Nevertheless, I was intrigued and curious and attracted, and I was not turning back.

We got to his place, a nice two-story town house, and we went in and sat down in his living room. We talked for a while and he got me something to drink. At some point he said, “Let me show you around the place,” and eventually we ended up in his bedroom. He put his arms around me and kissed me. I really liked being held, and I was thrilled that this guy found me attractive.

While it was happening, I enjoyed what we were doing, but afterward, I felt guilty and ashamed for having had sex with a man. On the one hand, it felt right; I was attracted to men, I wanted to be held, and I enjoyed being physical with a man. But on the other hand, it felt wrong; sex between two men was a sin according to my church. It upset me that he was so much older, not because I felt molested or anything—I had been a more-thanwilling participant—but the difference in our ages somehow made the experience even more shameful. But where could I go to meet gay people my own age?

Before I left, he gave me his phone number. Of course, I didn’t give him mine. I told him that I lived with my parents and that it would be a very bad situation for me if they found out. It didn’t occur to me that it also might be a bad situation for him, given my age. On the drive home I could smell his scent on me. I worried that my mother would know I had been with a man. As soon as I got home, I jumped in the shower and scrubbed myself clean.

Over the next six months, we got together maybe a dozen times. I’d stop on my way to the beach and call him and ask if I could come by. If he wasn’t home, I’d go to the beach and sometimes I’d run into him there. At some point he told me he was concerned about seeing me because I was under eighteen. Apparently, he’d been jailed in the past for picking up minors.

I thought that over time I’d feel less ashamed about what I was doing, but it only got worse. The age difference bothered me more, and he couldn’t exactly be a part of my life. I felt stupid telling him what I was doing at school, and I couldn’t introduce him to any of my classmates. I hated the separateness and the secrecy, but I kept going back for the affection, the holding, the cuddling—more those than the sex. I was starved for affection, and he was happy to give it to me.

I know that plenty of gay men and lesbians can tell stories about having had similar experiences with older men and women when they were teenagers. Most will tell you that they were willing participants. But age of consent is nonetheless a volatile issue among gay people, just as it is among heterosexuals, especially because of the persistent myth that gay men are by definition child molesters. The truth, of course, is that the vast majority of child molesters are the male heterosexual members of a child’s family.

Given a choice, I would have preferred to meet and date someone close to me in age. But as for most gay and lesbian teenagers, even today, there were no places for me to meet my peers. If there were more opportunities for gay and lesbian teens to meet one another, perhaps fewer of them would find themselves seeking refuge in the arms of adult lovers. That said, I don’t regret the affection I exchanged with this man.

I don’t regret any affection I exchanged, ever.

G
OING BACK HOME AND
returning to Valhalla High School in the fall of 1976 was a big adjustment for me. I’d been at Santa Ana High School for the spring semester, living with Dr. Lee and his family, training for the Olympics. Now I was home again, and there was no way to go back to the way things had been. I had left Valhalla an invisible person and I returned a hero. Now everyone wanted to be my friend, but I didn’t know whom to trust. Sure, I wanted friends, but not the kind who wanted to be around me only because I’d won a medal. From that point on, I could never tell if someone liked me for myself or for who they thought I was.

I’m also shy, and it seemed easier to keep to myself. My parents had gotten me a car when I went to live with Dr. Lee, so now as soon as classes were over, I would hightail it out to the beach. Some people at school thought I was snobbish, that I thought I was too good for them, but that wasn’t it. The new attention was more than I could handle, and I needed to get away.

Nevertheless, I still got involved in school activities and managed to have a pretty good time. I began coaching the men’s and women’s diving team, and I also helped coach women’s gymnastics. Despite what I may have thought of myself, and despite what they may have thought of me, my classmates voted me best dressed, best dancer, as well as best physique. I liked the attention, but it was more than a little embarrassing. And it always felt like they admired someone else, that if they knew the real me, they’d take it all back.

I continued training with Dr. Lee and going to diving competitions, but I began to have trouble with my back. Shortly after I started diving again that fall, I was doing a routine dive—an arm stand, cut through reverse one-and-a-half—and I came up short of vertical, which meant I was going to enter the water on an angle. That would have cost me points, so I tried to pull it in, and the combination of being out of alignment and the impact of the water compressed my back and threw it into a spasm. For the rest of the year, there were days when I could dive and others when the pain was too much. There were even some weeks when I couldn’t get in the pool at all. Not being able to dive got me really down.

By the summer of 1977 most of the pain was gone and I was finally getting into a normal training routine, but I reinjured my back at a diving exhibition in Greenwich, Connecticut. We were on our way to Europe for competitions in Sweden, Austria, and Italy. To give my back a rest, I didn’t compete in Sweden, but after that I had to dive through the pain.

By that point in my career, diving with pain was nothing new, certainly not a reason not to dive. For every athlete who competes at a world-class level, pain just goes along with the territory. A back problem is a different story, because there were times when I simply couldn’t move the way I needed to and I had to rest.

Over the years I have had plenty of painful injuries, from badly gashing my shin and severely spraining my wrists to dislocating my shoulder and, of course, hitting my head on both the three-meter springboard and the ten-meter platform. Routine injuries are no big deal, but diving can be an unforgiving sport.

Probably the scariest thing for a diver is getting lost in your dive. That’s when you lose sight of your spots and you don’t know where you are as you’re spinning in the air. When that happens, you don’t know if you’re going to land on your head, your back, or your face.

I only got lost in a dive a few times, but one time I remember really well was at Belmont Plaza in Long Beach. I was doing a front three-and-a-half. As I came out of the dive, I stretched for what I thought was the water, but it turned out that as I was spinning, I’d confused a wall of windows for the surface of the pool. So instead of hitting the water hands first, I landed flat on my face and stomach.

When I landed, it didn’t just hurt, it was a shock, because I wasn’t expecting it. It’s very disorienting, because you think you know where you are, but you don’t, and the only way you find out is when you slam into the water.

Another time, in New Zealand, I was doing an inward threeand-a-half. I came out of the dive, and instead of stretching for the water, again I stretched for the windows on the far side of the pool. I went a quarter of a turn too far, to a perfect three and
three quarters,
and I landed flat on my back. I couldn’t breathe and all I could see were stars—just like in the cartoons.

Getting lost in your dive is always scary and painful, but the injuries from doing a back flop off a ten-meter platform are usually just a few welts, some split skin, and a bruised ego. But two experiences I had with the ten-meter platform really drove home how unforgiving diving could be.

In 1979 I was at a U.S./USSR dual meet in Tbilisi. I was doing a reverse dive pike on the ten-meter platform, and I don’t know if it was the soft cushioning on the platform that I wasn’t used to or I was just trying a little too hard to do a perfect dive, but I jumped off the platform, brought my legs up and touched my toes, and saw the sun through my legs. That’s the last thing I remember. Apparently, I hit the back of my head solidly on the platform and was knocked unconscious.

I landed flat on my back in the water. Megan saw the whole thing, and at first she thought I was dead. If not for the soft cushioning covering the concrete platform, I probably would have been dead. They had to go into the pool and get me out.

Megan watched from the side of the pool as they pulled me out, and she said I was lucky I hadn’t broken my neck, because they weren’t careful getting me out of the pool. These days, with that kind of injury, the procedure is to keep the diver in the water until you’ve got a backboard under him and have secured his head, just in case he’s broken his neck.

I was knocked out for twenty minutes, and when I came to, I was on a stretcher in a waiting room adjacent to the pool. I thought I was watching cartoons running backward, because I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying. Actually, I couldn’t because everyone was speaking Russian. I thought for sure that my mom was there, shaking me and offering me some peanut butter cookies. I smelled something that smelled exactly like my mom’s peanut butter cookies.

When the fog cleared a bit, I realized that Mom wasn’t there. It was a Russian nurse, stroking my forehead. I looked around and saw other nurses, but I couldn’t understand what they were doing there. When I heard somebody announce Bruce Kimball’s next dive, I realized where I was: in the middle of the competition. Naturally, I tried to get up and get ready for my next dive. The nurses gently pushed me down and told me to relax. Jane Ward, one of the American divers there with me, calmly told me that I was finished for the day and that I was lucky I wasn’t finished for life. If I’d been doing a reverse two-and-a-half or three-and-ahalf, dives with tremendous momentum, I could have been killed.

The nurses tried to give me a sedative. They handed me a little cup with a liquid in it and told me to drink it, that it would make me calm, but I thought, “No way—not in Russia.” It was only then that I started to understand what had happened; I was out of the competition. I’d already won in three-meter springboard, after our coach, Dick Kimball, had told us that a foreigner would never win in Russia. Like many Americans, he believed that Soviet judges would favor the Russian divers.

I could have won on platform—I was in the lead—but there was no way they were going to let me get back on the platform after that. For all they knew, I might have fractured my skull.

Once I was conscious, they took me on the stretcher in an ambulance to a hospital. Jane Ward, who had a nursing background, and Dick Kimball came with me. There was no team doctor or trainer with us in Russia.

The Soviet X-ray equipment was so old that it looked like something out of a Frankenstein movie. They X-rayed my skull and didn’t find a fracture, but there was a big bump on the back of my head from where I’d hit the platform. The doctors were sure that I had a concussion, but they weren’t sure how serious. So they wanted to keep me in the hospital for observation, in case there were any complications, like convulsions. Jane objected to their keeping me overnight, so I was taken back to the hotel. Several people, including Megan, stayed with me all night. For most of that time, we talked and played cards.