It All Started In Munich - 1. Chapter 1

In the fall of 1972 it first began to gel in my mind that I wasn't sexually wired in the conventional way. I was thirteen years old and just starting ninth grade at a small suburban high school in Canada. The proximate cause of my mental unease, the Patient Zero, so to speak, of my emerging sexuality, was Mark Spitz, the American swimmer who was then competing in the Olympic Games in Munich.

Spitz won seven gold medals in Munich, then a world record. His image was everywhere: on TV, in the newspapers, even on boxes of breakfast cereal. At school, where the Olympic Games were always a big deal, his dark brown eyes gazed at me from the bulletin boards in health class and, like the Mona Lisa, seemed to follow me around the room. When I came home at the end of the day he was on the living room coffee table staring at me from the cover of Time magazine.

He was, like all competitive swimmers, lean and muscular, and his dark hair, swarthy good looks, and porn-star moustache haunted me. His tanned olive skin looked like caramel, and in the days when kids had to surreptitiously sneak peeks at the underwear section of the Sears catalogue for cheap thrills, his skimpy Speedo bathing suit was downright indecent, like soft-core porn. I couldn't take my eyes off him.

I remember feeling vaguely uneasy about being so obsessed with images of a semi-nude man. While other teenagers were gazing wistfully at posters of Raquel Welch in her One Million Years BC fur bikini on their bedroom walls, I was staring intently at images in a news magazine of a man wearing a skimpy bathing suit. That was unsettling to me, but like all boys my age I was self-conscious about my body; I justified it as research. If I worked out and ate properly, I could have a body like that too, right? What straight guy wouldn't want that? Mark Spitz was a motivational tool – that didn't necessarily make me gay. I hid the magazine under my mattress only because people might get the wrong idea.

In the middle of the games, terrorists kidnapped and murdered eleven athletes from the Israeli Olympic team. I stayed up late all by myself on the night they were killed, watching ABC Sports reporter Jim McKay covering the events. Early in the morning he announced solemnly, "We just got the final word ... you know, when I was a kid, my father used to say 'Our greatest hopes and our worst fears are seldom realized.' Our worst fears have been realized tonight. They've now said that there were eleven hostages. Two were killed in their rooms yesterday morning, nine were killed at the airport tonight. They're all gone." It was shocking.

But central to that tragedy, in my mind, was Mark Spitz. He had completed his events already, but he was Jewish, and after the killings he was quickly spirited out of Munich and back to the US for fear that he would be a target. He reminded me of a comic book character – Aquaman, maybe; not only was he ridiculously sexy but he was in danger and at the centre of a nefarious plot. He arrived back in America to a hero's welcome, and for a few months he was everywhere: on every talk show, in every magazine. There was an election taking place in the US that November, but for a few weeks nobody cared about Nixon or McGovern – it was all about Spitz.

Then in December That Picture appeared. In Life magazine's "Year In Pictures" edition was a full-page photo of Spitz wearing nothing but his Speedo, his seven gold medals arrayed on his hairless chest, his sly smile under his 'stache suggesting disturbing things to me. I was obsessed with that picture. I stared at it for hours and memorized every detail of his body: his nipples, his muscles, the little tufts just visible in his armpits, the faint trace of hair that had escaped the razor and led down from his belly button, down relentlessly into that Speedo. His hands were casually placed on his hips, fingers suggestively framing the bulge in his swim suit – oh what I would have done for a glimpse behind that fabric. He had been carefully padded for the photo so as not to reveal any indecent outlines, but I knew what was lurking beneath that bathing suit. I would lie awake at night, right hand busy, fantasizing about That Picture.

Looking back now I think it's amusing that for years as an adult I clung to the hope that I was straight when as a young teenager I was jerking off to pictures of Mark Spitz. I can laugh about it now, but at the time each session with Life magazine left me confused and full of self-loathing. I grew up with the pervasive homophobia that was typical of the time and place, and the last thing I wanted was to be gay. Mark Spitz and his damned bathing suit caused me a lot of mental anguish, implying things about me that I was afraid to confront. It took me a long time to get myself sorted out.

Spitz is 64 years old now and still looks good. I see pictures of him occasionally, including That Picture, and am instantly transported back to that confusing time of my early youth. I bought a copy of that issue of Life on eBay a few years ago to keep as a souvenir of that time. I have a fantasy that someday I'll meet him in real life and get him to autograph That Picture, and I'll say, “I was a big fan of yours during the Munich Olympics.” He'll have no idea.