Coming Out for Athletes - 2. Underage coming out

The next time I considered coming out to someone was with my curling team.

For people who haven’t been curling before, it’s a winter sport played on a long sheet of ice, where each member of the team takes turns sliding a 42 pound granite rock towards a target at the far end of the sheet. It’s more involved than that, but that’s unimportant. The only important thing to know is that there’s only four members to a curling team, so you really get to know your team and can’t hide anything from them, especially once you’ve played with them for awhile.

This story takes us back to when I was a seventeen year old high school senior. I played on both my high school team, and a separate competitive team that I spent much more time with because of the number of games and practices I had. This meant that most of my spare time away from homework and school was with these gentlemen.

One day, early in the season, my teammate Taylor and I arrived early to the rink to start throwing stones before the rest of the team showed up. Taylor was a new addition to the team; Brian, Oliver and I had been playing together in some fashion for a few years now, but we only just added Taylor to the team a few weeks ago, so I wanted to get to know him better. I still hadn’t told the rest of the team, since I felt they wouldn’t handle it well, but something about Taylor made me think he’d be okay with it.

At the time, I was a willowy weed of a person. At nearly six feet tall, I was taller than most of my peers and nearly all of the other curlers. What I had in height, I lacked in musculature and body mass, which had its advantages too. I could squeeze between things that other people wouldn’t be able to fit in, but otherwise I looked for all the world like I wasn’t fed very much or very often.

Taylor, on the other hand, was a tank. Taller than I am, my head didn’t quite reach up to his eyes, so I had to look up in order to get a read on what the blond was thinking or saying. He was built like a freight train, all muscles all the time, with a bit to spare for someone who only played curling as their sport.

To look at him, he’s probably the person I should be least interested in telling that I was gay. After all, if he wanted to I’m quite sure he could dribble me like a basketball without too much difficulty, passing over the fact that I wouldn’t be the most cooperative basketball in the world. However, I knew he was new to the team and wanted to get it out of the way, maybe if he was okay with it then I could tell everyone else, and if not… well, he was only here for a year maybe, we’d just find someone new.

We had thrown our rocks down to the other end of the sheet and were getting ready to throw back when I pulled him off to the corner of the building and said I had something to tell him. We were both in our full curling gear, so I kept a tight grip on my broom in case it was needed for any reason other than sweeping and balancing my curling slide.

I was nervous, so I stalled for time by making pointless small talk that I’m sure Taylor saw right through anyways.

“So, Taylor, how are you liking playing with us? Different from the last team you were on?” I uselessly fished, sort of hoping he’d say something nice about us so that it gave me a confidence boost, and yet also knowing that this had nothing to do with what I actually wanted to tell him.

Confidence wasn’t something that he lacked, however.

“Yeah, you guys seem pretty cool. Nice to be back on a competitive team, that’s for sure.”

I started shifting my feet awkwardly, and Taylor looked at me, wondering why we were wasting time instead of getting a few extra practice rocks in. I took a deep breath and decided to go for broke.

“I just wanted to let you know I’m gay, and I hope that’s not a big deal for you.” I quickly said, and then rushed off to settle into the hack and throw my first stone down the sheet.

As I was standing at the side of my sheet, watching my rock and eventually Taylor’s rock slide down the sheet, I felt someone slide in behind me. I knew it was Taylor, but I didn’t want to look at him right that minute, even though I knew I’d have to get past him to get my next rock ready to throw.

“It’s okay you know, doesn’t change anything. You don’t have to make a big deal out of it.” I heard him say.

I turned towards him and saw that he still had his usual goofy grin on his face, and that things actually hadn’t changed all that much. He was right. People often were looking to me for cues on how to act when I come out to them. If I make a big deal out of it, they tend to as well. I didn’t know that at the time, but Taylor taught me a valuable lesson that I continue to use whenever I have to come out to someone.

We both threw the rest of our rocks back down to the home sheet of ice and waited for the rest of the team and our coach to arrive. As we were practicing, I’d catch Taylor watching me, sort of checking up on me to make sure that I was acting normally and wasn’t letting our little conversation rattle me too much. We became much closer as teammates, and I was sad to see him leave at the end of the season.

As for my other teammates… I never did get around to telling these particular teammates, and a couple of years later we broke apart and went to pursue other things. I stayed curling and bounced around between teams, and found that coming out was getting easier as I got older.

I regret not telling that junior team in its entirety, but I’ve told other teams and everyone has normally just treated it like it’s one other aspect of who I was as a person. No matter the sport, everyone I’ve come out to has respected me as an athlete, and very little normally changes.