Breaking the Surface by Greg Louganis

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