Tom Daley: “Coming out was a liberation”

At the Tokyo Olympics he had bewitched everyone. More for his clean smile and his habit of knitting by the pool, than for his gold in diving, the first 13 years after his first Olympic participation. But for Tom Daley, now an icon of the LGBTQ + community, it has not always been easy. And if in August, with tears in his eyes, he said from the podium “incredibly proud to be able to say that I am gay and that I am an Olympic champion”, in the past he has suffered greatly from having to hide his homosexuality. He revealed it himself in an interview with British GQ: «I came out at 19, it was traumatic but above all it was liberating. Honestly, today, I wish I had done it a long time agoHe said, revealing an adolescence of torment and suffering.

“I started competing at a competitive level very early, I was a kid, but I was already in the spotlight,” he said. for all to see. It was inconceivable for me to even think I could tell someone. Who knows, maybe if I hadn’t been so prominent things would have been different, maybe I would have been able to “free myself” before, but it’s really surreal to have to go through all these torments when you have the eyes of the world on you ».

In 2013, however, Tom met and fell in love with director Dustin Lance Black, today 47 years old, and she found the courage to say it: first to her grandparents (who didn’t take her very well, she told in her autobiography Coming Up for Air: What I Learned from Sport, Fame and Fatherhood, just arrived in the bookstore) and then to the whole world, through her YouTube channel. A gesture that not only made him enter directly into the empyrean of LGBTQ + icons, but above all changed his life, making him feel for the first time himself is free to make his own choices.

That of marrying, in 2016, Dustin, with whom three years ago, with surrogacy, she had little Robbie, and also that of knitting in the Olympic stands before the eyes of the world. A passion that has allowed him to win everyone’s sympathy. And to finish his without trouble Olympic Cardigan, which was then auctioned for charity, allocating the proceeds to an association against brain tumor, a disease of which the father of the champion died in 2011.

.

You may also like