Swimmers are gay
Pride Month: Swimming's Dan Jervis and curling's Bruce Mouat in conversation
Dan publicly came out as gay on 29 June 2022, showing the nature his authentic self after years of being lost about his sexuality.
In this unfiltered conversation, Bruce and Dan trade sporting stories, share their coming out experiences and talk about the importance of self-acceptance.
Dan: I guess long distance swimming chose me. My grandad was actually the one that taught me to swim, so, I owe all my triumph to him. But when I first moved to Swansea, I wasn't a long-distance freestyler, I did 200 backstroke and 400 individual medley. However, my coach identified that I was quite good coaching long metres, so he entered me into a race, very much against my will. Now I can say it fortunately went well and I progressed from there.
But how did you get into your sport? I would love to curl, I watched it during Sochi 2014 with my grandad.
Bruce: My dad was really interested in the sport, and he saw a newspaper article about a club. So, he took my brother along and I went to see until I was allowed to go on the ice. None of my f
Dan Jervis: 'I yearn to be that role model for someone' - swimmer opens up on being gay
In the small village of Resolven where Jervis grew up, rugby rules.
But from the moment his grandparents took him to the local pool, swimming was the sport for him.
"My claim to fame is that I could do 10 metres without armbands when I was one," Jervis laughs.
"Swimming was my interest. It was the thing I'd gelled to and felt safe in, and I loved that when I went to university, there weren't any other swimmers I knew of. This sounds so horrible, but I wasn't the most academic and I loved having something that I was excel at than the others.
"If you'd asked me 18 years ago, my dream was always to go to the Olympics and win an Olympic gold medal - and it still is now."
The Welshman achieved the first part of that dream in 2021, although as all the Olympians in Tokyo set up, preparation wasn't straightforward. As the Covid pandemic caused the Games to be delayed for a year, Jervis had to adapt his training.
"It was probably the most stressful few months of my entire life," Jervis admits.
"The pools had shut, I'd moved home to
Swimming made me gay.
That’s not true, but I like the way it sounds. It finally lets me combine the words and the water, the sport and sexuality, that have made up my life, that have engulfed and carried me.
The first person to phone me a lesbian was the mother of one of the girls on my swim team growing up. The girl lived up the hill and around the corner, and sometimes we carpooled together, inventing songs in the back seat. On warm days after early morning practices we wasted time watching educational cartoons, and hiding from her older brother and his guitar. Was that something like a crush?
One day, not so different from the rest, we decorated our plastic team water bottles with permanent marker. We wrote out all the usual slogans: Eat my BUBBLES! Swim FAST!! Strike BUTT!!! And, inside a heart, my neighbor wrote our initials, with a little plus subscribe nestled in between.
That was her crime. Or rather, my crime. Her mother called mine, after scrubbing off the marker with acid, and yelled. I didn’t absorb about this phone call until years later, so I can only imagine how it went. “How dare you let your lesbian daughter in my property, in the locker room, in the pool with other gi
Competitive Swimmers Who Are LGBTQ
Competitive swimming is a high profile sport in organized competitions and its successful athletes are equally high profile. So how does the LGBTQ collective fit into this sport?
Despite its image of a relatively straightforward and non-impact sport, the competitive swimming planet is individualistic with a very macho, gender-binary, testosterone-driven homophobia. This assessment can be drawn from the many autobiographies and memoirs written by out LGBTQ individuals who detail the agony they had in the closet prior to coming out. The notion of catching AIDS by swimming in the matching water as an infected individual is an infamous example of ignorance surrounding this disease in the sport. Strict bathing suit styles and locker room dynamics play a large role in the culture of the sport.
To counter this unwelcoming environment, many local LGBTQ swim clubs have been formed with numerous inter-club competitive events, especially at the Masters level of match. The success of the Gay Games has been a big boost to LGBTQ competitive participation in the sport. The challenge for the LGBT competitor participating outside of the LGBTQ com