Trey Cunningham publicly came out, making him one of the few openly queer male athletes competing at such a high level.
Cunningham, described by the New York Times as “one of the world’s best hurdlers” and ranked 11th in the world in hurdles, just publicly came out as gay after coming out privately five years ago in phone calls to his friends and family. He describes these calls as the “scariest thing I’ve ever done” in his interview with the Times.
Initially, he struggled with the idea of being gay, mostly due to his background, which is relatable to many queer people. Cunningham grew up in Winfield, Alabama, which he described as “rural, quite conservative, quite religious: the sort of place where you did not want to be the gay kid at school. So I had certain expectations of what my life would look like, and it took me a little while to get my head around it looking different to that.” After high school, he ran at Florida State, a college within the state that is at the forefront of anti-LGBTQ+ policies.
To his surprise, many of the reactions to his coming out were positive, or neutral at the very least, with the exception of his parents, who responded with some pushback and hesitation. “I gave them a five-year grace period. I had to take my time. They could take theirs, too,” Cunningham tells the Times.
Cunningham hopes that his coming out helps encourage other queer male athletes to feel more comfortable with coming out, telling US Weekly that he wants to help “push the needle forward that it’s OK. This is normal.”
While other male athletes have come out as queer after retiring or at the ends of their careers, very few are openly out while still active. An example of another openly out, active male athlete is NFL player Carl Nassib, who came out two years before he retired from the NFL on Instagram.
Here’s to hoping that these few out gay male athletes inspire a wave of other queer athletes to come out, and that they are able to feel comfortable doing so.
Photo courtesy of social media
