Gay gymnasts
Danell Leyva
There is just something about the gymnastic body….
After two-time Olympic gymnast Danell Leyva came out as gay, I was reminded of just how much I love watching gymnastics. The theatrics and fun, the show of athletic prowess, the hint of true threat with every mistimed flip, there’s just nothing like it.
And it doesn’t injure that all the men of professional gymnastics are just so HOT! Every curve, every muscle, every inch of their bodies holds tales of the years they’ve insert into the sport and themselves. And honey, IT SHOWS!
So in honor of Leyva (and honestly, just for a bit of fun), here are some pictures of professional male gymnasts.
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https://www.instagram.com/p/CH
By Joey Bonanno
When you envision a superior athlete, the descriptive words that might come to brain include strength, force, masculinity and grit. Every young runner aspires to own these qualities. But when you’re plagued with stereotypes and stigmas of what it means to be gay, many young athletes turn into scared to be who they are, to follow their dream. I accept the fear of non-acceptance from one’s family and team; along with the desire to safeguard the reputation of one’s sport is a driving drive behind the hesitance of gay athletes to come out.
I remember the night I asked my mom to indicate me up for gymnastics. I was doing cartwheels and running around my mom’s dance studio. I had an obsession with backflips and was determined to learn one. Little did I know my craving to learn a backflip would soon turn into so much more. It soon became my life, my love and the essence of who I am today. I come from a family of four, born and raised in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. I was blessed with incredible parents, my mother, a dance studio owner and my father, a musician. With the influence of an artistic family, the value of passion was always in my blood. Growing up in one of the most diffic
(This story was published in 2005).
Openly gay collegiate gymnast Graham Ackerman won the national championship in the floor exercise at the 2005 Men’s Collegiate Gymnastics Championships at West Signal, N.Y.. Six different gymnasts in all were crowned national champions in the six events: floor train, pommel horse, rings, vault, horizontal bar and parallel bars.
While Ackerman was thrilled that his 9.600 edged out the 9.587 posted by Iowa’s Michael McNamara, he rolled his eyes about his performance after the meet.
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Last year, Ackerman won the national championship with a 9.687; his career best was 9.775 in 2002. Ackerman also finished 10th in the horizontal bar after he disoriented his grip and had to dismount halfway through his routine and finished with an 8.812.
The back-to-back national champion had one of the loudest cheering sections in the arena, with his parents and teammates cheering on “Ack” as he flipped and tumbled on the floor.
West Point
Staging the event at West Point see
When Kalyany Steele, a senior on UCLA’s famed gymnastics team, was growing up, she didn’t comprehend any other queer gymnasts. “Queerness was never really normalized in women’s gymnastics,” she explains.
“It made [coming out] feel like a very big thing. It was much more nerve-racking that way.” In Spring 2020, during Steele’s first season at UCLA, only one athlete competing in women’s collegiate gymnastics, Michigan State University’s Ella Douglas, was publicly out.
But things were changing in women’s college gymnastics. In February 2020, the UCLA gymnastics team lay on its first Pride connect. The team advertised the encounter through a now-iconic video in which gymnasts performed leaps, splits and dips while holding the Pride flag and yelling “Gay rights!” Pauley Pavilion, UCLA’s indoor sports arena, was decked out in flags from the LGBTQ2S+ community.” Team members from both Arizona, the visiting team, and UCLA, wore rainbow ribbons in their hair, and whenever a UCLA gymnast stuck her routine, her teammates draped a Event flag over her shoulders.
For Steele, the Pride meet was a turning point. She came out to her teammates as pansexual at the last practice before the meet. A