Canadian Swimmer 'Felt Like A Fraud' Before Admitting To Being Gay

MONTREAL, CANADA - After a thrilling gold-medal performance at the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona, Canadian swimmer Mark Tewksbury should have been on top of the world.
He had both the gold and a bronze medal around his neck, he made the cover of Time magazine and he had dozens of lucrative endorsement deals.
But never had Tewksbury felt so alone.
"I felt like a fraud," he recalls.
The strapping swimmer with the movie-star looks had a secret. He was gay and very few knew about it, not even his family.
"Keeping up the image of Canada's boy next door, while feeling a lot like the girl next door, wasn't very easy," Tewksbury writes in his new book, Inside Out: Straight Talk from a Gay Jock.
The book recounts his childhood in the arm-punching world of jocks, through his first kiss, his ensuing effort to keep his sexuality secret and finally, as he puts it, "home sweet homo."
The outspoken athlete, who also won silver at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, as well as 13 national titles, is arguably one of the country's highest-profile gay activists.
He's been inducted into the Canadian Olympic Hall of Fame, the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame and the International Swimming Hall of Fame. This year he's co-president of the first-ever World Outgames, set for Montreal this summer.
But in the years after 1992, Tewksbury struggled.
"From the outside looking in, it appeared that I was living a dream life," he writes.
In real life, he had come out to his family shortly after the Barcelona Games and it didn't go well. Although his mother is now one of his most ardent supporters, it took time.
His first real relationship had fallen apart and he lived in fear of being publicly exposed as a homosexual.
"That just terrified me," he says.
Then, in 1998, Tewksbury lost a six-figure deal as a motivational speaker for a financial institution because he was "too openly gay."
"That was kind of the final slap in the face," he says.
In December 1998, Tewksbury became the first Canadian athlete to voluntarily declare his homosexuality as cameras flashed at a news conference.
The executive director of a prominent gay lobby group praises Tewksbury as a role model for gays and athletes.
"It's one thing to have a gay theatre director," says Gilles Marchildon of EGALE Canada. "It's sort of accepted.
"It's quite another to have an openly gay athlete. There are gay athletes and Mark is proof of that. We hear less about them because there is, still, a lower tolerance level in professional sports."
As for Tewksbury, the very thing that once caused him such fear is now seen in a different light.
"Who knows? If I hadn't been gay, would I have been so driven to have success in swimming?" he asks.
Inside Out, his second book, will be launched at Montreal's Blue Metropolis Literary Festival Thursday and will be available across the country April 20.
from The London Free Press