One local college sports club is turning the stereotype about the intersection of gays and sports on its head.
Gay athletes are certainly no oxymoron at Temple University, whose 21-member men’s gymnastics team contains three out students.
While each of the trio — junior Evan Burke and sophomores John Gaffney and Dash Sears — had a unique coming-out experience, they all agree that the environment of the team and the university allows them to flourish.
Evan Burke, junior
Burke, 22, first got involved in gymnastics at age 6. The son of a football coach, Burke and his family moved throughout the country during his childhood, before his parents divorced and he spent the 10 years before college living in New York City.
As a child, Burke said there was a three-year span during which he left gymnastics because of its grueling impact on his daily life.
“I had to dedicate myself as a kid to 20 hours a week or more in the gym,” he said. “After school, my mom drove me an hour to and from the gym, and I’d get home around 11 o’clock at night, and I’d be doing my homework in the car.”
During that break, however, Burke said he couldn’t ignore the pull he felt for the sport.
“When it’s gone, it really feels like a big piece of your life is missing,” he said.
Another big piece of his life, his sexuality, emerged when he came out at age 16. Living in New York City at that time, he said coming out was a complete non-issue at school, on his gymnastics team and with his family.
“My mom loved it,” he said. “She cried and actually said she was praying I’d be gay because of the whole ‘a gay son will never leave his mother’ thing. And my dad’s been cool, too. He lives up in Canada so I don’t see him that often, but every time I do he asks if I have a new boyfriend. I really haven’t faced any adversity from anyone I know — sure, you can get it from strangers sometimes — but everyone in my life has been really respectful.”
John Gaffney, sophomore
Gaffney, 20, also had a similar coming-out experience.
“I came out my senior year of high school, and I don’t know why I waited so long because everyone was like, ‘That’s fine, we’ll support you no matter what.’ They were all for it,” he said. “People kept just asking questions and were actually interested.”
Gaffney was a member of a private gymnastics club, as his high school in suburban Boston only had a girls’ team and, despite his initial fears, his teammates were especially understanding.
“I actually waited to tell them until very last because I was expecting it to be this big blowout and people to really have a problem,” he said, adding that “they were all just like, ‘OK, that’s cool, no problem.’”
Gaffney first entered the gymnastics world at age 5, an activity his parents hoped would quell some of his natural spiritedness.
“I was always a hyperactive kid, and my parents wanted me to get that energy out, so they put me in gymnastics,” he said. “I only did two pre-school classes before they moved me up. I guess I was a natural.”
That high energy has come in handy, Gaffney said.
The feat of trying to balance classes, practices and workouts is a skill Gaffney said he’s honed over the past 15 years.
“It’s one of the most stressful things you can ever think of,” he said. “But we’ve all been doing this since we were little, so we’ve had experience. But college is another whole level: It’s a 24-hour commitment. I have to schedule time to sleep.”
Dash Sears, sophomore
Fellow sophomore Sears agreed.
“Any student athlete will tell you that on the outside you’re supposed to be students first and athletes second, but gymnastics is a sport that you have to commit so much of yourself to, that we’re more or less athletes first and students second,” he said.
Sears, 20, is a native of Hanover, and has been a gymnast for nearly 18 years.
“My parents sent me when I was younger and just kept sending me and it grew on me,” he said. “I liked the feeling of being able to jump in the air and run around and twist and stretch. And then just the more I did it, it became this natural progression.”
Sears said his coming-out process was also rather organic.
While he had already accepted his own identity before coming to college and living as an out student, he said that wasn’t something he was able to completely embrace while in high school.
“Central Pennsylvania is very conservative,” he said. “It’s not a place for those to be out in the open. There are some openly gay people from where I’m from, but they’re often more or less shunned. People will interact with them, but it’s not the same as it is here. They’re treated differently and they have to adapt; people do, but it’s hard.”
He said his family has been supportive and, even if he had grown up in a more LGBT-friendly environment, he was always too busy with gymnastics to have time for much else.
“I wasn’t really in tune with my community back home because it’s very right-wing conservative, but I was always on the road for competitions anyway,” he said. “I only went to school for school. My life was really in the gym, school and home. I didn’t go to parties or volunteer at places or things like that because gymnastics was really my life.”
Team dynamic
Burke was the only out member of the team when he started at Temple in 2008. But he said, even without the comfort of having other out teammates, he never felt intimidated.
Once Sears and Gaffney joined, the three became friends, but not to the exclusion of the other team members.
Gaffney said their teammates have at times gone out of their way to exhibit that they’re fine with their sexual orientation.
“They’re so comfortable that they sometimes do stuff that makes us a little uncomfortable,” Gaffney joked. “Sometimes we have to be like, OK guys, we get it, calm it down a bit.”
Burke added the team frequently jokes that the three are among the “straightest-acting on the team.”
Local attorney Brian Sims, who was the first openly gay football captain in the history of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, has traveled the country since 2009, telling his own story to college athletic communities in an attempt to raise awareness about the issues many LGBT student athletes face.
He said it’s not uncommon for a college campus to have at least one openly gay athlete, but that three LGBT students on a team as small as the gymnastics club is rather unusual — as is the level of support they’ve seen from the university. Yet, he noted, the student athlete population is largely leaning toward acceptance.
“We know statistically that this younger generation of Americans treats these issues differently than older generations,” he said. “The fact that these guys’ teammates not only accept them but celebrate the fact that they have three gay teammates is something that we’re starting to see more and more in this age group.”
Sears noted the sport is also one that traditionally has embraced gay athletes.
“There have been a lot of European gymnasts who are openly gay and flamboyant and they were in the spotlight, not for being gay, but for how amazing they were at what they did,” Sears said. “It was never a really big thing, and I think that idea’s starting to come around in America.”
Sims said the notion that the sports world is wholly homophobic is a misconception, largely promulgated by those who have little experience with team sports.
“People who actually play on a team understand that this is a network, a family. People who just watch team sports expect the whole butch, macho thing to take over, but I think that’s often more just the perception of people who haven’t actually played team sports.”
Burke said that team mentality is what keeps him committed to the sport day after day.
“Everyone on the team puts everything they have into this sport more for other people than for themselves. We all feel like brothers, like a family,” he said. “This is a job, and everyone needs to treat it professionally so it’s not like everyone coming here to hang out. It’s not a social thing, it’s a career choice.”
As much as the students pour into the sport, however, they don’t neglect their studies: Last semester, the men’s gymnastics team had the highest GPA of all the campus sports teams.
Sears noted that the ability to multi-task is something they’ve honed throughout their sports careers in order to keep gymnastics front and center in their lives.
“If we’re not here, doing gymnastics, it’s like something’s missing. If we’re injured or something, we’ll still come in and condition. It’s just something we’ve lived with all of our lives. It’s second nature to us.”
The Temple men’s gymnastics team will compete in its first home match against Army and Penn State at 1 p.m. Jan. 30 at Temple’s McGonigle Hall, 1801 N. Broad St.