THE PIONEERING ATHLETE WHO LED THE WAY FOR TODAY’S GAY ATHLETES | INSPIRED CITIZEN AND BOB PARIS

i feel in my own life like i didn't i wasn't born with that little thing that would allow me to be closeted i was a guy who left home at a relatively early age lived out of my car sacrificed for what i wanted was goal oriented and very driven and so i sort of approached my own personal life in much the same way god why not just stay in in the closet i mean your bodybuilding mr universe you fall in love and uh when rod and i met we we found found a spiritual bond between each other and you develop this relationship and this uh move toward marriage and you find that if you bastardize it and you stick it back in your back pocket where no one can see it then pretty soon you chip away pieces of that bit by bit until you have absolutely nothing left so i wanted to just start with a question about what's happening now something that's happening now which is the caitlyn jenner story um just on the cover of vanity fair this huge moment for the transgender community could you have imagined this in 1989 when you came out i'd been living out for years before i came out in the media and the only reason i hadn't done an interview before that is there was just no no one would you know you couldn't people thought they were protecting you by not doing it and so it'd be very difficult to imagine that story playing out in a way that wasn't treated as a joke in the 1980s when you're at the height of your career what did you go through as a gay athlete from the time i came out to myself at around 21 i very quickly came out to everyone my family my friends the people who ran my sport i wanted to be very upfront as i was and this was very early in my career but there was this expectation that family friends and people you do business with is one thing but to the public there was this level of discretion that you were supposed to have i feel as if i fell into a generation in between one generation earlier and i may have been comfortable with the closet and the generation that came after me sort of just took it for granted when people would come out in the media when you came out 1989 the los angeles times said that 70 percent of americans thought that homosexuality was a sin right so being at the forefront or right when your career was starting to gain momentum where did the bravery come from to live an open life rather personally or publicly i mean weren't you afraid that something was going to happen that would destroy your career i was there were there were certainly those fears i had already just talked openly in a very sort of nonchalant way in interviews even before and it always got that part of the interview always was pulled so there was no media outlet it was hard to find one that would tell your story yes how did the iron man article happen i just talked it through with them and i and the the the writer lonnie teeper was a a friend also and so we just decided to treat the information in a very sort of respectful way and um you know little did i know after that i had hadn't even really thought of it up until that point but that i was you know when that came out i was going to be the first pro athlete in any sport who came out and still was active in his sport did you know at that time give any idea that you were going to be laying the road for athletes like michael sam and jason collins to come out and to really be themselves while they're professionally playing in their sports uh there was a not a i was making up on the fly there wasn't really there was no template then in a way yes i sort of imagined that this might lead down a little further down the road but it um it felt like something that just sort of had to happen for me and if i was going to make a small contribution to the world maybe that was going to be a a small positive contribution bodybuilding is very much about aesthetics right how did you choose that as your sport out of being an athlete well i i discovered weight training accidentally and it had happened during a time i was 17 years old i saw a cover of arnold uh on on what was it's now muscle and fitness what was then muscle builder and power something like that at uh the newsstand in columbus indiana and i i was looking for backpacking magazine i walk in and i see this cover and there's arnold sort of like with a dumbbell over his head grimacing and i thought i'd already been weight training a little bit i thought oh that's interesting and so i very rapidly made this shift and began to train very seriously and as i as as i as the seriousness increased so did my sense that i was going to survive that i was going to make it through what seemed like a really difficult time period so how did you get really from that teenager who was really scared to come out to a guy who became a public figure yeah and who said i don't really care about my career and i don't really care what anyone else thinks i'm going to just live my authentic self well uh it was through the strength of this discipline and this dedication that i think i was able to find that that inner strength i always have often said that you know for me the training was as much an inside process as it was an outside process and once i identified the fact that look i have a life i was born one day i'm going to die i'm going to walk this path success is defined a certain way by other people i may not define it as that but once i identified that center i was able to see nothing could really hurt me the gentlemen and women of today who are able to do that now more easily because of some of the work that you did even though it was unbeknownst to you at the time right how do you think the culture has changed from then to now where now people are cheered on and they're you know shown respect and they're not as afraid to lose their careers what shift has happened in our culture to make that possible people have told their stories if we're not talking about our lives and letting people know that we're just your neighbor your friend your son your brother your sister it's been a matter of really stringing one story after another after another do you feel i guess back then when you came out it was almost 30 years ago did you know when you said that in the iron man article that you were jeopardizing everything that you'd worked for in your career at least i had a relatively i want to say an open-eyed naive approach i did have a lot of plans for my career that were thwarted meet almost immediately after that in the aftermath aftermath the aftermath was literally well on the positive side 30 000 pieces from that article and uh probably from that article then linkedin to oprah right after that the 30 000 pieces of mail came came in the days of snail mail there was no particular smoking gun you know nobody was spitting in my face or any of those things it's just i watched things vanish how did it feel watching everything vanish though because even though you want to live an authentic life you know we live in a society back then and now that tells us that we have to do something professionally we have to achieve something we have to go somewhere and so when you have all of these opportunities before you and just by being who you are you see them sort of fall away yeah how do you cope with that well it was enormously disheartening uh it was especially i think one of the one of the more difficult aspects for me was that um some of the doors that closed for me were for peop from people in the industry in our community who knew my knew my story i wasn't i wasn't closeted they knew my story and then it just those contacts and those avenues that i had nurtured and developed over the years prior just it's 2015 we still have hear these stories of teens especially which are so heartbreaking um committing suicide because they feel not able to speak their truth right or that they will not be accepted if they do so we've come so far yet there's still pockets where the education isn't there or the acceptance isn't there so what needs to happen for that to change well i think we we have to acknowledge that even though the culture moves forward it it doesn't necessarily change the conversation because now perhaps a kid like me would feel more pressure to be honest about their lives and and crossing that line in the realm of high school i mean i don't know if you remember high school oh i remember high school very well yeah it wasn't a good look i don't think it was for any of us um so the pressure just shifts even with even even as we move toward justice uh the pressure then shifts to be more open and you know we can say that our culture is shift but it's this is still a kitchen table issue at the end of the day and so it's going to matter what uh the immediate surroundings in a person's life feel like and there's still a long way to go well thank you for your bravery and thank you for you know really just being who you are and for taking that moment you know back in the 1980s because your decision whether it was being naive or it was intentional made such a huge difference for people's life um and i think it really paved the way for people today not only and athletics but in other areas too that are in in public you know public mediums so thank you thank you yeah so i really appreciate it certainly thank you so much you

Channel: Anthony Berklich

Views: 120,156

Keywords: gay, gay marriage, bob paris, gay issues, gay rights, body building, muscle, body builders, gay athlete, gay athletes, michael sam, jason collins, anthony berklich, inspired citizen, LGBT (TV Genre), lgbt, Athlete (Profession), Fitness, inspiring, inspired, Interview (TV Genre), robert paris, Ironman World Championship (Recurring Competition), iron man, Weight, Drag, Workout, Fitness (Media Genre), Bodybuilding (Sport), Weight Training (Hobby)

Id: QNG5oWjxTX0

Length: 12min 13sec (733 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 09 2015