Blake Skjellerup has spoken about how seamless coming out to the New Zealand Winter Olympic team was. The Kiwi athlete has shared the story in the Huffington Post to mark National Coming Out Day in the US. He says at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, where he competed in short track speed-skating, he and other New Zealand athletes started adding each other as friends on Facebook while sitting in the athlete lounge. “Once accepted, one girl decided to give my Facebook profile a good creep. Once she stumbled upon my relationship status, she blurted out, ‘Blake, are you in a relationship with a dude?’” he recalls. “If there were a gold medal for turning cherry-tomato red, I would have won it! I tried not to panic and realized that I was having to come out again. I hoped that it would be as positive as my previous comings out and decided that the best solution was to embrace it. “I responded with a quick and slightly dull ‘Yeah,’ which she answered with a loud and positive ‘Awesome!’” Skjellerup says while he tried to play it cool, it was hard not to smile. “I took a look around the room, and the walls were not crumbling down. Everyone kept about their business, and with such a simple, casual, and positive exchange the 2010 New Zealand Winter Olympic Team knew I was gay!” The athlete, who now lives in New York, has also written about how he and his fiancé are ‘boyfriend twins’ who get mistaken for brothers. You can read the full piece here
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News staff
First published: Monday, 13th October 2014 - 8:49am