Greg Louganis
 
We don't think of Olympic diver Greg Louganis as a gay stutterer, because he was one of those kids who outgrew his speech impediment. But in his autobiography, Breaking the Surface (Random House, 1995), Louganis describes a childhood in which he was taunted for having a stutter and a learning disability, having dark skin, and being queer. Reading Chapter 3, which Louganis calls "Sissy, Nigger, Retard," is a reminder that queer little boys and girls are not doomed to living as pariahs. Louganis had the decked stacked against him four different ways--and he emerged one of the most loved athletes in modern American history.
 
Louganis begins the chapter talking about his father, an alcoholic accountant who mistreated young Greg and his sister Despina. Then his story moves further from home. "School was hardly a refuge from what was going on at home," he writes. "As soon as Despina started school, I couldn't wait to go. She brought home books, and she had new friends. I thought it would be a lot of fun, like my acrobatics classes. Well, it wasn't. From my first day at Chase Elementary School the other kids started calling me names. At first they teased me because I stuttered, and they called me 'nigger' because my Samoan complexion got very dark in the San Diego sun. Almost all the kids at my school were white.
 
"Because of my stutter, I was put in a speech-therapy class. Most of the kids in the class were mentally impaired in addition to having speech impediments. I didn't feel like I belonged there, but I had this problem, so I thought that I must be like them, that I must be retarded too. After I got put into a special reading class, the other kids started calling me 'retard.' From the start, I had trouble reading, but it got really bad once we got past single words and simple sentences. What I couldn't explain--what I didn't realize--was that I was dyslexic.
 
"I didn't complain about the name calling until everyone found out that I did acrobatics. That was when they started calling me 'sissy.' I went to my teacher and told her that it made me feel 'red hot' when the kids called me names. I told her which names they called me, and she said, 'They could have called you a lot worse.' I took her remark to mean that I deserved what I was getting and that I was worse than what they were calling me. I never said a word of this to my mother, and she had no idea why I always seemed so unhappy, beyond the fact that I was having trouble reading.
 
"Over the years, I've thought a lot about those kids who taunted me, especially during the 1988 Olympic trials, which happened to coincide with my tenth high school reunion. Most of the kids from elementary school had gone on to the same high school I went to. I wanted to be there and see them. I wanted to say to them, 'yes I am that sissy boy, but look what I've done.' Maybe I will if I'm still around for my twentieth."
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