Trey Cunningham found the first few calls excruciating. He had spent his life learning how to stay calm on the track, under intense pressure, with a crowd watching. But as he waited in the quiet for family and friends to answer the phone, waiting to tell them he was gay, he found himself sweating. It was, he said, “the scariest thing I’ve ever done.”
At 20, he persevered, for much the same reasons he would publicly discuss five years later. Cunningham had been using a technique in training. “We said our goals out loud,” he said. “If we wanted to achieve something, we said it. Put it into words and make it real.”
Cunningham is one of the world’s top hurdlers, and he is ready and willing to do it, but that doesn’t mean he is unique. He is not the first elite athlete, or even the first top American runnerdiscuss their sexual orientation.
As one of the few active male athletes who has come out about his sexuality, Cunningham is still in the minority. “A lot of people are in this weird situation,” he said. “They haven’t come out about their sexuality. But people understand it.”
So has been Cunningham’s reality over the past five years. In high school, he never really thought about his sexuality; he was too busy, he says, “hanging out with friends and having fun,” dreaming of playing for the Boston Celtics, and then, almost to his surprise, discovering that he enjoyed “throwing solid objects at high speeds.”
He began “exploring this idea” in college, but there was no sudden epiphany or sudden realization. “It took me a while to know this was right,” he said.
He attributes that to his upbringing. Cunningham grew up in Winfield, Alabama, a place he describes as “rural, pretty conservative, pretty religious: the kind of place where you didn’t want to be the gay kid in school. So I had certain expectations of how I was supposed to live my life, and it took me a while to come to terms with being different from that.”
So did his parents, he said. It was the hardest decision, and when he decided it was time to make it, there was some “resistance,” as he put it, in the news.
“It’s true for me, and it’s true for my parents,” he said. “They have certain aspirations for their son, certain expectations for his life, and that’s OK. I gave them five years of grace. I have to take my time. They can take their time, too.”
That composure is typical of Cunningham. Although he missed the U.S. trials for this summer’s Olympics in Paris last month, finishing ninth in a “strong” 110-meter hurdles event — “if you do well in the U.S. trials, you know you have a good chance of medaling,” he said — he still Ranked 11th in the worldIn 2022, he won a silver medal in the event at the world championships in Eugene, Oregon.
Despite this success, he considers himself a relaxed person, both by his standards and by those of elite athletes. This isn’t speculation, he says; he has scientific evidence. His master’s thesis at Florida State University involved evaluating student athletes to determine which personality traits were most associated with burnout. He ran psychological tests on himself and found himself “almost too calm.”
Yet whatever concerns he had when he called proved to be unfounded. With the exception of his parents, who either understood or – in the friendliest way – shrugged their shoulders.
He said he felt like at least some of his friends had been “waiting for me,” so the confirmation wouldn’t affect those relationships. “I’m really lucky to have a group of people who don’t care,” he said.
The reaction in track and field has been similar. Despite the naturally brutally competitive environment of Olympic-level sports, he finds his sport instinctively supportive. Cunningham has thought a lot about why this is the case over the past few years, and has concluded that track and field has a dual identity of sorts.
In some ways, track and field is the purest form of sport, the truest measure of who can run the fastest, the strongest, the highest, the farthest throw. But in many ways, it is also a “misfits’ sport,” he said.
His favorite example is the shot putter. “They are the strongest guys in the gym,” he said. “But they also have the finest footwork.” The shot put is for people with toned arms and ballet dancers’ feet. “Track and field is for everyone,” Cunningham said.
It also has an unrelenting single-mindedness. “The only thing that matters is whether you run fast today,” he said.
Despite this, few male athletes are willing to discuss their sexuality publicly. After all, it is a very private matter.
He also doesn’t think it’s something everyone should do. He hopes athletics and the broader culture will evolve to the point where “people don’t have to ‘come out,'” he said, and that people can “continue to be themselves.”
But he knows there are practical and potential financial considerations to doing so: His career could easily require Cunningham to compete in places where his sexual orientation is well known, which could put him at risk. He said he would have to consult with his agent before traveling to a country like Qatar to compete. Homosexuality is a crimeFor example.
Still, he believes that while he is neither the first nor the only active athlete to speak publicly about his sexuality, there is value in doing so. He does not feel that his performance was limited in the past few years, when his sexuality was a secret. He does not give the impression that talking about it now will relieve any pressure.
The stress and tension eased when he called friends and family five years ago, saying he figured everyone who needed to know had known for some time.
But that old training mantra stayed with him. Cunningham was a natural writer; he found that putting his thoughts on paper helped him clarify them. But he knew that sometimes it was beneficial to say them out loud. It helped make things real.
