What percentage of male gymnasts are gay

Two-time Olympic gymnast Danell Leyva says that, for him, stereotypes surrounding his sport may have been one of the biggest obstacles to his coming out as a member of the LGBTQ community. There are several stories of elite gymnasts being called gay in the US by random people just for being in gymnastics.

And a number of the national team are very open about their right wing politics. Here's a fact: In the entire history of the Olympics, there has never been an openly gay male gymnast. An Olympic gymnast hasn’t even come out after retiring. We've had a gay decathlete, runner. Yet some sports, like gymnastics and figure skating, have been dubbed by our culture as “feminine” sports.

Here's a fact: In the entire

The men in these sports are either largely assumed to be gay, or their sexuality is. He also won a silver in the horizontal bar at this year’s Baku World Cup in Azerbaijan. He is one of very few out athletes in men’s artistic gymnastics and, at 30 years old, will be one of the oldest gymnasts competing in Paris.

Men's figure skating has always been caught between its public image and its conservative culture. But with anti-LGBT policies haunting the Sochi Olympics, the sport's biggest stars are under more pressure than ever to set the record straight. When I ask figure skater Jeremy Abbott how athletes should respond to Russia's anti-gay laws, his eyes widen.

He shrugs a little and glances over at the U. Abbott takes in a breath, glances down. Then — "I'm going to walk away from that one. We're backstage at the U. Figure Skating Championships, which serve as an unofficial qualifier for the Olympic team, and Abbott's a favorite. He's 28 years old, planning to retire at the end of the season and cautious; he was criticized last year for comparing Russia's laws — which have motivated the rape, torture, and murder of gay men and women — to bad interior design.

Abbott just happened to come up with a particularly inept metaphor. So what? I have a hard time believing that figure skating is a particularly homophobic sport. To insiders, though, it's no surprise that skaters are reluctant to speak out on LGBT rights, let alone come out themselves. Most male skaters and officials are committed to keeping their sport in the closet, whether that means choosing "masculine" music, hinting about a girlfriend, or outright denying any connection to homosexuality.

A figure skater can never quite outskate the judges' opinion of him, and judges and institutions, it turns out, are notoriously conservative — as some would say, "family-friendly. It's not that skating hasn't had out gay athletes. There's Rudy Galindo, a ready-made hard-knock story who grew up in a trailer, abused alcohol and drugs, and lost two coaches and a brother to AIDS.

Galindo came out publicly a few weeks before the U. When he was finally inducted into the U. Figure Skating Hall of Fame last year after having been rejected three times, his sexuality was not mentioned during the ceremony. And last month, after gold medalist Brian Boitano was named to the U. Olympic Delegation to Sochi, he announced that he, too, was gay. Boitano's enough of an established legend to be on the safe side, but it seems that in general, gay skaters are just a tad too implicating of the male skaters around them to be seriously endorsed.

They are dismissed in countless subtle ways. One pump-up video montage at nationals showed clip after clip of top male skaters performing one enormous jump after another, but depicted Rudy Galindo crossing himself and Johnny Weir bursting into tears.

So what exactly is male figure skating — which has the potential to be a gay haven in the world of sports — so afraid of? Until the early s, figure skating was mostly a way for wealthy men to show off their aristocratic grace and ample spare time by skating elegant figures and positions on the ice. It wasn't really until three-time Olympic champion Sonja Henie came to Hollywood in the '30s — bringing with her short skirts, white skates, and a whole lot of sultry cuteness — that skating became, in the public eye, a primarily girls' sport.

Already by mid-century, Skating magazine worried about the lack of boys. These days, boys are so rare that it's common practice, in pairs and dance, for the girls' parents to cover both partners' training expenses — or, for older partners, to offer rewards like a living stipend and a car to the rare man who will skate with his daughter.

It's day four of the eight-day championship, and the juvenile boys — the lowest competitive level, most of them between ages 10 and 13 — are training at the Skating Club of Boston's frigid and charmless rink. Even in their leggings and training jackets, the boys seem distinctly feminine, perhaps because they're younger and more flexible than the top male skaters.

They're doing moves that are often reserved for women, layback spins and spirals, curving their arms and cocking their wrists.