The U.S. Olympic swimmer wanted to retrace the pool homophobia experienced firsthand during his career as a professional swimmer
Homophobia in sports is still present but thanks to the courage of athletes like Lawrence Frostad, Tom Daley, Josh Cavallo and Justin Fashanu (the first professional footballer to come out) and many others, fortunately, something is changing.
But despite all this, cases of homophobia towards athletes by fans, teammates, and in some cases even the club itself are not isolated cases. For this reason, telling and denouncing the abuses suffered is the first step in the fight against homophobia in sports.
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Lawrence Frostad (55 years old) is a former Olympic swimming champion who through an interview with Nuts & Bolts Sports has told the dark years after his coming out. From the attacks by some of his teammates and even some senior U.S. Olympic officials.
‹‹ I was training with the Texas Longhorns Women’s Aquatics and coach Mark Shubert, and it was great. The girls protected me, but the guys on that team were really hard on me. I was in their locker room for about 3 days before they told me “we can’t stand it here”. So I moved to the public locker room, which was fine, I was still comfortable››
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The episodes of homophobia against him are not limited only to that, in fact, as he himself said, one day in the parking lot of the pool ‹‹ one of the guys tried to run me over, you got 10 points for running over a gay guy››.
Not all the members of the team were homophobic: ‹‹ Some guys were great. Some of them were nice. There were just a couple of them that put me through hell.››
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The most serious episode of homophobia happened during the preparation for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics when after he came out, two people from the U.S. Olympic Committee approached him and threatened him not to make public LGBT+ appeals.
Here’s what the swimmer himself said: ‹‹ Lawrence, we want to remind you that the Olympics are a sporting event, not a political event. (…) As long as you swim and don’t make political statements, you’ll be fine.››
Much has been made for the civil rights of LGBT+ athletes, but the fight is not over yet.
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The United States. A group of friends and an association that cultivates ethnic discrimination, racial superiority, and the fight against any diversity as essential pillars of its doctrine. These are the main elements of this multi-faceted novel, at times raw and hard, far from pity and useless turns of phrase, in which extreme fanaticism leads a father to desire the evil of his homosexual son, to the point of acting personally for the annihilation of this inclination. Yet “REDEMPTION DAYS” is not a novel that takes away space for hope, the same feeling that will take possession of the protagonist’s page after page, directing them to arrive very differently from the departure, a goal in which ideas change, the true virtues emerge, evil and perversions are finally removed, to achieve so, in different ways, their individual redemption.