It’s been a busy month for Tom Daley. For the British diver who has spent much of the last few years in the spotlight, the young lad has just entered a new media swarm as he announced he was in a relationship with a man.
This was a very 21st century revelation. Like much of Tom’s life, it was all played out on Social Media. On 2nd December Daley tweeted a youtube video in which he stated: ‘Come spring this year my life changed massively when I met someone and it made me feel so happy, so safe, and everything just feels great. And, well, that someone – is a guy.’
Speculation of who that lucky guy may be did not last long and director Dustin Lance Black was revealed as Daley’s boyfriend. The Acadamy Award winning director of Milk and LGBT activist tweeted, ‘Slept all day today after my trip to Russia. Did I miss anything?’.
Daley expanded upon his feelings and what led to him to ‘go public’ in an interview with Jonathon Ross. Here, he explained that it was a ‘terrifying decision to make’ and how alone and trapped he had felt because of his ‘dirty little secret.’
Much of the inevitable online reaction has centred on the fact that at no point has Daley said anything specific about his sexuality, neither mentioning the words gay or bisexual – but has stated that ‘obviously I still fancied girls’.
It seems the gay community are split as to whether to celebrate him as a gay icon or to malign him for not having the guts to admit his sexuality fully. Of course the B in LGBT is just as important as the other letters and sexuality isn’t something that has to be labelled or defined. For Daley, at least, this does not seem to be an issue and he has been throwing himself into training as he pushes for golf at Rio 2016.
It is within the sporting world that perhaps Daley can make the biggest difference. There were only 21 openly LGBT athletes out of the 12,602 that took part in the 2012 Olympics. The sporting world is still massively under-representative of the LGBT community and sportsmen and sportswomen often find it incredibly difficult to come out during their careers.