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Long a contributor to AIDS-related causes, Louganis further extended himself last summer when he gave a diving exhibition at the Gay Games in New York City and declared himself a homosexual. The gay community had known this for years, of course, but it still took courage for Louganis to come out to the general public-the most famous male athlete ever to make such a declaration. He decided to do the book because, he writes, "I hope my story will help anyone who has to face adversity...Maybe I can prevent one teenager from being infected with HIV, and maybe I can give hope to people who are in abusive relationships...It's not my intention to shock anyone, but looking objectively at some of what I've lived through, even I find parts of my life shocking.''
Indeed, Louganis has lived his entire life in a sort of quiet terror. He was adopted by a San Diego bookkeeper and his wife, Peter and Frances Louganis, when he was nine months old. Because his biological father was Samoan, Greg had dark skin that targeted him as a "nigger"; because he was dyslexic and a stutterer, he was often called a "retard." While his mother encouraged him to take dancing classes, his father virtually ignored his "sissy" son. Growing up with all those stigmas would have been pure hell had the nine-year-old boy not discovered diving.
And the diving world soon discovered him. "The first time I saw him," said former Olympic diving champion Dr. Sammy Lee, "he was 10, and I knew he would be the greatest diver in history if he got the right coach." Lee became that coach, and at the '76 Olympics in Montreal the 16-year-old Louganis won a silver medal. It was also in Montreal that Louganis developed a big crush-on a Soviet diver called Yuri in the book. "I fell for him like a boulder off the 10-m platform," writes Louganis. It led to nothing more than a night of drunken cuddling. "It was the most natural thing in the world, and I felt no guilt."
But upon returning home to California, Louganis, as divers say, "lost the water." Disoriented and depressed, he drank, dabbled in drugs and even attempted suicide. He left the hard-nosed Lee for the gentler O'Brien, who somehow kept Louganis focused through all the fallow non-Olympic years that stretched between Montreal and Los Angeles. (The U.S. boycotted the 1980 Games.) In 1984 Louganis won both the springboard and platform competitions. "That was the peak," says O'Brien.
The years before Seoul, though, were troubled ones for Louganis. He became involved with an abusive lover who then became his business manager and stripped him of his self-respect-as well as thousands of dollars. In the book Louganis refers to him only as Tom, but in a lawsuit filed in 1989, after Louganis had been stalked and threatened with blackmail by his former lover, the man was identified as Jim Babbitt. By this time Babbitt already had AIDS, and Louganis had been tested. "Greg told me he had tested positive early in '88," O'Brien recalls. "I was devastated."