Trey Cunningham hated those first few phone calls. He’s learned his whole life to stay calm on the court, under intense pressure, in the glare of the crowd. But as he waited in silence for his family and friends to pick up, waiting to tell them he was gay, he found himself dripping with sweat. It was, he said, “the scariest thing I’ve ever done.”
He continued, at age 20, for much the same reason he talks about it publicly now, five years later. There’s a technique Cunningham has long used in his training. “We say our goals out loud,” he said. “If we want to achieve something, we say it. Putting it into words makes it real.”
That Cunningham — one of the best high hurdlers in the world — is ready and willing to do so does not make him unique. He is not the first elite athlete, or even the first top American runnerto discuss their sexuality.
As one of the few active male athletes who feels comfortable enough to come out, Cunningham is still a rarity. “There are a lot of people who are in this weird space,” he said. “They’re not out. But it’s understood.”
For the past five years, that’s been Cunningham’s reality, too. He’d never really thought much about his sexuality in high school; he was too busy, he says, “hanging out with friends, having fun,” dreaming of playing for the Boston Celtics and then, almost to his surprise, discovering that he enjoyed “throwing myself at solid objects at high speed.”
It was in college that he began “exploring the idea,” but there was no sudden realization, no moment of enlightenment. “It took me a while to know that it felt right,” he said.
He attributes that to his upbringing. Cunningham grew up in Winfield, Alabama, a place he described 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 what my life would be like, and it took me a while to imagine it being different.”
The same, he said, was true for his parents. That was the hardest decision of all, when he decided the time was right to do it, and there was, as he said, some “backlash” on the news.
“What was true for me was true for my parents,” he said. “They had certain expectations for their little boy, for what his life would be like, and that’s okay. I gave them a five-year grace period. I had to take my time. They could take their time, too.”
That calm is pretty typical of Cunningham. Although he missed out on a spot at the Paris Olympics last month at the U.S. Trials, where he finished ninth in the 110-meter hurdles in a “stacked” field — “If you do well at the U.S. Trials, you know you have a good shot at a medal,” he said — he’s still ranked 11th in the worldIn 2022 he won the silver medal in this event at the World Championships in Eugene, Oregon.
Despite that success, he describes himself, both by his own standards and those of elite athletes, as a laid-back person. It’s not guesswork, he says; he has scientific proof. His master’s thesis at Florida State University involved evaluating student athletes to determine which personality traits correlated most strongly with burnout. He used the psychometric test on himself and found that he was “almost too laid-back.”
Whatever worries he had harbored on the phone were misplaced. His parents were the exception. The rule was either understanding or — in the nicest way — something closer to a shrug.
He felt like at least some of his friends “had been waiting for me,” so validation didn’t make a difference in those relationships, he said. “I was really lucky that I had a group of people who didn’t care,” he said.
The reaction in athletics is similar. While Olympic-level sports are inherently cutthroat, competitive environments, he has found his sport instinctively supportive. Cunningham has thought a lot about why this is the case in recent years and has come to the conclusion that athletics has a kind of dual identity.
It is, in a sense, the purest form of athletic endeavor, the truest measure of who is fastest and strongest, who can jump the highest or throw the farthest. But track and field is also, in many ways, a “sport for outsiders,” he said.
His favorite examples are the shot putters. “They’re the strongest people in the stadium,” he said. “But they also have the most delicate footwork.” It’s a discipline for that specific subset of the population that has bodybuilder arms and ballerina feet. “Track and field has something for everyone,” Cunningham said.
It also has an unashamed one-sidedness. “The only thing that matters is whether you run fast today or not,” he said.
Yet, few male athletes have felt comfortable talking openly about their sexuality. After all, it is a very personal matter.
He also doesn’t believe it’s something anyone should feel like they have to do. He’d like to see athletics, and culture in general, get to a point where “people don’t have to ‘come out,’” he said, where people can “just continue to be themselves.”
But he knows there are practical and possibly financial considerations: his profession could easily force Cunningham to compete in places where his sexuality, which is widely known, could put him at risk. He should, he said, consult his management before traveling to a competition in a country like Qatar, where homosexuality, for example, is a crime.
However, he believes that while he is not the first or only active athlete of his stature to discuss his sexuality publicly, it is a valuable thing to do. He does not feel that he has been held back in his performance in recent years, when his sexuality was a closely guarded secret. He does not give the impression that talking about it now is a great weight off his shoulders.
All the stress and tension that was there, it all went away five years ago when he made those phone calls to his friends and family. Everyone he thinks needs to know, has known for a while, he said.
But that old training mantra has stuck with him. Cunningham is a writer, by nature; he finds that putting his thoughts on paper helps him process them. But he knows there are times when it pays to say something out loud. It helps make things real.
