By now, you know the story: Having festered in the dark ages for decades, suffocated by its own bro-eyness, skating has, finally, started catching up with the rest of the world, and includes more and more gay, lesbian, and trans skaters. I’m hesitant to call it a sea change, as there’s still plenty to do, but where once only Tim Von Werne and Jarrett Berry stood, we’ve now got Leo Baker, Brian Anderson, Elissa Steamer, Hillary Thompson, and Forrest Kirby, to name just a few of the notables.
Given that every LGBTQ+ person that stands up to be counted inspires countless others to do the same, we thought it was time to take stock and to celebrate that skateboarding has reached something of a tipping point over the last few years in terms of queer visibility. With that in mind, for this issue, we hit up a bunch of different people, from pros to filmers, magazine heads and self-identified skate rats, and asked them to write about their coming out experiences: the good, the bad and the extremely ugly.
The stories that follow are heartwarming, horrifying and fascinating. All of them linked by a universal truth: terrifying as it is, no one ever regrets coming out.
By Patrick Welch
Photo by Paulo Ricca
Published in June 2019
Lucy Adams
Lucy lives in Crawley (UK), rides for Lovenskate and Vans, and is chair of Skateboard England.
I came out a long time ago, around 2005, and I don’t think it was a massive shock to anyone. It was kind of obvious to everybody, including myself. Obvious in terms of the way I dressed, how I looked and what I did. I was definitely the kind of girl in school that fitted the stereotype of a textbook lesbian: low ponytail, into all the sports, etc. Just all those things that, rightly or wrongly, would make you think, “She’s definitely a lesbian.”
My mum is actually gay and came out to me when I was 13. My dad and her split, they got a divorce, and a year after that, I was introduced to my mum’s partner who moved in not long after. So from the age of 14 my sister and I lived with my mum and her now-wife, and I was going through secondary school with a gay mum. There were a couple of hard times at school but I was quite a well respected kid, so it was never really difficult. Plus, I liked the arrangement we had: I enjoyed seeing my dad on the weekends and the split had been really amicable.
Then, when I was at university, I fell for another girl. We began a relationship and I was fully stoked on it and so I kind of wanted to open up to people and be like, “Yay it’s really happening!” The first people I told were with two close male friends from the skate world. I lived up in Manchester at the time at uni and they still lived back at home. And I just had a conversation about, not coming out, but being in a relationship with a woman – so coming out by default, I suppose. And they were both stoked for me.
“Now I have a wife that I’ve been with for 12 years and people know and love Em so much, they’re stoked. And when she doesn’t appear at events with me, they’re like. ‘Where’s Emily?!’ It’s just a really nice feeling to be massively accepted, like everyone else is, I suppose.”
It was definitely not a huge thing to tell those guys, but I felt quite nervous being openly gay or with my partner at the skatepark, in terms of silly laddish behaviour and comments. I just didn’t want to make anything different, because skateboarding had been the place where I just got on with it and had a laugh.
But as I’ve got older and people matured, I never found it an issue. If anything, people are interested and massively positive about it. And now I have a wife that I’ve been with for 12 years and people know and love Em so much, they’re stoked. And when she doesn’t appear at events with me, they’re like, “Where’s Emily?!” It’s just a really nice feeling to be massively accepted, like everyone else is, I suppose.
IG: @lucyadamsskate
