Gay Games

 
Who You'll Meet In Sydney
Harvard Water Polo Player Makes A Splash

By Cyd Zeigler Jr.

Mike Crosby has gotten used to being unique.  Not only does he play water polo, a relatively unknown sport where he attends college on the East Coast, but he’s also got another even more obscure distinction. 

“I’m the only openly gay male varsity athlete at Harvard,” says Crosby.

Mike has been playing water polo for eight years, since his freshman year in high school.  After swimming for many years as a child, he was recruited by the water polo coach at Harvard Westlake High School in North Hollywood, California, where his body type and skills lent themselves to the position of “driver,” which is similar to a forward in basketball.  After Harvard Westlake, the Harvard of the East Coast came calling. 

Throughout high school, Mike delicately balanced water polo with his emerging homosexuality.  Being a teenage boy attracted to other boys, and playing a sport where they are all wearing Speedos, could not be easy. 

Mike first told someone he was gay when he was a senior in high school.  Once he went to Harvard University, it took him all of six months to start telling his friends there.  However, he didn’t address it with his varsity water polo team until late in his sophomore year.  He started by telling a few close teammates and, with the positive responses he got from them, he built the confidence to tell the entire team.

The reaction from both coaches and players was incredibly supportive.  Jim Floerchinger, Harvard’s head water polo coach, attributes that to a couple things.  First, he was at Harvard where intellectual curiosity is the order of the day.  And, despite a conservative reputation, the school is dominated by open-minded education.  Second was who Mike was as a player – one of the toughest, most competitive guys on the team.  For a coach and a team dead set on winning, toughness and competitiveness weighed far heavier than a player’s sexuality.

“I don’t even think about Mike’s sexuality,” says Floerchinger.  “It’s something that never crosses my mind.  Mike does everything you’re supposed to do and he’s a fantastic athlete.”

In fact, Mike’s sexuality was so much of a non-issue for the team that they voted him co-captain a year later.  As co-captain, Mike lead his team to a 26-10 record, the best in Harvard’s history, an end-of-season national ranking of #15, and an amazing 4-0 record against California schools.  To give perspective, in the final collegiate water polo ranking this year, every school in the Top 10 was based in California.

With last summer off, back home with his parents in Pacific Palisades, California, Mike wanted to try something a little different to stay in shape:  play with a gay water polo team.  He had heard about the Gay Games, and was looking for a team to play with at the Games in Sydney.  Mike contacted West Hollywood’s water polo team, WH₂O, and began practicing with them.  In July, he went with them to the International Gay and Lesbian Aquatics (IGLA) Championships in Toronto, Ontario.  There, he played on the WH₂O B-Team and ended the tournament in fifth place.  Far more than a trophy, he got two invaluable experiences:

First was the fulfillment of a career-long goal:  to score the number of goals in a game equal to his player number at Harvard – nine - which would be equivalent to rushing for 250 yards and four touchdowns in a football game.  Against the Atlanta Rainbow Trout, he did just that.

The second was a culmination of who he was.  In Toronto, he was surrounded by openly gay water polo players.  Despite the fact that his homosexuality was never an issue with any of his teammates, being surrounded by men and women just like him was a cathartic experience.  “Instead of shaking hands after a match, the teams hug each other,” Mike says.  “It was something I hadn’t dreamt possible.”

Something else Mike never dreamt possible, though he had fantasized about it, was meeting another gay collegiate water polo player and falling into a relationship with him.  That fantasy became reality last autumn.  In September he got an e-mail from a water polo player at Brown.  They had mutual friends and one of them had told the Brown player about Mike.  They met for the first time over Columbus Day Weekend at the Claremont Invitational in southern California and hit it off right away.

They saw each other the next three weekends – both competitively in the pool and socially at night.  Brown hosted a tournament the weekend after California and Harvard hosted a tournament after that, each man winning in his home pool.  “It was weird because our teams ended up playing each other in each of the tournaments,” says Mike.

The rubber match came the following week, again at Brown.  Harvard smoked them.  After they went through their routine team handshakes, Mike and his friend from Brown made their way separately to the warm-down pool at the same time.  A sly look and a wink and they found themselves embraced in a passionate kiss in front of an audience of hundreds - a long way to come for a kid who wasn’t even out to his team just 18 months earlier.

A long way for his confidence, that is.  Mike attributes the ability of men to come out to their confidence level.  Part of what feeds into that confidence is the presence of other gay men in their respective fields.  While it’s never particularly easy to come out, the fact that there are more openly gay people in the arts and entertainment give other people confidence in those fields to come out.

“But because there are so few people in sports who are out, because of the homophobia there, that keeps some people in the closet,” Mike says.  “Then, some athletes who might think about coming out don’t have many role models.”  Being an example to closeted athletes is a large part of why Mike decided to come out to his team.  He also saw an opportunity to shift the perceptions of his own teammates.  “A lot of them probably don’t come into contact with many gay people and, by coming out to them, I thought that I could somehow influence their opinions about gay people.”

Photos by Alan Purcell