I was about 13 when I asked my parents if they could get me a subscription to Sports Illustrated. They were more than a little eager to accomodate, as they thought there might be some hope that their sensitive, shy, awkward teenager might actually turn out to be a sports-lovin', beer-drinkin' and (most importantly) pussy chasin' young man. Well I do drink beer sometimes (not exactly like a frat boy), and I do actually like sports, but I never got around to the other thing.  The reason I really wanted that subscription was not to keep up with sports, but to jerk off to those Jockey ads with Jim Palmer. His furry chest and well-formed basket certainly helped to ease the tension of my teenage years.

When I was 15 and flipping through the pages of SI, I stumbled upon the most unthinkable thing -- a tribute to the life of an openly gay man. This sports magazine, to my knowlege, had never shown gay men in a positive light, and here it was doing a feature on... someone like me.  For years I had used the magazine as a way to work out my teenage sexual angst, but I never imagined it would be the place that I'd find a role model who ultimately helped me accept my sexuality.

The July 27, 1987 issue had an article entitled "The Death of an Athlete". It was a tribute to Tom Waddell who had died of AIDS on July 11-- just 16 days before this issue was released. Tom Waddell was a college football player and gymnast who went on to become an olympic decathlete. At the age of 30, he finished 6th in the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games.  He was also paratrooper in the U.S. Army and an MD with a degree from Stanford Medical School specializing in infectious disease. Most notably, he started the Gay Olympics which later came to be called the Gay Games after the United States Olympic Committee sued Dr. Waddell for using the word "Olympics" so close to the word "Gay".The case went all the way to the Supreme Court before before it was decided that no gays were going to be putting on any kind of "Olympics".