hanging on

Hunky champion sports climber shares his empowering coming out story while scaling new heights

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Gay Australian sports climber Campbell Harrison, 25, may get a place on his country’s 2024 Olympic team after winning two titles at Australia’s national championships last weekend, Outsports recently reported.

“I definitely have big dreams to qualify for the 2024 Paris Olympics,” he told the publication. “Competing as a queer athlete, I always hope that I can show other young queer climbers that being gay doesn’t have to be a barrier to participation in sport.”

Harrison publicly came out in a 2021 personal column in which he wrote, “We don’t have to hide who we are to get respect.”

He said he recognized his gayness around age seven, when he noticed he wasn’t as interested in girls as he was in other boys. All the media around him reinforced the expectation that he should be straight, and by age 11, he expected to take his interest in boys to his grave, he wrote.

Even though he hid his sexuality during high school, Harrison said his male friends and other teachers detected something different in him because he didn’t act like a stereotypical jock.

“I had always hoped that through this sport I would find a haven of strong, queer climbers within which I could foster the sense of belonging that I had always yearned for,” he wrote. “As I grew older I increasingly felt that this was not the experience I was going to have.”

After he began coming out, Harrison quickly became tired of questions about his experience as a gay climber, his parent’s reaction to his “choice.” While he found it difficult to see himself as worthy of love, he also wanted to be known by his ability rather than just for his sexuality.

He felt conflicted when an LGBTQ-inclusive climbing organization, ClimbingQTs, invited him to speak at one of their events. While he relished the chance to find community, he also had not yet come out to his parents. He accepted the invitation and his parents attended. While they struggled to understand why he hadn’t come out to them before then, they embraced him.

Harrison then realized that,”Queerness is not a deficit that I was unfortunate to be born with, it’s an asset that both sets me apart from the crowd and connects me to so many others,” he wrote. “[My queerness] brings both strength and joy to my life.”

“It’s not always easy, and there will always be people who see it as their place to disrupt your sense of self,” he added, “but a strong community is one of the things that allows me to hold fast in my pride.”

Scroll down for a sampling from Harrison’s Instagram page…

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Driven features stories and interviews highlighting the thrill of the queer journey, celebrating tenacious LGBTQers whose courage to be themselves fuels their drive to succeed.

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