![]() ![]() “So it was important to share that, so that people can realize, ‘Hey, it can happen to anybody,'” he continues. I’m just a person, and yes, I make bad decisions just like everybody else and trust the wrong people at times. “Sure, I’m an Olympic gold medalist, but I’m just like everybody else. ![]() “It’s reflective of how much education needed to be done,” he says. In the clip, he’s a 35-year-old Olympic champion discussing his illness on prime-time television, and Larry King is a guy wearing suspenders finding it very difficult not to literally point an accusatory finger. Now the Castro screen was showing a portion of his media blitz. So he came out, made the television circuit and published a memoir called Breaking the Surface: The Greg Louganis Story. He didn’t know of any famous athletes who’d publicly stated that they were gay and HIV-positive. ![]() Instead, he lived, and contacted the writer Eric Marcus in hopes of publishing a memoir. In 1993, losing weight and five years removed from an HIV diagnosis, he was so certain he’d die that he decided to throw himself a final birthday party, for the purpose of saying goodbye to his friends and family. Louganis was 54 years old – an age that seemed an impossibility when he first tested positive for HIV in 1988 – attending a screening of the documentary about his extraordinary life, Back on Board, at the Frameline Film Festival. A little over a year ago, Greg Louganis watched as the audience at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre booed Larry King. ![]()
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