In last week’s Voice, we printed a list of six openly LGBT Olympic athletes who’ll be competing in Beijing. Jim Buzinski at Outsports.com reports that the number has since grown to 11. Three of the openly LGBT athletes are from the U.S.: Natasha Kai (soccer, pictured above), Lauren Lappin (softball) and Vicky Galindo (softball).
As Buzinski notes, 11 out of nearly 11,000 total athletes in Beijing is not a very good number. If it were proportional to the percentage of LGBTs in the general population, the number of out Olympians would be in the hundreds if not the thousands. Buzinski talks about some of the reasons for the low number in this article. For more on what keeps Olympians in the closet, go here.
