The Air That I Breathe

Jordan Windle

I have been focused a lot recently on Tom Daley, who won a gold medal in diving at the Tokyo Olympics. I got hooked on this guy way back when he first met Dustin Lance Black, the author of Milk, and the two of them hit it off. Milk is about Harvey Milk, the San Francisco gay rights leader assassinated by a former cop back in 1978. I lived that experience up close and personal, and all the events that followed, so when Dustin Lance Black began raising consciousness through his writing about Milk's contribution to gay rights, he became an instant hero of mine. Tom Daley has tremendous personal appeal as well, and when the couple's child, Robbie, came into the world by surrogacy, I tuned in regularly to Tom Daley's YouTube channel and shared their very public lives.

The other day another gay dad came across my radar. This time it was a news item about another Olympic Diver, whose name is Jordan Windle. Jordan's father adopted him from the same orphanage in Cambodia where Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie found their son, Maddox. In Jordan's case, his adoptive father was a single gay man named Jerry.

I'm not the People Magazine type. I don't follow the gossip stories, but I did note in passing that Brad and Angelina's relationship ended in a mess and I got this sour feeling when I thought about the six kids they adopted and what they must be going through. Maddox, for example, wants nothing to do with his adoptive father.

Fortunately, that's not the case with the Windle father-and-son pair. Jerry speaks of his son as the air he breathes. Who knows how much is hype, but it's uplifting as all get-out to read about how he has nurtured his son's interest and talent all the way to the Tokyo Olympics. When Jordan was seven, Jerry enrolled him in an aquatics camp in South Florida, where he caught the eye of Tim O'Brien, the man who coached Greg Louganis. It's been a great success story so far ever since.

While most people will no doubt focus on this remarkable kid - with very good reason - it's the gay dad who captures my attention. I've known a number of gay men who have wanted kids so badly. Many of them, like Jerry Windle, ran into barriers against gay people adopting in the U.S., and had to go abroad to make it happen, and I'm happy to say the ones I know are also success stories. The quotation from Martin Luther King comes to mind, "the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice." For so many years the self-righteous hypocrites of the Christian right, Catholic and Protestant both, have set themselves up as would-be defenders of marriage and the family, cruelly slandering gay people as enemies of the American family. Today it's becoming increasingly clear what an injustice it has been to assume gay people don't love children, when so many have even turned their whole lives around to raise their own. A very outspoken gay liberation advocate once admitted to me, after adopting a son, "I now seem to have much more in common with straight parents than I do with most other gay people."

The point is not that gays are somehow specially gifted, as artists, as sensitive human beings, or as parents, as gay boosters often claim. It's that they can create lives as rich and meaningful as anyone, and what a shame it has been that we have taken so long to get to that recognition. And I realize there are many takes on this story besides the gay angle. I don't want to detract from this kid's wonderful accomplishments as a young Olympian athlete.  

But I also don't want to miss the opportunity to celebrate this wonderful story about gay families.

Have a look at some of the news stories surrounding this remarkable young man, Jordan Windle, and his father, Jerry. If you don't have time for them all, at least watch the first two.

Watch him dive here.

Watch his father tell the world what his son has meant to him here.

Interview with Greg Louganis here.

As a 10-year old here.

2020 interview, pre-Tokyo Olympics here.

after qualifying for Tokyo Olympics here.

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