Track and field star Trey Cunningham has come out as gay — he just doesn’t really see what all the fuss is about.
Cunningham, a five-time All American hurdler at Florida State and a silver medalist at the 2022 World Championships, exclusively told Us Weekly why he’s not expecting a parade after making his announcement.
“I’ve grown up in a time where people just don’t care anymore,” Cunningham, 25, said. “I feel like I was on the cusp of that change, just a little bit. Especially my latter years of college, I’ve realized people just don’t care.”
He continued, “I’m just Trey and apparently it’s a special thing that I like to kiss guys.”
While Cunningham doesn’t expect much to change in his day-to-day life, he does hope his coming out “helps push the needle forward that it’s OK. This is normal.”
Cunningham — who made the 110m finals at the U.S. Olympic Trials last month, narrowly missing his first Olympic team — began thinking about his sexuality while coming of age in Alabama.
“In high school, I felt like I was weird,” he said. “I didn’t like people. I wasn’t going after anyone in particular. Toward the end of senior year and then moving to freshman year of college, I was like, ‘Oh, I can explore this side of me.’ It turned out it was more men coming up than women. And now, all men.”
Along the way, Cunningham credited a conversation he had with a track coach at Florida State during his freshman year, which he called “one of the best things that happened to me.”
“We talked about a few things we can do physically,” he recalled. “You can fix your foot, you can do all these things. And the last thing was, ‘I need you to be totally 100 percent comfortable with who you are because there’s no one out there on the track to help you. It’s you in between those two lines and those 10 hurdles. If you’re not comfortable, you can’t really fly.’”
Cunningham said that heart-to-heart “started this whole journey of me being uncomfortable enough to be comfortable with who I was.”
At the point of that conversation in 2019, Cunningham hadn’t told the majority of the people in his life about his secret. By the end of 2020, he had told his entire family.
“I don’t think anybody’s surprised,” he joked. “I mean, my favorite Power Ranger was the pink Power Ranger.”
Now, he’s opened himself up to the entire world.
While Cunningham acknowledged his story might receive some pushback, he’s not really worried about what things look like in the rearview mirror.
“There’s going to be pockets of places where they don’t tolerate it and they might not champion it, or there might be punishment for it,” Cunningham said. “I think that goes for anything outside of the norm around the world. But for the most part, the students don’t really care as much. They’re just like, ‘OK, cool.’”
