by MATTHEW HAYS

Sitting across from Mark Tewksbury, it’s impossible not to be struck by how paradoxical he is. At first glance, the Olympic gold-medal-winning swimmer is ludicrously clean cut, complete with Osmond-esque toothy smile, down-home good looks and Calgary upbringing. The strapping and muscular 6-foot-plus athlete has won a slew of accolades in the world of sports—certainly, he looks masculine—but is also one Great Big Girlfriend.

Then there’s his earnest side: the role model, the motivational speaker who preaches positive thinking and churns out New Agey-type truisms that sound like Oprahspeak. This public persona is effectively balanced by the occasional pot-smoking, raunchy, peroxide-blonde Barbie who many of us have seen clubbing in the Village from time to time. Simply put, Tewksbury is a mass of contradictions.

These points of contradiction are something Tewksbury wants to clarify, explore and embrace in his latest project, a 262-page memoir, Inside Out: Straight Talk From a Gay Jock (hc, Wiley Books, $34.99), released next week. In it, the athlete reveals behind-the-scenes anecdotes of his stellar swimming career while also showing us the internal struggle he faced.

Barbie, drag and threesomes

Sitting down for breakfast at a café on St-Laurent, Tewksbury concedes a big part of writing the book was for him to discuss the various contradictory pressures he’s faced as a public figure.

“I wanted to bring the two people I knew into one world,” he says. “The athlete and the gay activist have often existed separately. There are a lot of things I’ve never shared before. And there’s a new depth brought to old stories. I had never spoken about Barbie before, or drag, or threesomes, or prostitutes. And people may know some of this, but they don’t know the texture, the nuance, of a lot of the stories.”

Tewksbury pauses for a moment. “And you know what? My mother hasn’t even read the book yet.”

To be sure, Tewksbury’s achievements both as an athlete and as a gay trailblazer have been eclipsed by his various new media roles. He worked for a time as a lifestyle pundit for Canada AM. And he now hosts How It’s Made on the Discovery Channel. But it’s important to be reminded of his legacy: three Olympic medals, numerous world records, induction into multiple athletic halls of fame. And in 1998, he officially came out, making him one of a small number of sports celebrities who have openly declared their homosexuality.

In the book, Tewksbury delves back into his childhood in a conservative household in Calgary, Alberta. There, his father expressed horror at Tewksbury’s love of his sister’s Barbie doll. Whenever the lad got caught playing with the doll, he received a beating with a wooden spoon by dad. However unconsciously, these incidents stayed with him. Years later, after his father died, an adult Tewksbury spotted a Barbie doll at a yard sale in Toronto’s gay village and snatched it up. Done up like “Slut Barbie,” Tewksbury found himself playing with this Barbie in the bathtub. Call it getting in touch with your inner child.

Tewksbury also recounts getting into a threesome with a male and female swimmer in a cubicle at the University of Calgary when he was in training. They were caught, and the embarrassment and shame he and the other two felt was overwhelming—at least at the time. “Now I can look back and laugh at it,” he says. Tewksbury is quick to add that life in Montreal is “the best it’s ever been.” He moved here several years ago, and says “it’s a city where you don’t even have to think about being gay.”

Inside the jock closet

As Tewksbury’s success and subsequent fame grew as a world-class athlete, he says his personal life often felt worse. “Someone would come up to me and say, ‘You’re a hero, you’re doing all these amazing things!’ I would walk away, and I would think to myself, ‘Would you still think this if you really knew me?’ I felt very dishonest about the double life I was leading.”

Tewksbury agrees that the sports universe is one that still remains homophobic, especially the team sports of hockey, baseball and football. But the spokesperson for this summer’s inaugural Outgames, to be held in Montreal this summer, says he sees reason for optimism.

“I see a time when someone in a team sport could come out. I think it will happen, probably in the next five years. When that barrier is first broken, it’ll be a big deal. But by the third time, it will no longer be. In my day, you stayed closeted because you risked losing everything—your coach, your job, your financial backing. In 2006, being gay simply doesn’t mean the same level of public disdain that it did.”