Flashback To Dylan Geick’s Epic Video About Gay Pride: WATCH #FBF
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Dylan Geick is an über famous out influencer, personality, and wrestling star today, but in 2017 he was still in high-school wrestling (literally and figuratively) with many of the same issues we all do around coming out at that age.
In the spring of 2017, The Chicago Tribune said of Geick, who had recently come out “Geick — now a senior bound for Columbia University and a two-time state placer for Stevenson’s wrestling team — is not the only Chicago-area high school athlete to come out as gay. Track and cross-country runner Konrad Eiring, now a sophomore competing at Illinois, also came out as a junior at Barrington in 2014.”
He and Geick are part of a small but growing number of out athletes at the high school and college levels. They are the new face of LGBT sports as the number of out athletes in the major North American male pro leagues has dwindled to one: Robbie Rogers of Major League Soccer’s Los Angeles Galaxy.
Photo above: Dylan Geick, left, plans to continue his career at Columbia after earning two state medals at Stevenson. (Eric P. Davis / Lake County News-Sun)
Geick isn’t exactly sure when he first realized his sexual orientation. But he also can’t recall not feeling comfortable with the idea of being gay.
“You always kind of know,” he said. “But I didn’t start taking it seriously till high school. Probably by sophomore year, I knew and had come to terms with it by junior year.”
One night, Geick was in his kitchen when his sister was watching an Instagram video. “She was going, ‘This kid is so amazing at singing,'” Geick said. “I very absentmindedly said, ‘Who is that?'”
Geick messaged Mower, the two became friends, and they started dating. That got Geick to thinking about how he wanted to live his life.
“Once I accepted myself — which was the hardest piece — I knew I was going to come out at some point,” he said. “But meeting Grant and then starting a relationship with him, it definitely gave me a reason to.
“I really didn’t like feeling like I was hiding something, especially a relationship that was important to me.”
The week after state is when Geick’s status as a standard-bearer for LGBT athletes started to take off. It came almost overnight after Outsports.com, a website covering LGBT athletes, posted a profile of him.
“The Outsports thing was insane,” said Geick, who estimates he added about 8,000 Instagram followers in the week after the story broke. He now has 25,000.
Columbia wrestling coach Zach Tanelli was among those who learned Geick was gay from the Outsports story and who made it clear that it was not only not an issue, it was an asset.
Geick ended up accepting his offer to attend Columbia.
By June of that year, Geick would record the vlog that would launch his number of followers into the stratosphere called Sit N Talk Pride. In it he expressed his views on and how he accepted what the Pride parade was about in a conversation with his brother, Mason Geick.
Watch it below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2nSFFNB6T8
