The night before the 2008 Canada Cup, the final meet of the fall season for the Stanford women’s swimming team, Laura Wadden ’09 lay in bed awake.
Three weeks earlier, Wadden was the poster child of a Stanford student campaign against Proposition 8, a California initiative to ban same-sex marriage. She was left devastated by the results, as 52 percent of state voters decided that marriage could only be between a man and a woman.
In her Toronto hotel room, the senior co-captain of the swimming team was overcome with memories and emotions of the past half-year. She remembered imploring her fellow students through a megaphone to join her in the fight for equal rights and recognition of same-sex marriage. She recalled her encouragement for her younger brother Jack, a rower on the men’s crew team at Williams College, when he told their parents the summer before that he was gay.
But on Thanksgiving night in 2008, after months of supporting others, Wadden wondered who would be there for her.
The next day, she found her coach, Lea Maurer ‘94 M.A. ‘95, just before the start of her first event.
“I’m bisexual,” Wadden told her coach.
At Stanford, coming out can still be difficult, especially for athletes. The University is home to about 800 varsity athletes, but only a handful has come out while still representing the Cardinal at the collegiate level.
It took Wadden four years to confront her identity and tell her coach, after questioning her own sexuality since high school. Looking back, she recalled her reasons for closeting part of her identity for the majority of her time at Stanford.
“I was just so scared,” Wadden said of the night before she confronted Maurer. “I didn’t know if I should come out or not, and I didn’t even know who to tell.”
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