Say goodbye to Gus Kenworthy’s abs because you might not be seeing them for a while.
For the few of you that don’t know, Gus Kenworthy, professional freeskier and Olympic silver medalist, came out as gay in an interview with ESPN two weeks ago. After coming out, Kenworthy began posting shirtless pics on Instagram (with a butt photo in there for good measure). His Halloween costumes, which were all shirtless, consisted of a mouse, a cop, and a not-so-politically-correct Native American.
Unfortunately, it looks like we won’t be seeing any more shirtless pics of him for a while.
In a recent interview on SiriusXM Progress, Kenworthy spoke about posing shirtless and why he did it so much after coming out. Kenworthy said, “I need to cool it with that -- according to my publicist. But I don’t know, I guess I just felt like for so long, kind of pretending to be straight and lying in interviews, and everything that I was doing to try and fit in, I felt like I was like -- I know it’s not actually clothes -- but I felt like I was covering myself, and covering myself, and covering myself, and really censoring myself. So when I got to the point where I was really telling people that I was gay and I knew that I was going to come out publicly and stuff, it was sort of nice, and I guess freeing, to do something like that that was kind of off-brand for me, and something fun and I guess kind of objectifying, but still something that was fun and different.”
Given that posing shirtless seemed cathartic and freeing for Kenworthy, it’s a shame for his sake (and fine… ours too…) that he will no longer being posing shirtless. But you do whatever you need to do, Gus. We’ll still be here supporting you.
