Breaking the Surface (31 page)

There had been a time in my life when I didn’t mind Tom’s being controlling. I was content for him to be my eyes and ears to the world. I didn’t want to be bothered by anyone or anything, and I was happy for him to be my buffer. But now it was too much. For one thing, after training in Florida for so many months, I’d gotten more used to being on my own and making a lot of my own decisions. I no longer liked having Tom tell
me
what to do all the time. Now that he wanted total control of everything, it was becoming impossible. I began to realize that I had to make a change. And I began to see that I could.

Things got to be so bad with Tom that I started sharing with Megan how unhappy I was. I’d call her when he was out of the house and ask, “Am I crazy? Am I losing my mind?” Megan tried to tell me that I wasn’t going crazy, and I started to open up to her about what Tom was doing. She reassured me that I was okay and explained how Tom was being manipulative.

My relationship with Tom was hardly a new subject with Megan, but I’d never been willing to acknowledge in the past that there was anything wrong. Two years earlier, Megan had hinted strongly that Tom was taking advantage of me, and she asked me if I knew where my money was and whose name was on what. Megan knew that Tom had power of attorney, so he was able to do whatever he wanted with my business interests.

Megan was pretty persistent, but she couldn’t come on too strong because I was still very defensive. One time, she said, “Just to entertain me, please find out about the finances.” I listened, but I wasn’t ready to follow through.

In the months leading up to the ’88 Olympics, Megan got more and more blunt, sharing with me what other people thought of Tom and how they thought he was destroying my career by the way he represented me to the press and companies that might hire me. Sometimes she tried to give me feedback about how she saw Tom treating me, but I still defended him. I still didn’t want to believe that he was the way Megan was describing him.

It’s not as if Megan was the only one telling me things about Tom. I had other people who came to me and told me that Tom was going to bars and making out with guys. Or they would say he was at bars handing out his business card, trying to make a pickup. His card stated in bold print under Tom’s name, M
ANAGER OF
G
REG
L
OUGANIS
, O
LYMPIC
D
IVER
.

Megan told me several times to confront Tom about these things, and on the few occasions when I raised the subject of him going out at night, he always made it sound like he was out there working for me, promoting my interests.

In the late fall of 1988, I mentioned to Megan for the first time that maybe I should break up with Tom. We were on a plane together going to an exhibition in Wyoming. She said that before I did anything, I needed to call my attorney and have her find out whatever she could about Tom, to get back my power of attorney, and to keep it all as quiet as possible. She knew as well as I did that if Tom got wind of this, it would be hell. She told me that if I didn’t call my attorney, she was going to do it. Her concern was that I’d be making a lot of money during the coming months, and unless I did something, I’d wind up without a penny.

Megan was very insistent. While I was finally ready to listen to what she was saying, I wasn’t yet ready to call my attorney. I thought I’d do some snooping around myself first, just to see if there was anything that didn’t look right. I was still hoping I wouldn’t find anything to worry about.

After I got home from that trip, I started poking around the office, looking in files. Tom caught me a couple of times and he got extremely angry. Suddenly I was forbidden to set foot in the office, which made me very suspicious. He was acting as if he had something to hide. I figured he was trying to hide a boyfriend. So I waited until he was out of the house, and I started going through the files, the checkbooks, and the phone logs. I was always on guard, because I was afraid that he’d catch me. Usually, I waited until he went to the grocery store, because then I could time how long he’d be away.

The first thing I came across left me a little puzzled. I found several letters from young gay men who had written to me after the publication of the
GQ
magazine profile of me earlier that year. In the letters, they told me about their lives and what a positive role model I’d been for them. Some of the letters had pictures with them. I wondered why Tom hadn’t shown them to me. In fact, I’d never seen
any
letters in response to the article.

I looked through a few of the letters and noticed they were all from kids who lived in places where I’d done appearances or was about to do appearances. They seemed to be set aside for a reason. Tom often came along with me on my trips. Suddenly, I started to worry that he had been calling them up and having sex with them.

But the letters were nothing compared to what I discovered about my finances: I had only two-thousand dollars in my personal checking account. Everything else—all my investments, all of my savings—was either in Tom’s name alone or in both our names. Since the Olympics, I’d been making a lot of money, but none of it was in my name. I couldn’t understand what was going on.

I wanted to say something to Tom as soon as he came back from the grocery store, but I waited a little while so he wouldn’t think I’d been playing detective. That evening, I mentioned that I’d written a check from my personal account and my balance was a lot smaller than I’d expected. I asked him in the most nonconfrontational way I could what had happened to all the checks that had come in for my endorsements, appearances, and speaking engagements. Tom explained that he hadn’t had a chance to get to the bank, so he had sent the checks in to his own account.

I may have been stupid when it came to finances, but I wasn’t
that
stupid. I decided to take Megan’s advice and talk to Debbie Shon, my attorney, about what I should do. I went to her office the next day and told her everything I knew up to that point. I didn’t do a very good job, but however badly I explained it, Debbie understood enough to be concerned. She said that we had to handle the situation very delicately and suggested that she arrange a meeting at her office with Tom and some of the other attorneys to talk in general about my finances and taxes.

Debbie gave Tom the impression that it was her office that initiated the meeting, not me. She decided not to run the meeting, because she knew he would take it as a personal attack. One of her senior partners presented their concerns about the way Tom had structured our holdings. He explained that it could look as if we were doing it to avoid paying taxes, which could lead to charges of fraud. He laid it all out very logically, so it was hard for Tom to argue with.

The result of the meeting was that my finances were restructured in a way that protected my interests and prevented Tom from walking off with everything. One of the first things they did was rescind his power of attorney so that he couldn’t do anything with any of my personal finances or our joint finances without my approval.

I could tell during the meeting that Tom was furious. He had been outmaneuvered by his little dummy. If things at home had been cool up to that point, they were cold from then on. Tom didn’t know for sure that I had initiated the meeting, but he had an idea, because I’d been spending so much time with Debbie. After that meeting, Tom started calling Debbie a “meddling bitch.”

The first thing Tom did after we got home from that meeting was draw up a letter outlining my relationship with him and send it to anyone I had business dealings with, from Speedo to the banks. In it he said something to the effect that when you were dealing with him, you were virtually dealing with Greg Louganis. He intended the letter to give him free reign to do whatever he wished regarding my business and financial matters. I’m embarrassed to admit it now, but I signed the letter. He was furious over the confrontation with our attorney regarding the power of attorney, and I thought I could placate him by signing the letter. Now I see that I was still trying to keep the peace and still trying to make things okay. I was still afraid to say no.

Megan couldn’t understand why I was still with Tom. I explained to Megan that despite everything, and no matter how irrational it was, I still loved him. And I told her that Tom had AIDS. Then she asked me how I was. I told her that I was HIVpositive. None of that was a surprise to her, because she knew all about Tom’s being sick. I went on to explain that the main reason I was so reluctant to leave Tom was that we’d each promised that we wouldn’t let the other die alone. She understood, but she still urged me to talk to my attorney about having Tom investigated to see if there was anything else to be found out.

I didn’t like the idea of hiring a private investigator to look into Tom’s past, but I called Debbie anyway. I talked to Debbie about the private investigator, and she thought it was a good idea. I was still reluctant, and I told her that after six years I already knew everything there was to know about Tom, including his criminal record. Why hire an investigator?

Early on in my relationship with Tom, he told me that he’d been convicted of disturbing the peace following his arrest at a gay rights protest. I respected that. Just to appease Debbie and Megan, I said it was okay to hire a private detective.

Well, I couldn’t believe what the investigator found. Tom’s actual record showed that he’d been charged with both petty theft and grand theft. I shouldn’t have been surprised, given what Tom had done with my finances, but I was. There was more: Tom was involved in insurance fraud. When we got together he’d told me that he had a Mercedes that had been vandalized and was in the shop being fixed. The investigator turned up that Tom was the one who had done the vandalizing, but not of a MercedesBenz. Tom did have a Mercedes, but the car he’d vandalized was his Volkswagen. Tom would never have harmed his precious Mercedes, which he kept parked in the garage on an Oriental rug.

That wasn’t the end of it, and it certainly wasn’t the worst of it. Tom had been arrested for solicitation. He pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of disturbing the peace. He hadn’t been arrested at a gay rights protest. He’d been arrested for hustling. It was so hard to believe, but the investigator talked to people who knew Tom, who confirmed that he’d been a hustler on Santa Monica Boulevard.

I had a terrible time believing that Tom had lied to me, and even though there was no way to explain away his record, I couldn’t really believe it was true. That night, I slept with him as I always did. I couldn’t let on what I’d learned. I had to be careful, because I had no idea what he would do if I confronted him. So until I decided what to believe and what to do, I pretended that everything was normal. It was an incredibly difficult acting job.

Around this time, I met a man who turned out to be very instrumental in helping me realize that I deserved better than Tom. He was someone I came to lean on as I tried to figure out what to do. I can’t use his real name, because he’s an extremely private man. So I’ll call him Steven.

I met Steven in late 1988, when I was driving home from San Diego after visiting my father, who was in the hospital. He’d gone in to have his heart checked and they found a spot on his lung, which turned out to be cancer.

I was driving in pretty heavy traffic. I looked over to the next car and saw an attractive man staring back at me. We continued driving, and we kind of played cat and mouse with each other. At one point, when we were stopped in traffic, he passed his phone number over to me. I didn’t know it then, but at first he didn’t know who I was, which was very appealing to me, because that meant he wasn’t interested in me just because I was famous.

The next time I went to San Diego to see my father, I took Steven’s phone number with me and called him. If Tom had found out, he would have made my life a living hell. But I needed the attention and I needed to talk to someone so desperately that I was willing to risk it.

When I spoke with Steven, I thanked him for making my day. I felt comfortable talking to him, so I shared with him a bit of what had been going on in my life and how unhappy I was. I told him that he’d made me feel attractive, which I hadn’t felt in a long time. Of course, here I was saying I didn’t feel attractive, yet I was photographed for magazine covers and calendars and plenty of people told me how attractive I was. It always felt like they were talking about somebody else, and I just never allowed myself to believe what seemed to be obvious to everyone but me.

At the end of the conversation, Steven and I agreed to meet in the morning for breakfast. I knew that would be safe, because I was leaving right from there to go home. I needed to make sure there was no opportunity for me to go home with him, because I didn’t trust myself. If we’d made plans to get together the night before, I feared I’d end up staying over with him. I wanted to, but given that I was still with Tom, I knew I shouldn’t.

During breakfast, I told him I was HIV-positive. Steven was a wonderful listener. He reassured me that I was right to be upset about what I was going through with Tom, that I was better than Tom had made me believe I was.