With his coming-out four years ago, the former Bundesliga handball player Lucas Krzikalla has not only changed his own life but also the daily lives of those closest to him. “Everything became easier for my family; that used to feel like a bit of trickery,” the 32-year-old told the Süddeutsche Zeitung (paywalled).
Earlier, relatives answering questions about a girlfriend, a wedding, or children would often dodge. “The hide-and-seek is over, we can all live openly,” Krzikalla said about the time afterward.
Krzikalla Recalls a Threat Letter
The former Leipzig player publicly came out in the fall of 2022. To this day he remains the only openly gay German professional in a team sport. Before that, his family, his closest friends, and his then-team knew, Krzikalla said. “We kept a bit of silence about it,” the former Bundesliga pro from SC DHfK Leipzig, where he played for 15 years, recalled. Today Krzikalla competes in the Regionalliga for the Munich Panthers, a project of former national players Dominik Klein and Steffen Weinhold. He moved to Munich because of his boyfriend Chris, with whom he had previously maintained a long-distance relationship.
How seamlessly his relationship has become part of the sporting routine is illustrated by a small gesture from the team circle: his boyfriend was added to the group chat of the players’ wives, Krzikalla said in the interview. He can also imagine a wedding: “Definitely. For now we’re living together, but marriage has always been high on my list.”
“It Was a Liberation”
There were hardly any hostilities after the coming-out. “From the stands or in the arena directly, nothing. There were comments on social media. The harshest was a threat letter sent to the club office,” said the right wing. The content: “That I belong in a reeducation camp and should die there.” That was met with a lot of support, from professional sports as well as from politics: Leipzig’s mayor Burkhard Jung (SPD) reached out, and there was also a conversation with Saxony’s premier Michael Kretschmer (CDU).
Looking back, the handball player regards his coming-out as the right decision. “Because mentally it had always been a burden to live in hiding. It was a liberation; I would do it the same way again,” Krzikalla said.
He also knows other gay handball pros. “But it’s not for me to push anyone there. I made the decision for myself, and every athlete should do the same. Colleagues have written to me that they doubted whether it was right to continue playing pro sports, they couldn’t reconcile it with their conscience.”
Sorge vor dem Rechtsruck
Looking at political developments, Krzikalla said he is worried. “Of course that makes me think about the direction in which we are headed in the various states,” he said. For the queer community, a rise of the AfD “isn’t good if the queer community loses more rights that were hard-fought.” If the party were to gain the upper hand nationwide, “not everyone here would feel comfortable and safe anymore.”
That Munich has a gay Green politician, Dominik Krause, as mayor, he found “very sympathetic,” but it did not influence his move. He had not heard of queer-phobic attacks in Munich’s Glockenbachviertel: “I know that hate crimes have risen across Germany. I didn’t know that about Munich.”
