troye sivan got out of a school swim race by singing the national anthem instead. i'm not crying, you're crying.

via A View From A Bridge, PinkNews and Queerty

"Some of my biggest fears is like a ball getting kicked over a fence when I'm the one walking past and have to pass it back to this group of men."

Troye Sivan said that into a red telephone on a bridge, for A View From A Bridge, a series where someone picks up the phone and tells a story. Every gay man reading this has just felt the ball land at his feet.

"I think I've like always had a very complicated relationship with men and like my own masculinity," he says. "Some of my like earliest memories in life were feeling very very um I guess sort of just like a bit of a failure as like a boy."

The story he tells is the school swimming carnival, compulsory, whole school watching, and "all of the boys that would like kind of already make fun of me for singing like a girl" in the stands. He made it about four strokes before he had to hang on to the lane divider. The next year he went to a teacher he describes as "so fab" who "always just looked immaculate and was so warm," and told her he did not want to swim. She said fine. But he had to sing the national anthem at the carnival instead. He did, the school clapped, and he went home dry.

"She saw something in me that I was really afraid of which was like a more real version of myself," he says. She is now the principal of a big school in Sydney, and he thinks "those are very, very lucky students."

It lands in the same month as She's the Best, the album he has framed around the women in his life, the same album rollout in which he answered a critic with "I am gay!!!! Gay gay gay gay." Turns out one of those women got there first, around the time he was learning to dread a football.