I showed up to swim team practice in jeans.
Swimmers leaned against the side of the Seattle University gym under the big tree (the directions that coaches gave to newcomers literally said to find “the big tree”), waiting for a coach to unlock the doors. No one else rocked jeans. I wore sneakers, but everyone else wore sandals. All the people I chatted with were experienced swimmers. Not me.
The sound of our footfall echoed on the pool deck as we entered the building. Voices boomeranged. The strong chlorine smell sent me stumbling back into childhood summers spent in pools sticking tin foil into my brother’s goggles so he wouldn’t cheat at Marco Polo. I forgot how much I loved swimming. A lot of the people here, at one point or another, had forgotten that feeling, too. Those here for the team’s “Begin to Swim” program were discovering that love for the first time.
No one at practice was a Michael Phelps or a Katie Ledecky. Maybe they’d aspired to be an Olympian in the past, but many were rediscovering swimming after taking time off in adulthood. Whether because life got in the way or because they’d swam themselves ragged in their youth, what they once loved about the sport evaded them. Here, on the Orca Swim Team, an LGBTQ+ team focused more on socializing than competitive success, swimmers, queer and allies alike, found themselves and their joy.
For my latest exploration into Seattle’s subcultures, I dipped my toes into the local swimming scene and dove into the deep end with the Orcas. During my time under the surface, I experienced underwater life as a place to connect, escape, and to push onward.
The Orcas
The Orca Swim Team started flutter-kicking in 1984, around the founding of the Gay Games, a quadrennial event, and International Gay and Lesbian Aquatics (IGLA), an annual event for gay pool sports.
“Sports provides a good opportunity for people to discover themselves in a safe, queer space,” said Mason Chuang, president of the Orcas.
Chuang started swimming in high school. The sport is so intertwined with his sense of self that he doesn’t even know his exact age—he refers to his age in the five-year increments that align with whatever age category he swims in. So, how old is he? “I’m 45 to 49,” he said.
Through swimming and IGLA, Chuang, whose first gay swim team was the San Francisco Tsunami, embraced his identity as a gay Asian man, he said.
He joined Orca in 2014. By then, Jim Lasersohn, 59, had been swimming with the team for almost two decades. Lasersohn came out in 1991. He joined the Orcas in 1995 after swimmers he met while watching the 1994 Gay Games in New York encouraged him to join a gay swim team of his own.
“It’s such an important social aspect of my life,” he said. “Most of the people I know in the city have come from here.”
By hosting several potlucks, various post-practice dinners, and Taco Tuesday open-water swims, Lasersohn has seen the team through all its seasons.
He even organized a Seattle IGLA tournament in 2013. During that tournament, as part of a Jell-O shot fundraiser he collaborated on with local bars, he catalyzed an inner-team romance.
“There were two young guys on our team that were friends,” he said. “On that Jell-O shot night, I’m pretty sure that I had something to do with them eventually getting married.”
He elaborated, coyly: “Maybe I told them that I would buy the Jell-O shots if they maybe took them off of each others’ chests.” He delivered a toast at their wedding.
A decade later, the team looks different. Sparse pool space and a shortage of lifeguards made convenient practice locations and consistent schedules nearly impossible. The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t help. Membership plummeted. Only in the last year, after regaining pool time at Seattle University, have the Orcas been able to rebuild.
However the Orca team changes, its emphasis on being a safe space won’t change, Lasersohn said. That creates a unique sort of intimacy in an already intimate sport, according to coach AJ Burt.
Intimacy in the Water
When I talked to Burt, 30, right out the gate he asked me to describe my first memory of swimming. Down to brass tacks. Okay.
I have a ghost of a memory—or, maybe it’s one of those memories gleaned from family folklore—of stepping off the lip of my grandpa’s pool when I was two, my dad shouting, “No!” and then the sound of bubbles as someone—my dad? my uncle?—jumped in to rescue me as I calmly floated to the surface. It’s a story that encapsulates how I’ve always felt in the water: bold, at ease.
Burt said he asks every swimmer this question.
“A person’s relationship with swimming is really intimate,” he said. “Getting into water has a risk of hurting you. That’s an intimate thing to rationalize. And—you take off your clothes. You’re vulnerable down to what is covering up only the essentials. You’ve literally stripped yourself of everything.”
Plus, navigating a pool—a place with learned etiquette—when you never have before is uncomfortable.
“It’s intimate, too, because it’s a very organized sport that requires that you kind of be at the same speed as other people,” Burt said. “With all this coordination, you essentially put yourself into a literal box—a lane.”
Burt learned to swim as a kid in his Ohio backyard. He’s swam ever since, and he’s coached swimmers from eight to 80 years old for 15 years. He stopped doing both of those things when he moved to Seattle three years ago.
“I was having trouble finding a sense of belonging,” he said. His coworker at Nordstrom told him about the team during the pandemic, but at that time practices were difficult for him to attend. Soon, life returned to normal, practices returned to closer to his home, and Burt joined up.
“I found the team at a time when I really needed it,” Burt said.
Katie Fritcher needed the team, too.
Swimming as an Escape
Fritcher, 36, learned to swim in Anchorage, Alaska.
“My mom is terrified of water, so she put me and my sisters in [swim lessons] as soon as we were capable of holding our heads up,” Fritcher said.
She fooled around on her childhood swim team, diving underwater and staying there for long stretches.
“I got interviewed on the Anchorage News when I was four,” Fritcher said. “I said, ‘I just love being in the water.’”
Beyond the fun of it, swimming helped her ADHD.
“I always kind of felt like a puppy that needs to go on walks,” she said.
By cutting off all her senses in the water, focusing on the bottom of the pool, doing calculations to figure out send-offs, and timing for different lengths, everything else fell away.
“I don’t think I would have gotten through any school if I hadn’t had swimming,” she said.
As she aged, Fritchers’s parents divorced. Her home life became generally “bad,” she said. The opportunities in Anchorage seemed more limiting. She needed a way out. Swimming became her one-way ticket to college, and a road out of a life that no longer served her.
“That was really where it turned from being, ‘Oh, this is fun. I love doing this and look at how great I am’ to ‘My life depends on this,’” she said of swimming.
Putting that level of pressure on herself, plus the stint it had earned her in a Division One swimming program, killed her joy in the water. She quit swimming after one year on the University of Nevada – Reno’s D-1 team. She didn’t swim seriously again for a decade.
She returned to swimming after she came out in 2020 and, in need of a queer community, joined the Orcas.
“It’s pretty typical at that level for somebody to take a full decade off to process things,” Fritcher said. “It’s taken me a long time to find joy in swimming again.”
She said that finding swimming again after being so competitive required a mindset shift. She has to remind herself to have fun. “There’s literally no stakes,” she said. “There have been times when I’m like, ‘You know what? I can’t handle a set right now. I’m just gonna put on fins, take my cap off, and be a mermaid.’”
She pretended to be a mermaid so hard the other week that she bonked her nose on the bottom of the pool and had to go to urgent care.
Racing Against Time
But Fritcher can’t always avoid her greatest competition—her former self.
“My ego’s too big to handle the slower times,” she said. In her past life as a freestyle sprinter, Fritcher used to swim two lengths in 23 seconds. “Now, I can’t crack 30 seconds to save my life.” She mostly swims breaststroke now, avoiding the strokes she used to swim competitively.
Swimming is about personal bests. Those bests change as your body changes.
“As you get older, you can’t say, ‘Well, is this my best time ever?’” Lasersohn said. “Overall, you’re going to slow down.”
However, aging is precious in this community.
“Seeing generations much older than me swimming and competing out and proud is a pretty special thing, because we lost a whole generation [to the AIDS epidemic],” Burt said. “And now we have who’s left.”
Facing the realities of aging—weight gained, charley horses acquired—and of being queer are easier with a community like the Orcas.
“The noise from the outside world disappears for an hour or so during practice,” Chuang said. Diving beneath the surface, everything quiets. When you pop your head up for a sip of air, you can hear the music the team blasts during practice. “You get to realize how much fun life can be.”
In the Pool
I initially found the Orca swim team due to a delusion that I could swim Seattle’s annual Fat Salmon Swim, a two-hour, 3.2 mile open water swim.
The harebrained idea spurred me to buy a pass to my local community center pool. I acquired a red Speedo one-piece suit, goggles, and the sacred knowledge of how to put on a swim cap. I jumped into a lap lane with no idea what circle swimming was or how to respond when the people in the lane told me times and numbers. I did not feel bold and at ease here.
It was that dumb idea that brought me to the Orca pool deck.
Lasersohn, who used to organize the Fat Salmon Swim with the Orcas, invited me to join him at an Orca practice to see if I could actually swim the distance in under two hours. He gave me my own lane. He watched me swim a lap.
“Your stroke is good,” he said. “Your body is twisting back and forth nicely. Like a pencil.” He rocked one of his hands back and forth to mimic the movement.
I preened. Even though I loved swimming, I’d never called myself a swimmer because I didn’t have any formal training. I’d never actually considered swimming seriously because I thought it was too late. Then, he told me I shouldn’t kick so much. Noted.
“Now, why don’t you swim 800 yards and time yourself?” he said. That was 20 lengths of the pool, or a quarter mile. The most I’d swam uninterrupted was four lengths. Fuck it.
The rest of the Orcas sloshed through practice, perfecting their butterfly in the lanes next to me. In the furthest lane, coaches taught swim lessons. Britney Spears crooned through a bluetooth speaker, joining a chorus of arms tearing through surface tension.
After I assumed I’d swam 20 laps (I lost count), my heart pounding and water dripping off my face, I checked the clock. Fourteen minutes. Wow, I thought, not bad. Pretty fast, even? Goggles on my head, I looked up at Laherson, hopeful. He tapped numbers into his phone’s calculator. Okay, maybe not that fast.
“I’d recommend against the race this year,” Lasersohn said, gently. He then gave me a few exercises to work on in the pool.
The rejection stung at first, but I stayed for the whole practice, noticing—despite the exertion—my stroke strengthen. When I left the pool, my mind felt freshly scrubbed and my limbs hung loose.
I’ve since purchased a new punch card for the community center and designated a drawer for my goggles and my cap. Maybe I’ll try the Fat Salmon next year.
