New dad Tom Daley on meeting husband Dustin Lance Black: ‘It was a real love at first sight thing’

Tom Daley has a new book out soon called Tom’s Daily Goals and he’s on the promotional trail. So that means it’s a busy time for the Olympian who with husband Dustin Lance Black recently became a dad for the first time.

Daley talked to The Guardian. Here are some excerpts:

When he released his YouTube video coming out publicly, Daley had been in a whirlwind romance with the US screenwriter Black for just over six months. “It was a real love-at-first-sight thing. But then I had to come back to England so we were just talking on the phone or WhatsApp or whatever. Then he came over eight weeks later. The first night, I took him to meet my friends and said: ‘This is my boyfriend.’ The next night we went on our first date. The next night he asked me to be his boyfriend. The night after that, after a couple of lychee martinis, he told me he loved me. He extended his trip, we were already talking about babies and weddings. So that was in the first week. It was weird. But now it’s five years later …”

The couple’s baby, Robert Ray Black-Daley, was born to a surrogate mother in July: probably the most remarkable respect in which Daley matured before his years was his desire to be a father. “I’ve been shopping for baby clothes for six years, since before I met Lance, since I was 17 or 18. There’s nothing I’ve ever been more sure of in my life than having a family. One of the things I was so mortified about, so upset about, when I came out, was that I’d never be able to have a family. But then obviously I did more research. Because there’s something so special about passing on what my parents have taught me to children of my own.”

This year, having won his fourth Commonwealth Games medal, he called on its nations to decriminalise homosexuality. It wasn’t a planned move. “I got to go to the games with my grandad, grandma, my mother and Lance, and we sat down for lunch. I looked at Lance and thought: ‘How lucky am I to be able to be married to the person I love without any worry about ramifications, to be able to represent my country at a sport I love to do, and not have to worry about getting thrown in jail?’ At the time, there were 37 countries that criminalised LGBT people – Trinidad recently has legalised. Lots of people in the UK were shocked to hear that there were countries at all where it’s illegal. People of my generation, we just don’t realise. I’ve learnt so much from Lance [who’s 20 years older] about how different it was 20 years ago in the States even, but there are so many countries in the world where it’s so dangerous, and anybody who’s out is so brave. I thought, if I can try and shine a light on that, that’s the way to change people’s hearts, that’s the way to change their minds, and change laws, and change the way people think about everything.”