Sam Phillips is the kind of athlete he never saw growing up: not only queer, but proud of it. Now an All-American collegiate gymnast, Phillips brings every aspect of himself to the floor — and his sport is all the better for it.
As a child, Phillips recalls seeing athletes whose queerness was an open secret, not something they’d represent when on the world stage at national championships or Olympic games.
“To me, that sent the message that, ‘Oh, maybe something’s off. Maybe I shouldn’t be this, or maybe I shouldn’t be vocal about it,’” he says. “And then when I stepped on the stage, I knew that there was no other option besides just to be me on the competition floor. And so I really wanted to do it just for those other little kids who needed to see someone to tell them that it’s okay, and you can do both, and you can be yourself and be a team captain and be an All-American.”
“I really wanted to do it just for those other little kids who needed to see someone to tell them that it’s okay, and you can do both, and you can be yourself and be a team captain and be an All-American.”
– Sam Phillips
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Phillips, now 23 years old, grew up in Los Angeles. His two older brothers were also athletes as children, and before Phillips was old enough to play any sports himself, he remembers being dragged along to their practices and games. There, he channeled his boundless childhood energy into learning how to do flips.
“I was always on the sidelines, just playing with the other siblings, flipping on the sides,” he says. “I always had a lot of energy. I was flipping in the house, flipping with my grandma. She tells me stories about me flipping on the streets of Chicago, literally.”
“My parents just were like, ‘We gotta get him into something. He cannot be staying on the sidelines the whole time, and we don’t know what to do with him. So let’s put him in gymnastics, where he can flip,’” Phillips continues. “Once I got comfortable on the floor, just from a young age, it became my second home. I loved it, and I felt free to just flip and be myself and get out all my energy.”
For any RuPaul’s Drag Race fans (or terminally online gays in general), yes, Phillips’ origin story bears a striking resemblance to Drag Race queen Mhi’ya Iman Le’Paige’s viral explanation for her gymnastics skills, that one day she and her cousins were “out flipping and just started flipping.”
As of this interview, Phillips wasn’t familiar with Mhi’ya, but he recognizes their kindred spirits: “I thought about doing drag,” he shares. “A friend of mine did drag, so they kind of always told me that I should try and stuff, because I also do love theater and performing.” Maybe someday he’ll be the second queen of flips.
Despite LA’s reputation as a melting pot, Phillips recalls being one of the only Black children at his elementary school and at his local gym. He saw more diversity when he got to middle and high school, but when he started college at the University of Nebraska, it felt like a return to square one.
“Going to Nebraska, I was back in a place where it lacked diversity a lot,” Phillips says. “I was, a lot of times, maybe the first person someone had ever met who was Black and queer.”
He recalls people earnestly asking him if it was alright for them to say racial slurs or to use homophobic language. Despite his disbelief in those folks’ ignorance as people old enough to attend college, he says he took it as a chance both to educate his peers and to exercise his own open-mindedness.
“That was something that I had to handle with grace and humility and kind of take a step back and realize, like, look, some people had never even been friends with a Black person, and some people came from towns with one cross street, graduating class of 20 people, while mine was a thousand,” Phillips explains. “So it was a lesson in grace, and it was a lesson in patience and, honestly, tolerance and being the bigger person and using it as a moment to bring people in and kind of educate and answer those questions. Because if not me, who? For the next Black person or for the next queer person they meet, it’s like, I wouldn’t want them to go through it. So this, we’re going to use as a learning lesson, and I’m going to just be the one to teach you or to tell you right from wrong.”
Despite those early road bumps, Phillips says his five years at Nebraska were overall wonderfully inclusive and accepting, especially when he was serving as team captain for the 2023 and 2024 seasons. The two proudest moments of his gymnastics career so far, he says, came during his time as a Cornhusker: leading his team to a share of the Big Ten Conference in 2024, and becoming a two-time All-American just weeks later for both the high bar and all-around events.
“Both of those moments just felt like it was just an act of providence, and just so emotional,” Phillips recalls. “I’m a spiritual person, so in those moments, it’s like, God just forced me to let go: let go of all expectations, let go of my mind and my physicalness in this world, and just trust my spirit and trust my soul and trust my journey, and it just all came together.”
Phillips’ spirituality extends to his take on gymnastics itself, including why he feels coming out to his teammates as queer improved his performance in the sport.
“Gymnastics is a very spiritual sport to me,” he explains. “You do a lot of skills that feel right to you, your body, your form, and what you know how to do, and your skill set. And so I think just being closer to yourself allows you to be closer to gymnastics, because the more you feel yourself, the more you feel yourself within your gymnastics. You know what’s right, you know what feels good, you know what’s wrong.”
Phillips has become known for his floor routine transitions and his post-event celebrations, where he often adopts a feminine swagger and deploys undeniably queer-coded moves. One moment he’s especially proud of came at the end of a rings routine, where after hitting his final pose, he lip synced to the end of “No Bars” by JT. The video went viral, earning Phillips more than a million views on social media and a repost from SZA.
That viral moment is just one example of how Phillips feels expressing his queer identity has improved his gymnastics skills. “It just allowed me to go all out and just express myself, and people connect with that,” he says.
Phillips acknowledges the performative aspect of gymnastics (one of the reasons it’s a favorite sport among the queer community), and in his performances, he says bringing a mix of masculine and feminine energy is one of his goals.
“I am six-foot tall, I’m the biggest gymnast a lot of people have seen, I’m very muscular, and I am masculine-presenting, and I definitely pass a lot of the time,” he says. “I do all these events, and I celebrate, I scream, and I get loud — but I also do the death drop or these feminine things. And I love making people question their perception of people and their perception of gender norms and stereotypes.”
Phillips is now pursuing his masters in management at the University of Illinois, where he joined the men’s gymnastics team for the 2025 season. Sadly, he suffered a ruptured Achilles early in the season — but Phillips, ever the optimist, still found ways to contribute to the team and to improve on his own athleticism.
“Every time I get injured is just another opportunity to reevaluate myself in the sport, go back from the start, and come back to it, strengthening my basics, strengthening my weaknesses,” he says. “You have more time just to watch everyone, help everyone out, help the coaches out, give your soul, give your spirit, give your energy, just everything you can — everything but physical to the team. So that’s just what I did this season.”
“I love making people question their perception of people and their perception of gender norms and stereotypes.”
– Sam Phillips
Despite the injury, Phillips’ collegiate career isn’t over yet: he recently officially announced that he’ll be returning to the Illinois team for the 2026 season. It could be his last time competing at the university level, but beyond that, Phillips has his sights set on a fantastic finale to his time as a gymnast.
“I’ll just speak plain: my cutoff is 2028, LA Olympics. That is my absolute cutoff,” he says. “Literally, even if I don’t make the national team once in between there, I just gotta go for it. It’s three more years until then anyways — might as well. The time will pass anyways. And so then I can walk away saying, ‘Yeah, I went for it. I went for a hometown Olympics, which is something that a lot of people can’t say they did.’”
If he does make it to the 2028 Olympics, Phillips will still be just 26 years old when they’re over. From there on, he sees no shortage of possibilities for his future, including working in the film industry as an actor, director, or screenwriter.
“[Gymnastics will] always stay with me, but it’s given me so many things that I can use for my career,” he says. One of Phillips’ other passions is modeling, which he’s already started pursuing casually on social media. “I want to be a Calvin Klein model! If you have any connections, please, please, please,” he adds. (If any Calvin Klein reps are reading this, you know what to do.)
Even now at 23, Phillips has left the world of gymnastics — and of collegiate sports at large — a better place than he found it. To any other LGBTQ+ athletes out there who aren’t sure about bringing their queerness into their sport, he has a simple piece of advice: embrace the discomfort.
“I would just tell them that it gets better the more you do it. Like, it gets more comfortable,” he says. “It’s definitely like stepping into cold water. It might feel like a shock, and you might want to quickly run out because you’re afraid of the spotlight.”
“But once you get in, they might look at you, but then they’ll come up to you and they’ll congratulate you for it,” Phillips continues. “They’ll applaud you for it, they’ll hug you for it, they’ll talk to you about it, they’ll show interest, and it just gets better. […] It’s scary at first, but just keep hammering it down a little bit, making yourself uncomfortable, until eventually you get comfortable being yourself.”
“You’re going to look back and regret if you kind of hid a part of yourself, you know?” he adds. “We only get one life and a small amount of time on this earth, so just make sure you’re living the most out of it.” ♦
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