Is alex honnold gay
On June 3, 2017, my boyfriend, Alex Honnold, became the first person to free-solo El Capitan, a 3,000-foot wall in Yosemite National Park. It was an achievement compared to the lunar landing.
Just a year and a half prior to that afternoon, Alex and I met at a talk and book signing he’d done in Seattle. I hadn’t known a single thing about him, but after listening to him communicate, I decided he was cute and funny, so I left my mobile number on the table as I walked away. A few weeks later, we went on our first date. It was a dry, cloudy afternoon in early December, and we sat across from each other in the upstairs of a crowded pizza joint. As we chatted, we learned about each other: I was an outdoor dilettante; he had committed his entire life to rock climbing. I lived with four friends in the middle of the city; he spent entire rest days alone in his van. I treasured nuance and context; he found clarity in the black and white. We were total opposites, yet somehow there was a spark. As we laughed and watched each other, I was oblivious that he had recently signed a contract with National Geographic to film a documentary about his life.
In June 2016, six months after Alex and I met, I quit my job
Opinion: The Free Solo Documentary Addressed Some Uncomfortable Truth, But Ignored Others
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Alex Honnold is a polarizing figure. I don’t mean within our community, I mean within my own mind. Honnold gives me cognitive dissonance. I believe both that his free solos are amazing feats, approaching the limits of human potential, and that he’s recklessly risking his own animation. I’m impressed, but I—like so many in the climbing community, including some of Honnold’s own friends—wish he wouldn’t pursue these unroped climbs in the first place. The movie Free Solo, which documents Honnold’s groundbreaking El Cap solo via Freerider, is this concept distilled.
Before I move on, let’s become one thing out of the way. This is not a review. Free Solo is a superb movie—one of the top climbing films to date—and you should go watch it. OK, now that that’s settled….
As a member of the climbing media, I don’t like questions like “Should the media cover free soloing?” I don’t believe it’s our job to decide. I believe it’s our position to report on newsworthy climbs of whatev
Short Profile
Name: Alex Honnold
DOB: 17 August 1983
Place of birth: Sacramento, California, United States
Occupation: Rock climber
Alex, what is it enjoy to do something that no one else on planet has ever done?
It’s satisfying, but the thing is nobody else is really playing the game of free solo climbing, so it's easy to defeat when no one else plays, you know? When you're just playing by yourself, anything you do is going to be something that has never been done before. It’s not just free soloing El Cap, I believe I've done something like 35 or 43 solos that were the first time they'd been done, or they were new in some way.
But there are of course other free solo climbers in the world, no?
Not a lot though. It's kind of out of vogue, people don't really accomplish that much anymore because…
Because it’s insane?
(Laughs) I think some of that is cultural stuff. In the seventies and eighties, there were more people free soloing, it was slightly more ordinary, and I consider part of that is that climbing has gotten safer. Climbing used to be extremely countercultural and fringe, this niche outrageous outing. And now it's much more mainstream, much more acknowledged. I walked over to the cl