This story is part of LGBTQ+ in Fitness, a series of articles that spotlights the trainers, athletes, and gym owners who are making the fitness industry more inclusive for their community. Read the rest of the stories here.
WHEN YOU WALK into OUT-FIT, a functional fitness gym in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood, you'll instantly see that they’ve made the most out of a small space. Four rowing machines are neatly spaced apart, directly across from four squat racks. The room doesn’t feel constrained; instead, it's intentionally designed to encourage closeness during the small group classes, each of which contains no more than six to eight clients. Class sizes are especially important to OUT-FIT’s owner, Todd Brandon Morris, because he wants to foster genuine connections between clients. His classes are specifically for LGBTQ+ people who come not only for their physical health, but for the sense of community OUT-FIT offers.
The camaraderie is evident as I watch how clients greet one another while warming up, usually while petting Morris’s black lab, Brooklyn. Most of the clients I spoke to had been coming to Morris, a 45-year-old functional fitness trainer, since OUT-FIT opened its physical space in March 2023. A lot of them have stayed on since their very first class not only because they work out, but also because they get to hang out with their friends.
Morris starts off each class with an icebreaker, and then asks for everyone’s pronouns. After introductions, he walks the group through a 60-minute strength and conditioning routine, which includes a circuit focused on core lifts like front squats, accessory moves like split squats, and cycles of conditioning spent on the cardio row. “We started training with Todd because we wanted to get serious about our fitness and Todd was the only person who was willing to train us as a couple,” says Matt Caltabiano, one of OUT-FIT’s clients. “That was important because we wanted it to be something we could do together.”
Caltabiano and his partner, Noah, started coming to the group classes shortly after, and it's clear everyone knows them. At the strength and conditioning class I observed, friends were cheering Matt on as he went for a PR on his front squat. All of them were eager to talk with me about how much they loved the class, clearly wanting to support Morris and OUT-FIT. Several times, Morris had to break up conversations to get people back to their workouts, but overall, he's thrilled that the group is so close.
Prior to opening the physical space a little over a year ago, Morris had been running OUT-FIT by hosting quarterly workout classes at gyms around New York City for over 10 years. He originally started coaching after getting laid off from a sales leadership role with a tech firm, which had brought him to the city from San Francisco in 2013. While he was looking for other work, a friend suggested he try functional fitness as an outlet to channel his energy. It wasn’t long until he decided to become a coach himself, eventually earning his CrossFit Level 2 Trainer certification. “In some ways, coaching came naturally because it was very similar to what I liked about managing,” says Morris. “When you’re managing sales people, you’re helping them set their goals and supporting them to reach it. It’s the same thing in the gym.”
He ended up getting a job at a functional fitness gym in Manhattan. During that first year of coaching, he noticed that while he knew he had multiple queer clients, those clients often didn’t know about each other. They were siloed off in different classes and time slots, and may have felt like they were the only queer people at the gym. He realized that if this was happening at his gym, the same thing was likely happening at other gyms across the city. Besides creating a sense of isolation, this perceived lack of belonging might have actually discouraged queer people from working out. Morris wanted to come up with an idea that would not only solve this sense of isolation in his gym, but for gyms across the city.
“The only reason I started any of this was for visibility and community,” Morris says. Morris himself had often felt isolated as an out coach, due to a lack of visibility and community. He'd also dealt with homophobic comments from coaches and gym owners at other gyms. On top of all that, same sex marriage was not legal in most states. To Morris, building OUT-FIT felt vital not only in his fitness circles, but for the queer community at large. That community deserved to feel comfortable being out wherever they went–especially at the gym.
Building fitness classes for the queer community took serious work—many of the gyms that Morris knew in New York City were independently owned, with maybe one or two locations. As a result, gym owners often felt a sense of competition with one another and hesitated to collaborate with other gyms. Morris’s solution: He worked to capitalize on this competitive spirit with quarterly “Proud Workouts” hosted at different gyms around the city. This allowed gym owners chances to show off their spaces and offerings to a broader clientele. Each participant paid around $25 to attend the class, which covered the cost of the gym and coach’s time. This satisfied not only the owners and Morris’s own vision, but the many clients who were interested in his idea. Fifty people showed up to the first "Proud Workout" in 2014.
Over the next few years, interest in the “Proud Workout” spread to gyms outside of the city. Quarterly classes filled up quickly and demand was high. To meet the interest, Morris helped set up “OUT-FIT” formally as an LLC to run the quarterly workouts for queer people and help coaches set up their own local versions. Soon after, satellite Proud Workouts launched in Queens and Brooklyn. Then Morris was asked by coaches who found him on Instagram to help start similar programs in Dallas and South Florida. Morris knew New York City had a large enough queer community to sustain the program, but he didn’t know if it was possible to pull off the workouts in smaller cities. “I didn’t really know what to expect when we set up the other locations [in Dallas and South Florida], but I was amazed that we had at least 30 people showing up to those workouts from the start,” he says.
Morris knew that LGBTQ+ people in rural areas might not have the same access to queer fitness communities, so he tried to reach folks outside of big cities in other ways, eventually launching OUT-FIT’s merchandising arm. He came up with a simple design: a gray T-shirt with the word “PROUD” on it in all caps, black font. Over the years, Morris says he’s gotten messages from people across the country who shared that wearing the shirt at their gym helped them feel welcome as their authentic selves, and recognize that there were other LGBTQ+ people in their classes. He was amazed that the reactions were largely positive, even in rural towns where folks might’ve been afraid to wear the shirt.
While OUT-FIT has been largely successful thanks to the tight-knit community its built, it hasn’t come without its struggles. The organization had to stop operating temporarily during the pandemic. Some of the quarterly groups never restarted because other coaches left the industry and partner gyms shut down. “When the pandemic was over, whatever over really means with Covid, we couldn’t just go back to business as usual,” Morris says.
Morris was forced to start over. This time, he didn’t want to be at the mercy of a gym owner who might decide at any time that they no longer wanted to host the quarterly group. Instead, he became an owner himself. At the location in Chelsea, Morris offers personal training and four weekly small group training sessions. The small group training sessions are a mix of strength and conditioning, focusing on form and pushing clients beyond what they might push themselves to do on their own. He’s looking forward to offering more classes as the demand continues to grow. He’s also hoping to restart “Proud Workouts” in other cities across the U.S.
Those messages that Morris received from from queer fitness enthusiasts across the nation and from his own clients at the gym shows that, despite continued discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, they can find solidarity and support from their respective fitness communities. OUT-FIT will continue to support the LGBTQ+ community by running some free workouts through The Center, a community center for LGBTQ+ people based in NYC that has existed since the height of the AIDS epidemic. These classes fit in with OUT-FIT’s central mission that Morris had when he started the organization a decade ago: to continue to provide visibility and an inclusive fitness community to those who never had it before.
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