Photographer Jeff Sheng didn’t think being out as an athlete was an option in his younger years. (Photo courtesy Sheng)

At the beginning of his senior year in Thousand Oaks, Calif., Jeff Sheng did something that probably surprised everyone who knew him.

He was a varsity tennis player and had just been named co-captain of his high school team by his teammates, a team his younger brother was just joining as a talented freshman player.

Before his senior year tennis season even started, he quit the sport he loved and had been playing since childhood.

It was 1997 and Sheng was in the middle of confronting his own sexual orientation and didn’t believe that he could continue as an athlete.

In a quote from his new photography book “Fearless: Portraits of LGBT Athletes,” he writes, “I believed that being openly gay and being a competitive athlete were incompatible with each other. There were no visible role models to show me otherwise.”

In an attempt to fill the hours that were once occupied by tennis, Sheng turned his attention to photography. He went on to Harvard University and earned a degree in filmmaking and photography from the visual and environmental studies program.

It was at the end of his freshman year at Harvard that Sheng met his first boyfriend and began the process of coming out of the closet. His boyfriend was on the Harvard water polo team and Sheng began snapping photographs of their life together. The photos would later become his senior thesis.

The relationship ended in their sophomore year due in part to the fact that Sheng was becoming more comfortable with being openly gay and his boyfriend was still closeted to most of his water polo teammates.

His ex-boyfriend eventually did come out to his teammates before graduation and Sheng found himself reflecting on what it would have been like to compete as an openly gay athlete.

Sheng began photographing openly gay student athletes in 2003 and by 2012 had accumulated roughly 140 subjects.

“My reasoning for starting the ‘Fearless’ project was about never being able to be an out athlete myself,” Sheng says.  “It was inspiring to encounter people who were doing something that I hadn’t been able to do. I found myself moved by their bravery.”

After initially starting with college athletes, Sheng expanded the Fearless project to include high school LGBT athletes. Over the years since 2003, the photos have been exhibited at the Nike and ESPN headquarters along with 70 other venues.

Following a slideshow exhibit at Pride House during the 2012 London Olympics, the ideas for making a book to further the LGBT sports movement began to jell.

“Everyone kept telling me that these images were powerful and that they needed to reach more people,” Sheng says.  “I didn’t want to make another gay coffee table book. It needed to be a work of art that gave appropriate recognition to the LGBT sports movement.”

A Kickstarter campaign was launched and the funds were generated to photograph 60 more athletes. The resulting book, released on June 9, features photographs of 202 LGBT athletes, a timeline of the LGBT sports movement, backstories of five of the photographed athletes and a memoir of Sheng’s journey.

The book concludes with an afterword essay by retired NBA basketball player Jason Collins who celebrates and praises the authenticity and bravery of the athletes.

“I am hoping that mothers and fathers in underserved areas can look at this book and find a connection to their own child,” Sheng says. “We have had so much remarkable progress in the LGBT sports movement. A movement happens not because of just one person; it is a collection of the lives of many people.”