THERE are few places where you can swim in a public pool and see a merman gliding by.

    But for regular visitors to the local pool in Fitzroy, Melbourne, it is in fact a familiar sight.

    Adam Valentine, 29, regularly heads down to the pool in his hydrodynamic flipper-like tail — a hobby that has since seen him crowned as the “gay merman of Melbourne.”

    “Mom took me to see ‘The Little Mermaid’ in 1989 and of course I identified with her straight away,” said Valentine, a senior PR executive.

    “She [Ariel] was this amazing, graceful, knowledge-hungry, friendly and cool person who wanted to get out and explore and I was this little gay boy who was bullied relentlessly and wanted to get out of Newcastle — there were so many parallels and I just really connected to it.”

    Valentine, the youngest of four siblings, begged for a tail to use in their new backyard lagoon pool and his mother made him an “awful” maroon tail complete with an eggshell bra.

    “I fluffed around in the pool wearing the tail but after being teased mercilessly by my siblings it didn’t feel good anymore and between the ages of four and 17 you start to realize that being different isn’t cool anymore,” Valentine said. “You learn to hide your differences.”

    “The backyard pool was my safe haven where I would float for hours on end — I was a swimmer and a lifesaver as well but in my town it was cool to be good at surfing and rugby.”

    But when Valentine received a scholarship to an arts college in year 11 and given the opportunity to present on his favorite film, he chose “The Little Mermaid.”

    “Nobody blinked an eye — suddenly it was cool to like Ariel again,” Valentine said, whose love of the iconic film was soon common knowledge and widely accepted.

    Three years ago, Valentine was presented with the first mermaid tail of his adult life from his sister and first took it down to the Fitzroy pool in January 2013.

    “The reaction was really cool and everyone was really positive ... little kids lost their minds and a lot of people wanted to try it on,” Valentine said, “It enhances how you move like a dolphin and it’s so powerful it propels you straight through the water.”(SD-Agencies)