Roger Brigham on Gay Games VIII

From the first installment of Roger Brigham's reflections on Gay Games VIII:

First, there is the inconceivably fortuitous accident of its name-the Gay Games. When Dr. Tom Waddell put together the first event in 1982, he envisioned it as an Olympics to provide his fellow queer athletes with the same exhilarating experience he had had 14 years earlier as a decathlete in the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City: An opportunity to show the world that we had muscles, we had toughness, we could achieve greatness.

He called it the Gay Olympic Games.

Weeks before the event began, the U.S. Olympic Committee, which had never stopped events from being named "Olympics" previously, successfully sued to prevent San Francisco Arts and Athletics from using the word. Organizers were forced to get out markers and redact the word. The homophobic slight electrified participants and set an antagonistic tone between the games and the Olympic community for a decade, thawing only after they began to work together successfully to lift federal travel bans against HIV-infected attendees of the 1994 Gay Games in New York City and the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta.

We were left with the Gay ------- Games. Gay Games. What did that mean? What did it stand for?

If striking down the word "Olympics" was an attempt to bottleneck us, to force us to retreat to the locker room closet, it didn’t work. Rather, it forced a soul-searching evaluation of the mission and a deeper commitment to the trademarked motto of the Gay Games: Participation, Inclusion and Personal Best.

The Gay Games are not merely for everyone: they are designed for everyone. Unlike the Olympics and every other major international sporting event, there are no qualifying events designed to weed out the non-elite athletes. Modified rules enable handicapped persons to play in virtually every sport and provide multiple age groups so people can compete on even terms with peers. There are no medal counts for countries. World-best times are set in swimming at the same time that novices gasp to follow far behind and finish.

The triumph is that they try and they finish.

You don’t need to be gay to be in the Gay Games. You just have to have the courage to march with the banner.

Read in full HERE.