Featured events


7-9 September 2012
Brussels Games
Brussels

Brussels Gay Sports will offer a weekend of fun and fairplay in the capital of Europe, with volleyball, swimming, badminton, and tennis, as well as fitness and hiking.

Learn more HERE.
26-28 October 2012
QueergamesBern
Bern, Switzerland

The success of the first edition of the QueergamesBern proved the need for an LGBT multisport event in Switzerland. This year will be even bigger, with badminton, bowling, running, walking, floorball.

Learn more HERE.
17-20 January 2013
Sin City Shootout
Las Vegas
The 7th Sin City Shootout will feature softball, ice hockey, tennis, wrestling, basketball, dodgeball, bodybuilding and basketball.

Learn more HERE.

13-16 June 2013
IGLFA Euro Cup
Dublin
After this year's edition in Budapest at the EuroGames, the IGLFA Euro Cup heads to Dublin for 2013, hosted by the Dublin Devils and the Dublin Phoenix Tigers.

Learn more HERE.

Saturday, July 16, 2011

San Francisco Pride Parade seen from within

Heidi Beeler tells her story from the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Freedom Band i the San Francsico Bay Times:

I’ve been Out in Gay Mecca for 20 years. On the last Sunday of every June, I make a beeline from some point west of the Ferry Building down to City Hall, crammed between convertibles and motorcycles, dodging men on roller skates dressed in day-glo G-strings and bristling with balloons, and batting down pamphlets against gale-force winds. I have helped build giant glitter-encrusted plywood cakes and a 4-foot-tall Music Man hats that are screwed onto flatbed trucks and roped to booth supports. But in 20 years, I’ve never actually seen the Pride Parade. Never watched it live end to end from a Market Street sidewalk.

As long as I’ve been Out, I’ve only seen the half block of the parade occupied by the San Francisco Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band at any given moment.

That and whatever contingent rides ahead of our banner, whatever contingent cruises behind our sousaphones, and the faces and photographers on either side. I joined the Band in 1991 specifically to have someone to go to the parade with, and she’s been my date every year since.

The first year I marched, the parade was amazing. I’d gone through my “I’m The Only One” phase in San Francisco (proving you really can do anything if you set your mind to it). My boss had told me that she fired a man for being gay and then noted my blushing as a smoking gun. When my clenched teeth turned into a rapid-fire eyelid tic, I quit the job and joined the Band. That year seeing Market Street festooned with rainbow flags, I secretly felt Pride was a party thrown for me. And when my band and I turned onto Market Street playing “California, Here I Come,” the roar of a million people cheering bounced around the skyscrapers over our heads and I felt like Dorothy entering the Rainbow City. Ding dong the witch was dead indeed!
Twenty years later, coming up on Pride 2011, the magic of the rainbow had worn thin before my middle-aging eyes. The Pride Committee had chalked up more abdications than Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign. After last year’s fund juggling, the theme “In Pride We Trust”

Keep reading HERE (it's worth it!)

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