ABSTRACT
Gay Games founder, Dr Tom Waddell, considered the Gay Games to be an excellent vehicle for proving to mainstream society that gay people were just like everybody else: they played sport. He wanted to bring to the gay and lesbian communities of the world what he saw as the health-promoting powers of sport participation and the community building embodied in a charismatic event. He also wanted to dispel myths about gay men being un-masculine. After all, sports, especially those involving the demonstrations of strength, power, speed and combat, were excellent social practices to affi rm one’s masculinity as a male. But these sports were more usually developed within sites that acted as training grounds and celebratory public arenas for supremist forms of heterosexual masculinity. Sport has also become one of the most mediatised, consumed and naturalising social institutions ‘for defi ning preferred and disparaged forms of masculinity and femininity, instructing boys and men in the “art” of making certain kinds of men’ (Rowe and McKay 1998: 118). Homosexual men were defi nitely suspect in this macho sports world, and women were rendered the naturally inferior ‘other’. Homophobia and heterosexism place signifi cant constraints on the ways straight but especially gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer (GLBTQ) people engage in and seek pleasure, achievement and careers within the mainstream sporting arena. The international Gay Games were founded to provide a uniquely affi rming environment for such sporting enjoyment and achievement. So, have these Games challenged the gender order and opened up different ways of experiencing gender, sexuality and sport?1
