ABSTRACT
Tom Waddell and Dick Schaap recount the origins of the Gay Games in Waddell’s biography, Gay Olympian (1996: 145-48). Waddell was watching television one day in June 1980 with Mark Brown, the sports editor of the city’s gay newspaper the Bay Area Reporter (BAR), when they happened upon coverage of the Gay Men’s Bowling Tournament. Waddell was impressed because: ‘the competitors were strong and skilful athletes, clearly bowlers first and gay second’. This sporting image reinforced, for Waddell, the ‘normality’ of the majority of gay men – they were middle-class professionals who ‘voted, ate out, bowled and played softball and rooted for the 49ers’. Waddell didn’t see them ‘lusting for attention’ like the drag queens and leather men whom he considered received a disproportionate amount of mainstream media attention. Waddell lamented the way that this attention reinforced for many in straight society the negative stereotypes of gay life.
