I’m confused: When and where are the games for gay French-speaking Commonwealth members?
Homebrew why do you say the Olympics is by default the Heterosexual games? Are there really cases where athletes have been passed over for less skilled athletes because of their sexuality. Disscounting trans-sexual female swimmers and shot-putters whos chromozones and physical bodies don’t match up.
My fear is that the Gay games may be introducing a further level of sexual segregation into sport, rather than addressing the issues of sexuality disscrimination that I am sure exists within ‘grass-roots’ sporting clubs and societies.
I see how a homosexual could watch the performance of other homosexual athletes and this could help inspire them to achieve greatness, but there is no good reason why a person should feel that because they are homosexual they somehow cannot compete with supposedly heterosexual athletes.
This is completely different to the paraplegic games where a physical dissadvantage makes direct competition at the highest levels with fully able bodied athletes impossible in nearly all cases.
It all boils down to, for me, why not spend the effort on a Gay Games instead on promoting existing gay athletes in main stream sports, and providing help to stop repression of gay athletes at the grass routes of sports. Gay and gay friendly athletic clubs are much more important than an international gay games, I believe.
Why can they be concurrent goals, Bippy? Why should the gay people who want to compete now have to wait until they can be openly gay safely in sports, perhaps missing their chance if it takes too long?
From what I understand, Olympic associations are not exactly gay-friendly milieux. There was a reason Greg Louganis and Mark Tewksbury came out afterwards. And we know that other sports organizations are bastions of homophobia both subtle and gross. So I can certainly imagine why having an explicitly Queer-positive sporting event would be useful.
But others will no doubt be able to go into more detail.
No, let’s not discount them, shall we?
Addressing a few things.
The participants in the Gay Games are in general, not of Olympic standard. A few are, but you will rarely see the gay Olympic class atheletes at the Gay Games since it is not feasible for them to be out. What you have are teams of sports enthusiasts competing internationally. This is not to say that some of the atheletes and teams are not incredibly good, I believe a few records were broken a few years back, but I could be wrong. This leads to a really nice mix of competition and fun, a lot of competitors are there just to be there.
No matter how good yourself and your partner are at figure skating, they aren’t going to let you compete as a team more or less any major sporting event. Same goes for some other sports/events.
The Gay Games atheletes provide in many cases great roll models for young (and not so young) sports interested queer peeps. Since very few professional atheletes are out in order to keep their careers or sponsors, the atheletes competing in GG fill a very important roll. This in turn will in the future lead to more professional atheletes and sportspeople being out.
It’s hella fun, I would love to go to GG some time. Whistle at the cute girls on the football teams 
I wonder really how that financial issue works out. Ok, they run it in the red, but that in itsself is not unusual. It would be interesting to compare how much tourist revenue (not only that year) it generated for the netherlands, and also to compare costs such as security costs for hosting the event compared to say a UEFA cup match. For some reason you don’t tend to get riots in the streets between the english wrestling fans and the mexican figure skating supporters.
To clarify, I should point out that the reason for this is that there are no qualifying rounds for the Gay Games; anyone is welcome to compete. However, as Iteki points out, it’s not unheard of for world records to be broken at the Games.
Non gay here, with a possibly irrelevant opinion …
I myself don’t see why there cannot be multiple sets of games - Olympic, Commonwealth, Gay, whatever. The more the better, assuming that having such games are a good idea in the first place (either for revenue-generating, or because promoting sports and healthy excercise is a good idea, or whatever).
If gays want to have an extra set of games, I don’t see why the gay athletes cannot compete in both the gay games and the olympics - and straight athletes too, should they want to - assuming of course they are not held at the same time.
OK as for transexual swimmers/shot putters, certain drugs are considered cheating, even if you have a perfectly good medical reason to take them, secondly we have for some reason decided that male and female athletes should not compete together, due to this there exist rules to determine if an athlete is considered male or female. If either of the rules against certain drugs, or the rules determining which gender you compete with are broken, then that is considered cheating.
I’m absolutely fine with a gay games. Just unsure it is a good use of resources in fighting for gay equal rights, since the games seem to be making a big loss in income.
I am dissgraced by any sport that disscriminates against openly gay competitors. I fear the biggots in such sports will see the Gay games and feel that the don’t need to change their methods, even if pressurised to do so, because they may feel that ‘the gay’s have their own games, they don’t need to be allowed into our olympic team’.
Exactly.
The “we” who decided this, and the “we” who are taking part in the Gay Games, are probably not the same “we”, so for the people who don’t want to play by those rules having a competition where they are not in place is probably very nice.
Do the ‘gay’ games not separate male and female athletes in competitions? Are all the events mixed gender? If so then that would very interesting, do many who self identify as female compete at the top levels of the sports included.
If the ‘gay’ games segregates male from female like so many other sports, how is a male competitor distinguished from a female, is it done by the competitor’s self identifying with one of the genders? What about those who don’t identify with one gender over the other, or don’t identify with gender at all?
matt, sorry, just getting back and saw your “work friendly” question. When I clicked on the link to read the article I got a “Forbidden… material deemed inappropriate… etc” page. Hopefully it’s just my particular company being anal.
Carry on.
Thanks, I’ll risk the sight now, and hopefully not have to ask quite so dumb questions 
Reading the article, I am glad to hear Montreal is still planing to hold the games, even if it is under a different name, it sounds like it will still be very much a gay friendly event.
This is a bit of an aside, but the USOC also swooped down on a competition I used to be involved in, formerly called “Olympics of the Mind” (now, to sate the USOC law staff, called “Odyssey of the Mind”). OM is a school-age creativity competition: no sports or athletics are involved at all. Why USOC decided “Olympics of the Mind” was so offensive, Og only knows. Yeah, they threatened to shut OM down too…
I dunno, maybe the USOC feels that only worthwhile pursuits like the Gay Games and Odyssey of the Mind are actually worth attacking.