Gay Games Research Articles

The 2002 Sydney Gay Games: Re-Presenting “Lesbian” Identities through Sporting Space

In this article poetic representation in qualitative research is explored in relation to researching “lesbian” lives. Set within the context of The 2002 Sydney Gay Games the article considers how poetry can bring to light experiences at the intersection of sexuality, sport, and place. The article details three aspects to this process. First, by asking what queer theory could do for particular research subjects, a robust, malleable, and transportable theoretical concept of “queer” is proposed that is responsive to the participants’ lives and experiences. Second, this concept is applied methodologically in order to unsettle more traditional academic modes of representing interview data through the use of poetic forms of representation. Finally, a poem constructed from the Opening Ceremony of The Gay Games is presented and analyzed. Poetic representation is thus offered as a distinct methodology that permits a particular kind of “queer” analysis when researching “lesbian” lives.

Homophobia, Fundamentalism, and Canadian Tolerance: Enabling Gay Games III in Vancouver

Gay Games III were held in Vancouver in August 1990. This paper analyzes the effects of three different moments of homophobic backlash faced by organizers of that event. While quiet institutional homophobia might have been tolerated, public representations of blatant homophobia could be mobilized by the organizers of Gay Games IIII to their advantage. The effects of a hateful campaign paradoxically functioned as an interesting condition of possibility for Gay Games' credibility. I then suggest that the limitations of these liberal strategies were shown up by the fractures within local lesbian and gay communities, demonstrating the weaknesses of accepting tolerance as a limit to the possible.

Boundaries of Desire: Becoming Sexual Through the Spaces of Sydney's 2002 Gay Games

What are the consequences of unbounded gay, lesbian, queer, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (GLQBTI) spaces that are positioned as inclusive through welcoming everyone? Two festival spaces of the Sydney 2002 Gay Games, the City Hub and Oxford Street, illustrate inclusivity within nonheterosexualized space. Adopting a poststructuralist feminist approach, I examine experiences of male desires. The spatial metaphor of a “GLQBTI borderland” provides a conceptual lens through which to rethink the relationship among desire, boundaries, imagined space, and sexualities. The uncertainties of GLQBTI borderlands indicate it might be possible to revisit the queer political agenda by acknowledging that sexual identities are actively and spatially produced through processes that simultaneously draw from and defy social borders.

Federation of Gay Games

Federation of Gay Games

Exploring participants' experiences of the Gay Games: intersections of sport, gender and sexuality

Sport is a social institution that has a considerable impact on the shaping of gay and lesbian subjects. On the eve of the 2006 Gay Games in Chicago and its new rival, the Outgames, in Montreal, this article explores dimensions of participation in such gay and lesbian sports events through a study (based on participant observation and interviews) of their most recent major predecessor, the Sydney 2002 Gay Games. In particular, it points to the centrality to many participants' experiences of both individual and collective forms of identification, including those associated with sexuality and nation. Through their participation in the event, respondents must negotiate the significant tensions that underpin the ideals and demands of these often-contradictory forms of identification. The article suggests that it is this negotiation of competing identities and subjectivities that illuminates the broader political significance of the Gay Games.

Transsexual and Transgender Policies in Sport

This article examines developments in gender policies in sport in relation to recent changes in transsexual rights legislation and gender identity activism. The Gay Games has developed a gender identity policy about “men, women, transgender and intersex” athletes. In 2004, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) introduced the Stockholm Consensus on sex reassignment surgery to allow “transsexual” athletes to compete at the Olympics. These developments do not indicate an overall increase in the acceptance of gender variance in the world of sport; rather, there has been ongoing resistance to inclusive gender policies in mainstream sport organizations. I argue this resistance is based on anxieties about the instability of the male/female gender binary and the emergence of queer gender subjectivities within women’s, gay, and mainstream sporting communities.

Explorations in ‘Event Ecology’: The Case of the International Gay Games

Mega-events increasingly shape and reinforce the identities and economies of cities and nations. Major sporting events such as the Olympic Games attract enormous interest, consume vast resources and generate substantial material and cultural capital. In what has become a competition of place and identity, an ecology of events can be discerned which highlights the considerable differences that exist between events in terms of their nature and internal objectives and their intersections with the discourses and politics of host cities. Through a study of selected gay and mainstream media coverage of the International Gay Games held in Sydney in 2002, this paper explores the consequences of, and deep contradictions inherent in, an agenda of cosmopolitan advocacy that requires the endorsement of different publics with competing interests. The paper argues that the emphasis on urban sophistication and anticipated economic benefits at the heart of the promotion of the Games to mainstream Sydney were at odds with the identity building and sexual political advocacy agenda of the gay and lesbian community. Through this analysis, the paper contributes to academic understanding of the contemporary event ecology and its wider significance for social identities, cultural formations and political interventions.

Federation of gay games

Federation of gay games

The Sydney 2002 Gay Games and Querying Australian National Space

In what ways did Sydney's Gay Games reinvent the Australian nation? In this paper I set out to examine this question by drawing upon the idea that sports and parades of athletes during opening ceremonies have been definitive moments for the Australian nation. I investigate the social terrains or bodyscapes invoked by sporting gay pride during the participants' parade at the opening ceremony and sports venues of the Sydney 2002 Gay Games. This enables insights into whether these spaces subverted the heteronormativity of sporting bodies that are metaphors for Australian national space. I centre my argument within a post-Foucauldian performance theory to consider both lived experience and textual representations of queer sports spaces. This approach advocates a recursive relationship between power, discourse, and critically reflexive, geographically embedded subjects. The ethnographic basis of my findings is participant observation and a time series of in-depth interviews with over forty self-identifying gay and queer males living in Sydney. I extract two overarching themes from the bodyscapes of the games: transcendence and imprisonment. For those actively involved in the making of camp bodyscapes, mimicking the monopoly of the dominant order through the authority of national signification provided by the parade of athletes at opening ceremonies and by sporting bodies offered a transgressive vehicle. However, the pillar of hetero-normative sporting bodies in defining Australian national boundaries survived unchallenged. Sporting gay pride also worked to close rather than to open up a space for discourses about sexuality and national identity to occur. Closure from a mainstream audience occurred by jettisoning the shame that links sport, sex, and bodies. Closure also occurred amongst certain respondents who shunned the games, regarding it as disciplining bodies into ‘normalcy’.

Federation of gay games

Federation of gay games

Gay/Lesbian Sport Clubs and Events

Over the last two decades the founding of sport clubs and organization of sport events specifically for gays and lesbians has increased in the Netherlands and most other western countries. For many policy-makers the popularity of playing sport ‘apart’ seems to be in contradiction to current liberal legislation concerning homosexuality and gay and lesbian rights. Gay/lesbian sport clubs and events like the Gay Games, which took place in Amsterdam in 1998 and Sydney in 2002, raise questions about the social integrative meanings and functions of sport. In this article different, often tenuous and ambiguous, integrative meanings are discussed in relation to mainstream and gay and lesbian sport clubs and events.

Gay Games: Performing 'community' out from the closet of the locker room

Matters of community, performativity, bodies, space, belonging, oppression, resistance and their relationship to culture are explored in this paper within the context of Sydney's 2002 Gay Games. I begin the paper considering how the everyday meaning and practices of sports produce spaces that are oppressive to many gay men. I then introduce the Gay Games as a site of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, and intersex resistance, established to rupture stereotypes of heteronormativity in sports. Drawing upon my own research of Sydney's Gay Games I next explore how willingness to participate amongst self-identifying gay men depends upon how they understood their performance within the context of the event. I conclude the paper by arguing that willingness to participate in Sydney's Gay Games illustrates fundamental issues about the connectedness of bodies and space through the discursive body as space and the material body in space.

Social Psychological Benefits of Gay Games Participation: A Social Identity Theory Explanation

Abstract Research examining sexual orientation in sport settings has been limited in scope and lacked theoretical frameworks. To extend this body of research, the current study was framed within social identity theory and examined the impact of Gay Games participation on: (a) social identity, self-esteem, and collective esteem; and (b) expected subsequent social change activities following the Games. One hundred and twenty-five lesbian and bisexual athletes competing in Gay Games V participated in this investigation. The athletes completed a demographic profile and an open-ended questionnaire that asked about their Gay Games experience as well as expected social change activities after the Games. A content analysis of the responses revealed themes consistent with social identity theory. Specifically, these individuals identified the role of the Gay Games on social categorization, personal and social identity, and self and collective esteem. Additionally, these women revealed that following the Gay Games they felt more likely to work towards social change by becoming more out, educating others, and working through political channels.

Social Psychological Benefits of Gay Games Participation: A Social Identity Theory Explanation

Research examining sexual orientation in sport settings has been limited in scope and lacked theoretical frameworks. To extend this body of research, the current study was framed within social identity theory and examined the impact of Gay Games participation on: (a) social identity, self-esteem, and collective esteem; and (b) expected subsequent social change activities following the Games. One hundred and twenty-five lesbian and bisexual athletes competing in Gay Games V participated in this investigation. The athletes completed a demographic profile and an open-ended questionnaire that asked about their Gay Games experience as well as expected social change activities after the Games. A content analysis of the responses revealed themes consistent with social identity theory. Specifically, these individuals identified the role of the Gay Games on social categorization, personal and social identity, and self and collective esteem. Additionally, these women revealed that following the Gay Games they felt more likely to work towards social change by becoming more out, educating others, and working through political channels.

Sporting Bodies: Dynamics of Shame and Pride

Drawing on examples of mainstream sport and the philosophy of the Gay Games, this article uses sporting bodies to rethink the links between sexuality, pride and shame. The contrast between the two highlights the ways in which the Gay Games downplays the dynamics of shame and competition in favour of its project of pride. Against the domestication of the body in some theories of embodiment, it is argued that shame may provide a productive ground for revitalizing the study of the body in terms of affect, politics and ethics.

Sports tourism and niche markets: Identification and analysis of the growing lesbian and gay sports tourism industry

The purpose of this study was to determine if there is a lesbian and gay sports tourism industry. Results revealed evidence of an extensive and growing industry estimated to be worth $180m within the larger lesbian and gay sports industry that is estimated to be worth $15bn. Moreover, the market is gaining increased recognition by mainstream corporate America as an affluent and viable market. Some of the results include: there is a large lesbian and gay sports industry; there is a viable lesbian and gay sports travel industry; the demand for lesbian and gay sports products has led to the creation of companies that specialise in lesbian and gay sports travel products; lesbian and gay media give increasing attention to sports events and travel; there is proliferation of sports spectatorial products; and the Gay Games have had a significant impact on sports participant and spectatorial travel.

Female Athletes' Motives and Experiences During the Gay Games

This study examines female athletes' motives for participation in Gay Games IV, and their experiences during the Games. The participants (N = 132) acknowledged traditional sport motives as well as social, self-enhancement, and political motives for participation in the Gay Games. Positive aspects of these athletes' experiences at the Games included having a sense of belonging, pride, and community. Meeting, competing with, and being near other lesbian, gay, and bisexual athletes also were important motives and outcomes of participation in this event. Almost all of the athletes described positive experiences at the Games. The experiences expressed by these athletes show the affirming emotional and psychological impact of participation in an inclusive sport environment. Overall, while many of these athletes noted sport highlights in describing their experiences, the social and personal development were voiced more consistently and frequently.

The Gay Games Conference: Benchmark for Scholarly Exploration and Artistic Expression

The Gay Games Conference: Benchmark for Scholarly Exploration and Artistic Expression

Remembering Tom: The Gay Games' Ego Ideal and Ideal Ego

Remembering Tom: The Gay Games' Ego Ideal and Ideal Ego

Parody of the Gay Games: Gender Performativity in Sport

Parody of the Gay Games: Gender Performativity in Sport