You don’t see a single trend anywhere you look.” “The status of LGBT rights globally is schizophrenic. had “much to learn from Holland, Norway and France where there are national laws protecting the rights of Gay and Lesbian citizens.” “Direct contact” with athletes from these nations, Day argued, would be enlightening for Americans living in a country where international visitors were often denied entry because of their sexual orientation. As the activist Greg Day wrote in the program for the inaugural Gay Games, the U.S. Tom Waddell, a gay Olympian who would die of AIDS five years later, told The New York Times that he had organized the athletic competition to “pull the gay community together globally.”Īt the time, that gay community found itself in vastly different circumstances around the world. The Stonewall riots were more than a decade in the past a year earlier, reports had surfaced about rare pneumonia and cancer afflicting homosexuals in New York and California-the first glimmers of what would later be called AIDS. In August 1982, 1,350 athletes from 12 countries gathered in San Francisco for the first-ever Gay Games.
A demonstrator holds a rainbow flag and the Russian national flag during a protest against Russia's anti-gay laws outside the Russian embassy in Berlin.
