Bay Area Reporter - June 1, 2006
Roger Brigham

One was AIDS, which almost literally wiped out a generation of active people of all ages, shaped politics and perceptions regarding life and lifestyle, and for years to come sucked much of the vitality out of the city.

But while the visible signs of that played out in San Francisco bars, streets, and hospitals, a quieter second revolution was born that brought new life to the Bay Area's playing fields, gymnasiums, and recreation centers. It became a movement that would inspire millions, shatter gay stereotypes, break down homophobic barriers, and even shape intellectual property law. Like AIDS, it would unify lesbians and gay men in a common cause. Through the serendipitous timing of its launch, it would provide for many a haven of hope in a decade of despair.

"I lost two partners to AIDS (one after 10 years), as well as lost a hundred friends. I felt like I had gone off to war, and that I was all alone in a battle against our worst nightmare," said basketball guru Tony Jasinski. "Of course, many of us were dealing with it, but each loss and each bit of pain is something we all internalized - and it affected us deeply. No one in my blood family will ever appreciate the extreme loss that I suffered and the time spent dealing with something so horrible. I still recall those faces with purple marks and sunken cheeks, and the fears of lives being closed too soon. No one deserved what happened to us and to our loved ones during that first 10 years."

In 1981, San Francisco Arts & Athletics Inc., filed for 501(c)3 nonprofit status to organize what founders Dr. Tom Waddell, Paul Mart, and Mark Brown initially called the "Gay Olympic Games," now known as the Gay Games. Originally envisioned by San Francisco physician Waddell, a decathlete in the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, the Games were meant to shed the elitist model of the Olympics themselves and create a safe and accepting multisport event for everyone, regardless of skill level, age, gender, orientation, race, or health status. Cultural events were added to the charter to make it eligible under the California nonprofit laws at the time, and an emphasis was placed on participation, inclusion, and personal best.

The founders quickly assembled a volunteer crew to spread the word, arrange for venues and officiating, plan the events, and recruit support.

"It was wonderful," Sara Waddell Lewenstein, an early board member who married Waddell after getting to know him through their work on the Games. "It was a dream. It was a miracle. If it wasn't for Tom Waddell's energy, it wouldn't have happened."

At the time, divisions and discrimination ran deep in the queer community. Blacks and Asians had trouble getting service in many bars. Women were often asked for five pieces of ID. Youth was worshipped in a culture that seemed to say: "Don't lust after anyone over 30."

Waddell wanted to erase those divisions and bridge the divide between lesbians and gay men. He insisted on a board on which they would serve as equals.

"For three years I wouldn't let any men into my restaurant [Artemis Caf ] just to counter the discrimination on the bars," Lewenstein said. "The women were tired of being tokens. Meeting with Tom took away the tokenism. He knew sports. He was so open to anything. If you disagreed with him, there was talking, not yelling. Half the board didn't know anything about sports. But they were devoted to the Games and hoping to bring men and women together.

"We thought it was important to address all of the 'isms.' We wanted to address color. We wanted to address ageism. We wanted diversity. It was all about the isms. That's why the Games happened."

Waddell envisioned the Games as a "vehicle of change."

"The Gay Games are not separatist, they are not exclusive, they are not oriented to victory, and they are not for commercial gain," Waddell wrote later. "They intended to bring a global community together in friendship, to experience participation, to elevate consciousness and self-esteem, and to achieve a form of cultural and intellectual synergy. We have the opportunity to take the initiative on critical issues that affect the quality of life."

As the Games drew people together to work behind the scenes, it brought together straights, gays, and closeted gays in a way that was still novel in the Bay Area.

"In late 1981, when the Games were first being publicized in the papers, I was very much in the closet but very much wanted to participate somehow," Derek Liecty said. "I was a member of a college soccer referee's association. I met with Waddell on Castro Street and I asked him, 'Who is going to referee your soccer games?' He asked me if I could help with that.

"Well, our association had a meeting a little after that and I stood up and said, 'We've had a request from the Gay Olympics people for officials. Does anyone want to participate in that?' To my surprise, three or four hands went up. So my hand went up, too."

At the time, gay athletes, coaches, and sports officials were a hidden community within the greater, marginalized LGBT community. All of that changed when the athletes marched into Kezar Stadium in 1982.

But just 19 days before the August 28 opening ceremonies, the U.S. Olympic Committee won a court injunction blocking the use of the name "Gay Olympic Games." Organizers had to scramble and black out the word "Olympics" on all of their banners, posters, medals, and other materials.

At the time, the move was widely seen as homophobic since the USOC had never actively objected to the use of the word "Olympics" by other organizations. The legal battle dragged on for years, the USOC placed a lien on Waddell's house, and a hostile rift grew between the Olympic movement and the queer community.

'Life changing'

No matter what the name of the Games was, for the 1,300 or so participants who marched into the stadium the world became a different place. The phrase most often used by those who were there was that it was "life changing."

"I felt such strong love from my fellow athletes that I had never felt in smaller athletic events," Jasinski said. "The Games definitely affected my life in extreme ways. I relocated here from Boston as a result of participating in the first Gay Games.

"The Games are an inoculation into a subculture of sports-oriented gays that I'd only seen slices of before. That warmth was unique, welcoming, and sincere."

" Wrestling coach Gene Dermody. Photo: Jane Philomen Cleland There will never be another Gay Games I," Lewenstein said. "The feeling then - I've never felt anything like I did walking in for the first Gay Games."

Gene Dermody was a tenured teacher and high school wrestling coach in New Jersey when he wrestled in Gay Games I. His only real complaint was that he just won bronze.

"For the first time, I felt like I had the most exciting time in my life," Dermody said. "For the first time, I felt I was appreciated for who I was, and felt that I was successful, and I didn't have to hide who I was.

"If you had a medal every restaurant was open to you, and every cute guy would lie down for you."

Back East, Dermody had his professional, closeted life in New Jersey, and his bar-hopping private gay life in New York City. The shallowness of the dichotomy hit home after being in the Games.

"To have a tournament like that the whole week," Dermody said. "I decided, 'Why am I living a double existence. Screw the money, screw the job.' I quit and I moved out."

The sudden deaths of so many that followed nearly signaled the end of the Gay Games movement. Waddell himself hesitated about holding a second quadrennial event.

"There were some people who felt we shouldn't do Gay Games II because of AIDS," Lewenstein. "They thought we should be fighting that. They thought we were taking money and other resources away.

"We thought about it. But then we thought, 'No. There's enough for both.' We needed something positive going on. Not just people dying."

Lewenstein said she put up posters, asking anyone interested in working on another Gay Games in 1986 to show up for a meeting. "Two hundred people came," Lewenstein said. Waddell was sold on the idea.

On a recruiting trip to the International Gay Bowling Organization tournament in Las Vegas in May 1986, Lewenstein sat in the audience waiting to speak. As she sat there listening and absorbed the party atmosphere, she grew angrier with each passing speaker.

"Nobody was saying anything about AIDS," she said. "I said, 'You act like nothing is wrong. You're hiding from the word AIDS.'"

Lewenstein said when she stopped speaking the crowd leapt to its feet in applause. She was showered with drinks and flowers all weekend. She sold all of her promotional souvenirs on the spot and filled up all of her registration sheets.

"Everyone stood and cheered. I've never had an ovation like that. They said it was time to stop the party. They all came up around me. I was in shock. My teammates hugged me and hugged me and said, 'That was remarkable.'"

One of the volunteers working for Gay Games II was Liecty. Having retired and started to come out, he met again with Waddell, who asked him to work on getting contracts with the facilities that would be used.

"That's what I did pretty much full-time for 18 months: contacting all of the facilities," Liecty said. "That pretty well established me within the board. So when they decided in 1989 to form the federation, they asked me to be a charter board member."

But as work proceeded on Gay Games II, Waddell, who had just had a daughter, Jessica, with Lewenstein, became sick himself. He began a diary of his thoughts and memories to pass on to his daughter. The work continued. Waddell competed and medaled in the javelin throw.

As the link between exchange of bodily fluids during sexual contact and the transmission of AIDS became known, and the city debated closing public bathhouses, Waddell, who had frequented the bathhouses on a regular basis himself, took the unpopular position of advocating for their closure.

"He took a lot of shit," Lewenstein said. "But what came out of it was education about unprotected sex. We had to say, 'This is not the way to do it.' We had to stop it from happening. You'd pick up the B.A.R. and it was a mortuary."

New leadership

Waddell died in the summer of 1987, but the movement he had founded had already engendered numerous LGBT sports organizations locally and internationally. One of the greatest challenges was maintaining and developing new leadership in the face of so many losses.

"I organized the basketball program here in 1986, after feeling shut out by the local basketball team due to their higher skills," Jasinski said. "I wanted to play in a program that welcomed all skill levels and also allowed 'instant access' - something that a visitor to San Francisco could participate in without any prior participation or filing. Our 'open court' basketball time is that sort of program. I located a local gym and just rented it. Then, I passed out fliers at local events and got the program publicized in the B.A.R.

When Dermody joined Golden Gate Wrestling Club late in 1982, he was immediately impressed and changed by the team's coach, Don Jung. Jung was an out wrestling coach and art teacher at Mission High School and widely respected in the wrestling world.

"Don was super cool, kind of quiet, but a phenomenal wrestler and a great coach," Dermody said. "I got to realize I was no different than he was, but he had worked for years and years at being out. He wasn't the crusader rabbit type. He did it by overcompensating and impressing people. That's what you had to do in those days.

"I wasn't interested in coaching, but I learned a lot from him. He was very open and accepting. I was the hard ass. I had a very rigid standard on what a wrestling team was. And I was totally wrong. If we had done it my way, there would have been no fun in the Gay Games.

"He impressed me almost immediately. I saw what he created."

Things changed early in 1986.

"We were about two or three months out from the Games," Dermody said. "Then all of a sudden, he disappeared for about six to eight weeks. We couldn't get hold of him and we didn't know where he was.

"I just sort of stepped in along with some of the other wrestlers who had a lot of experience and we tried to do what he did. I made a lot of mistakes because I reverted to my old high school ways. All you have to do is look at the tapes of the Gay Games and see it didn't work.

"Don finally did come back and he looked terrible. And then we knew what had happened. He wrestled, but it took the wind out of the team. We knew he couldn't carry the club forward. It broke our momentum. The day after the tournament, he went into the hospital and died that night. It was devastating to all of us on that team."

"It's hard to meet people with real passion, with heart and soul," Lewenstein said, "Until I met Tom, I didn't know people like that existed. Then after that, I met many such men.

"Unfortunately, most of them have passed away, and it just breaks my heart."

It was at Waddell's funeral that Lewenstein learned the USOC had dropped its lien against the family home.

"I was really happy to get the release," Lewenstein said, "happy for the Gay Games. And then I was sad for Tom. All of a sudden it went from the release back to sadness."

More than two decades later, the case, in which the USOC finally prevailed by a 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1987, is still used as a deciding factor in intellectual property cases, but the wounds between the gay community and the Olympics have healed, largely because of cooperation between the Federation of Gay Games and the USOC.

"The rift really got healed back in 1993 when we needed to get HIV athletes into the country and the Olympic Committee needed to do the same thing, and there was a collaboration," Liecty said. "The FGG and USOC met with authorities in Washington and won the designated event status largely through the work of San Francisco's Susan Kennedy, who coordinated the effort. In 1994, the USOC for the first time included the fact that the Gay Games were taking place in its annual list of events."

Later, Liecty worked with Anne Cribbs on the host and bid committees that brought World Cup soccer to the Bay Area. So when Cribbs became head of the Bay Area Sports Organizing Committee that bid on the 2012 Summer Olympic Games, she invited Liecty and Dermody to serve on the board.

"The rift was healed here because of the initiative taken by Cribbs," Liecty said. "She knew there was this history and wanted to address it."

Sports as an alternative

As AIDS exacted its toll in the mid-1980s, the clusters of gay bars in San Francisco had begun to resemble ghost towns before Gay Games II. "Half of them were closed down," Lewenstein said. "Not because people were dying, but because people stopped coming in because they were afraid of catching it.

"AIDS made sports an attractive alternative."

After Gay Games II, San Francisco Arts & Athletics gave way to two groups. The Federation of Gay Games was formed with an international board to continue the Games on the road. Team SF formed to help organize efforts to send Bay Area athletes to future Games.

Taking the Games to different cities increased the chances for the Games to break down barriers with mainstream amateur sports organizations.

"What has probably helped, certainly in the case of cycling, is that as these events have been held in various locations, the organizers have reached out to local or national organizations to be involved in the sports and in some cases becoming sanctioned," Liecty said. "I don't know of any problems we've ever had other than with figure skating.

"These [sports] people go back and say, 'Hey, it wasn't so bad after all. It was a good event. It was fun.'"

At GGWC, the club needed to find new leadership. Dermody reluctantly took over, resentful that it cut into his personal preparation as a competitor. "I was kind of angry," he said. "I had gotten a taste of what it was like to be a big man on campus. I resisted it, but after awhile I had to do it. If I didn't there would have been no club."

The deaths continued to mount. Dermody estimated that 40 to 50 GGWC athletes have died from AIDS and related causes. He said he thinks having wrestled with them made the losses easier to bear. He can remember each of them as if they were still here, especially his former lover, Carl Martin, who co-chaired wrestling for Gay Games II.

"Just like when you lose a loved one in your family, you had a relationship that involved a lot of interaction and events and memories," he said. "When you have that with all of the wrestlers, including all of my boyfriends, the memories were especially sweet. I can almost smell it, almost taste it. Because we wrestled. I can close my eyes and I can feel it.

"I remember everything so specifically. It wasn't like we just had a few beers in a bar. It wasn't like he was my brother and we shared a room. We did so many things together. The memories are so vivid. So yeah, I miss him, but remembering is so much easier than it is with family members.

"The other thing is because of the relationship I had with them, I knew I was on the right path for the rest of my life. The feeling was too good and too wonderful to be wrong. We could be so competitive and still be a team. It transcends a normal family relationship."

Beginning with Gay Games III in 1990, which drew 7,300 participants to Vancouver, a series of "Rainbow Runs" have been held every four years in connection with the Games. Produced by the FGG, the American Run for the End of AIDS, the Names Project, the Keith Haring Foundation, and other international and local organizations bring the rainbow flag as a symbolic torch from San Francisco, the "Athens" of the Gay Games, to each host city. Included are displays of memorial quilts historically linked to the Gay Games, receptions and rallies focused on remembrance, AIDS and breast cancer prevention, and promotion of the Gay Games. The events have been in memory of Waddell, Haring, and San Francisco softball pioneer Rikki Streicher, who died in 1994.

That was the year the Games returned to the United States. Held in New York City, to coincide with the city's Stonewall celebration, the Games drew 12,500 participants, making it one of the largest athletic events in the world, comparable to the Summer Olympics.

In 1997, the FGG added a "Memorial Moment" to its annual membership meeting to remember those Gay Games pioneers who have been lost to AIDS, breast cancer, and other diseases. The unfolding ceremony and reading of names submitted by FGG directors (123 names at the 2005 meeting) are patterned after the ceremony established at the first unfolding of the AIDS Memorial Quilt in 1987.

Nobody knows how many thousands at LGBT athletes have died. But an estimated 50 or so people living with AIDS have participated in the sports and cultural events at every one of the Gay Games so far. Those are the faces Lewenstein, who has remained active in the Games, looks for every four years.

"My involvement has always been about the athletes. Every Gay Games, I have been down on the turf and watched the athletes come in. I look for the old faces. When I see them, it makes it all worthwhile."

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