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The anti-doping policy of the Gay Games offers an interesting exemplification of the treatment–enhancement distinction. Some Gay Games athletes require steroids to deal with the effects of HIV or for sexual reassignment, and the practice community had to negotiate coordinating conventions with regard to steroid use that remained committed to the deeper conventions of Gay Games sport. This paper will investigate the way that this policy emanated from the type of participatory social practice community that would be necessary for any sport to challenge the anti-doping fundamentalism within contemporary sports. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many members of the LGBT community have viewed the Gay Games as an opportunity to challenge dominant ideologies concerning sexuality and sport participation. Members of the mass media, however, play a potentially important role in how the event is perceived by the general public. Therefore, the primary purpose of the current study was to examine how the Gay Games have been framed in newspaper coverage. A total of 646 articles published in the United States covering the eight Gay Games events held during the 32-year period of 1980-2012 were analyzed in terms of three aspects of framing: (a) the types of issues highlighted, (b) the sources of information cited, and (c) the manner in which either episodic or thematic narratives were employed. The results of the current study revealed that issues of identity and optimism were most commonly highlighted, LGBT participants were most frequently cited as sources of information, and thematic framing was most commonly employed in newspaper coverage of the Gay Games. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes up the challenge posed by McDonald (2006) among others to interrogate queer privilege in the analysis of sport and sexuality. Using Puar's (2007) concepts of sexual exceptionalism and homonationalism, and Morgensen's (2010) notion of settler homonationalism, I analyze specific examples from the 2002 and 2006 Gay Games, and 2006 Outgames to demonstrate how emancipatory sexual identity events have also reiterated white, Western, bourgeois privilege through aspects of their instantiations. The argument is not just that race has to be added to the analysis of the international lesbian and gay sport movement, it is that relying on a primary focus such as homophobia actually contributes to the reproduction of other forms of potent oppression. The paper ends with a reading of the 2010 Winter Olympics as a new context for homonationalism in the production of queer abjection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) sport events potentially represent a significant transgressive and alternative space in the world of sport. There has been a scarcity of research on the full range of legacies that these types of medium-sized events can have, as previous studies focus on larger mega-sport events like the Olympics and/or economic and infrastructural aspects. This study evaluates the potential sociopolitical and sport legacies of the 2014 Gay Games held in Cleveland/Akron, based on interviews with 29 key stakeholders and complemented with conversations with 46 local residents. It demonstrates a range of positive sociopolitical and sport legacies were cited, although awareness of possible negative legacies and barriers also emerged. The discussions, centered on legacies, show the Games have symbolic significance for both the gay and wider community and accelerated the process of more accepting societal attitudes towards LGBTQ people. The conclusion discusses the somewhat qualified transgressive potential of the Games to challenge wider existing dominant heteronormative values in the local area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In May 2014, the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) launched its Pride campaign and became the first professional sport league in the US to explicitly reach out to gay fans. As the public opinion toward homosexuality has been changing, sport marketers need to understand how to reach and respond to heterosexual and gay fans without alienating one or the other. The purpose of this study was to investigate heterosexual and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) fans' attitudes toward the Pride campaign, and the impact of fandom, attitude toward the Pride campaign and sexual orientation on consumption intentions. One-way ANOVAs, a one-way ANCOVA, and hierarchical multiple regression analyses were performed to investigate the hypotheses. The main finding of the study was that LGB fans had more favorable attitudes toward the Pride campaign than heterosexual fans, yet their consumption intentions were comparable, and attitude toward the Pride campaign had no influence on fans' consumption intentions. Keywords: fan attitudes, gay-themed marketing, consumption intentions, LGBT, WNBA, Introduction In May 2014, the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) launched its Pride campaign and became the first professional sport league in the US to explicitly reach out to gay [...]

The politics of gay and transgender visibility and representation at the Eurovision Song Contest, an annual televised popular music festival presented to viewers as a contest between European nations, show that processes of interest to Queer International Relations do not just involve states or even international institutions; national and transnational popular geopolitics over 'lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights' and 'Europeanness' equally constitute the understandings of 'the international' with which Queer International Relations is concerned. Building on Cynthia Weber's reading the persona of the 2014 Eurovision winner Conchita Wurst with 'queer intellectual curiosity', this article demonstrates that Eurovision shifted from, in the late 1990s, an emerging site of gay and trans visibility to, by 2008-2014, part of a larger discursive circuit taking in international mega-events like the Olympics, international human-rights advocacy, Europe-Russia relations and the politics of state homophobia and transphobia. Contest organisers thus had to take positions -- ranging from detachment to celebration -- about 'lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender' politics in host states and the Eurovision region. The construction of spatio-temporal hierarchies around attitudes to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights, however, revealed exclusions that corroborate other critical arguments on the reconfiguration of national and European identities around 'lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the first two decades (1982–1998) of the Gay Games, in which an important story unfolds about normalisation and how that contributes (paradoxically) to further racism and sexual oppression. Following McWhorter’s (2009) important analysis of Foucault’s ‘racism against the abnormal’, I suggest the Gay Games have worked hard to distance themselves from the ‘abnormal’ from their very inception. The paper discusses how the early Gay Games are a homonormative leisure formation seeking mainstream acceptance through such examples as: the development of a commodified and conventional sporting spectacle; the individualising and privatising impulses to the AIDS crisis; the granting of a US immigration waiver in 1994; and the consumption of exoticised and racialised bodies in 1998. Moving beyond the celebration of lesbian and gay affirmation, I argue that the push for normalisation at the games produces them as a biopolitical technology of whiteness, class privilege and racism. The paper concludes by suggesting that the homonormative discourses of the twentieth century Gay Games functioned as a condition of possibility for the twenty-first century Gay Games to be mobilised homonationally, that is, as a form of post-9/11 (homo)sexualised racism that semiotically contributes to sustaining a global ‘war on terror’ (Puar, 2007). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The creation of the Gay Games and other gay and lesbian sporting events have provided a space for gay and lesbian athletes to participate in sports, free from the discrimination experienced in mainstream sports. The Gay Games in particular is the largest sporting and cultural event organised by and for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) community, and is open to all skill levels, genders and sexual orientations. While the Gay Games are based on participatory discourses, the level of competition in some events at the Gay Games is relatively high for a participationbased event. Consequently, recreational level athletes are able to participate in a higher level of competition than they normally would in regular club competitions. An analysis of the experiences of lesbian-identified players from a recreational level women's field hockey club in Australia and their Gay Games participation has revealed several positive outcomes for these athletes. Through participation at the Gay Games, these women have the opportunity to compete with and against players from other countries and sometimes at a higher level of competition than they would regularly engage in. They have formed new friendships and developed closer bonds with teammates in a homophobiafree space, and experienced a sense of personal empowerment. This paper will draw on interview and sociological material in order to explore the experiences of these women in relation to these themes and their participation at the Gay Games. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the Opening Ceremony of the Sydney 2002 Gay Games as a case study, in this article I analyse sexual citizenship through the lens of global cosmopolitanism. I begin by arguing that at these Games an idealised sexual citizen was produced through neoliberal discourses of freedom, rights, choice and cosmopolitanism. At events of this kind, these individualising practices function as new and important forms of ‘political’ action. I then argue that the idealised cosmopolitan sexual citizen is presumed to be a white, western citizen-subject who has access to ‘difference’ through urban living, global travel and through personal investments in the project of global queer world-making. Finally, I illustrate how becoming a cosmopolitan sexual citizen involves a set of consumptive practices that fetishise and Other non-white bodies and lives. At large global gay and lesbian events like the Gay Games, local histories and bodies are mediated as sites of consumption that affirm sexual citizens’ status as global cosmopolitan citizens and define the parameters of an imagined queer world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the developments in gender policies in sport in relation to changes in transsexual rights legislation and gender identity activism. A gender identity policy about "men, women, transgender and intersex" athletes has been developed by the Gay Games. There is resistance to inclusive gender policies in mainstream sport organizations.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]