It feels like Rio has just had the gayest Olympics of all time, with 44 out and proud Olympians competing this year.
In Beijing, 2008, only 12 openly gay athletes competed, among them our very own Matthew Mitcham (who went on to win gold).
But despite Rio’s competition, in reality the 2000 Sydney Olympics was actually the gayest ever, with 53 out LGBT athletes participating. I think Rio just feels gayer, simply because the media coverage has been fantastically inclusive without ever being weird about it and treating the athletes like exotic animals: “Oh look at that diver, it’s a homosexual. A homosexual at the Olympics! How funny!”
It’s been refreshing to have the media treat gay athletes as complex human beings. In the past, raising the topic of an athlete’s sexuality led to the media allowing that to define them, jettisoning the rest of their career achievements in lieu of that fact alone. This attitude reduces gay people to their sexuality and nothing else: it ignores their athletic prowess, their achievements and goals.
As an aside to all this good news though, there was one media incident that ended with a journalist being sent home from the Olympics, and led to him being dealt a social media lynching. A heterosexual, married journalist decided to hop onto Grindr and trick gay athletes into arranging dates with him so he could out them.
Somewhere along the line, this gay-baiting man Nico Hines outright lost his mind, deciding to set up this bizarre lure-the-gays game with a total disregard for the repercussions. What he did was dangerous and wildly unethical. His original article has since been deleted, but the whole piece was impressively creepy.
I’m reasonably certain he was aware of the 76,890 different reasons why what he did was wrong – I think he just ignored them. Among those reasons is the fact that his little exercise was definitely going to hurt real people: many of the athletes he outed are closeted at home, and many are from countries where homosexuality is a crime. By being outed, they run the risk of going home to be imprisoned, humiliated and ostracized.
Hines’ unprincipled journalism was a nasty piece of work. The upside to all of this, though, is that the media didn’t paint him as a sympathetic character. They absolutely pulverised him. He’s been packed up and shipped home. The damage has been done, but the overwhelming narrative in mainstream media isn’t, “Did you know so and so is a homo?” but rather, “This piece of shit has been fired for causing direct harm to other human beings.”
Justice.
So today in 2016, though Sydney’s still got the gold for the gayest Olympics ever, I’m still hoping that by 2020 that record will be broken. This year, the media helped to broaden cultural acceptance by not “othering” the 44 out Olympians. That kind of added visibility is so important for those who need these sorts of role models – believe me, I spent the majority of my adolescence looking for some suitable LGBTQIA media representation and finding precisely squat.
The world caters to the heterosexual experience. As a young gay, I found myself meticulously combing through films or TV shows, searching for the tiniest slither of gayness. If I couldn’t find it, I’d invent it, or I’d convince myself that it existed as subtext.
I definitely wasn’t alone in this either. Watching shows like Queer As Folk and The L Word (with the volume on the lowest possible setting, and my ears straining to hear if my parents were tromping down the hall), really helped me understand how I fit into a culture I didn’t know how to access because I couldn’t see it anywhere.
That’s just the fiction though. It was much harder to find an honest portrayal of homosexuality (much less one that wasn’t a raging stereotype) in the media. It’s why something as banal as a sports commentator talking about a gay athlete is so important. It’s a way of saying, “Here is this athlete doing this awesome thing”, while not shying away from their gayness, and simultaneously not making it the only thing about them. It’s listed as a detail, but it’s not all there is, and that’s just peachy.
[Kazuki Watanabe, Scott Clary, Ashley Delaney photo by JD Lasica – Flickr.]
This Week:
On Friday August 25, pash.tm is launching Australia’s first sexual health campaign for gay, bi and queer trans men. It’s called Grunt and it’s hitting The Bearded Tit in Redfern. DJs Rub n Dub will be spinning tunes along with Fleetwood Crack. Space and catering is limited so please make sure you RSVP to [email protected].
On Saturday August 26, head over to The Shift Club for Hellfire’s Cartoons, Costumes and Cosplay Party. DJs Georgie Zuzak, Tokoloshe, Sveta and Estée Louder will be playing and prizes will be awarded to the smartest, craftiest, weirdest, sexiest and most lateral takes on this fun twist on fetish fashion.
Then on Sunday August 27, the Red Rattler will be hosting Daddy Dickie’s Dark Arts Club, described as, “A combination of the best of the worst of Dracula’s Theatre Restaurant and the worst of the best of the 2000 strip and burlesque explosion in Sydney town.” The performers include Adonis & Lexi Laphor, Imogen Kelly, Solid Gold, Willow Darling and many more.
