"I've known world-class athletes, men particularly, who dropped away because of the stress," said Sandy Ledray last week. She gestured down at the Hunter College gym floor where two teams lunged and spiked in a Gay Games volleyball medal match. "Imagine how good they feel, how mellow. Competitive but not nasty. No one's calling the women dykes, no one's sticking tampons in the guys' lockers."
Ledray, a 35-year-old businesswoman from Seattle, agreed there could be merit in the criticism by some gays and lesbians that the Games trivialized life and death issues and blunted the thrust of confrontational politics. On the other hand, in a week of Games going, it was hard to find an athlete or serious spectator who hadn't found it a life-enhancing experience.
"It's hard to explain how thrilling it is to feel affirmed as a gay person and an athlete at the same time," said Pat Griffin, a 48-year-old triathlete. "I was an athlete in high school and college, I was a high school and college coach, and I was never totally there; I was always holding back some part of myself, keeping a secret, on guard. I was never totally free until I came out 10 years ago."
Both Griffin and 42-year-old Gary Reese, a writer from Austin, Tex., remembered the intense thrill of the opening ceremonies at their first Gay Games, in Vancouver four years ago. "That was the first time in my life I felt I could call myself an athlete," said Reese. "I'd been cycling competitively in sanctioned events for four years before that. But at a mainstream sports event, gay men always think, 'Is it showing?' and there's a loss of strength, of focus."
For Ledray, Griffin, Reese and thousands of others last week, the Gay Games were a kind of jock fantasy theme park. Professor Joan Gondola of Baruch College/CUNY, founder and chair of the first International Gay Games Congress of Athletes, Arts and Sciences, began to cry during the opening ceremonies. "There were so many of us," she said, "and we looked so good and so happy and relaxed, and you know, if you didn't know it was the Gay Games, there was no reason to believe that almost everyone there was gay or lesbian."
"All week," said Reese, "I thought about being in the envelope and what it would be like to go back."
Even within the Games there are shades of opinion; some athletes just want to compete for medals in an atmosphere without mainstream stress while others want to make a show of commonality with nongays, to create a currency of communication through sports. And, of course, some, like some athletes in the Olympics these Games are modeled on, just want to party.
"Diversity," laughed Griffin. She is an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where she developed an anti-bias program called Social Justice Education.
"I hope we never lose this sense of a people's Olympics, of inclusions and love and just feeling good about yourself," she said. "Lesbian athletes my age are sad and a little angry at all those years feeling scared and thinking it was our fault. It took me a long time to find out there's nothing wrong with me."
Griffin is on the 60-member team from Northhampton, Mass., that carried a banner declaring itself from "Lesbianville," a name they took after a supermarket tabloid so dubbed their town. Griffin won a bronze medal despite cancellation of her best leg in the triathlon, swimming. Reese also won a bronze, in a cycling race dedicated to the Team Dayton captain, Tom Kohn, who was seriously injured by an automobile while training a week before the games.
"A team is about belonging," said Reese, "which is why this is so important to us. Coming out is a lifelong process and something like this deepens your sense of self. I only hope the Games don't become some nitty-gritty competition. Between these Games and Vancouver, I saw how much more sophisticated the cycling equipment got. And people got much more serious."
Sandy Ledray, sitting next to me at the volleyball, says she hopes the Games won't become too commercialized.
"We need the sponsors, but do we need the liquor companies?" she said. "With all the stress in gay life, there are already a lot of alcoholics."
Ledray, one of an estimated 500,000 Gay Games visitors, came to relax and push Brookside Soap Inc., her natural soaps and oils company. Last Wednesday, she stepped off the red-eye flight and headed toward a Broadway doubleheader -- both parts of "Angels in America."
"Maybe there were four straights in the audience," Ledray said. "It was the same feeling I have here right now, the same I had when we marched in Washington last year. Community. Family. Of course, we're so diverse, nothing else binds us, so you can't get together for more than a week. Then you have to deal with laundry, relationships, the real world."
