Book Description

Participation in international sporting events has social and cultural meanings beyond the athletic performances produced. Throughout the twentieth century, marginalized groups such as African Americans, women, and people with disabilities have used athletic participation as a way to shape their public images and show positive representations in hopes of changing public perceptions. For these groups, athletic participation has drawn on an assimilationist model that seemed to suggest that marginalized individuals could succeed if only they tried hard enough. In the early 1980s, organizers created the Gay Games, which rejected the assimilationist model adopted by earlier groups to present a visible alternative to mainstream stereotypes about gay men and lesbians. Gay Games organizers hoped to provide an event that would unite the gay and lesbian population, while educating mainstream viewers by providing positive representations to counter prevailing negative imagery. While the first Gay Games succeeded in this goal, the AIDS epidemic prompted a wave of negative representations, particularly of gay men, that were difficult to overcome. Instead, Gay Games organizers offered representations of gay men and women engaged in healthy, wholesome athletic activity as a way of countering images of a disease-riddled population. The response by the gay and lesbian population to the AIDS epidemic also affected mainstream responses, since the creation of an AIDS industry arising from grass roots AIDS Service Organizations ultimately drew lucrative government grants for healthcare and research, attracting the attention of corporate advertisers who recognized the gay and lesbian population as a potential niche market. Corporate advertisements in gay and lesbian publications and corporate sponsorship of the Gay Games led Gay Games organizers to adopt the same assimilationist model that other marginalized groups had utilized. Increasingly, their message indicated that gay men and lesbians could succeed if only they tried hard enough, a narrative that ignored institutional inequities. This study of the Gay Games in comparative perspective to other marginalized groups and their participation in international sporting events is important because it traces the way that a radical social movement became increasingly normalized in mainstream representations once the group in question demonstrated their viability as consumer market. This suggests that the economics of consumption, rather than equality and fairness, are the driving forces behind this normalization process.