Tom Waddell: A Statement on the Quality of our Lives

Tom Waddell is interviewed by Mary Anne McEwen about the origin of the Gay Games. They are sitting on a park picnic table at a venue of the 1983 Vancouver Gay Summer Games.

Waddell: “We had a lot of problems, because there was no credibility. Who’d ever heard of the Gay Games? We were getting questions like, ‘Well, ‘Gay Games’… haha. What does that mean? Spoon and egg races? A new concept of Drag Races?’,  you know. Some of the comments were rather funny except that we were quite serious in what we were doing and addressing social issues and I guess what I need to reemphasize is that the Games are really not about athletics. They’re about a statement on the quality of our lives. How ’bout – particularly now with the A.I.D.S. crisis, with a lot of flack coming at the gay community for being so sexually oriented – the fact is that’s what the public focuses on. They don’t know that we’re also doctors and lawyers and that we’re professionals in a variety of areas. We’re clergy, we’re truck drivers, we’re waitresses, and we’re executives, both male and female, in corporations, we’re stock brokers.”