Tom Waddell: The Origin of the Gay Games

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: “The Games were an outgrowth of a thought that I had five, ten years ago. I was working in Arabia. I was designing a national sports program while I was working as a physician in Saudi Arabia. I was out to my corporation I worked for, they knew that I was a gay male, and we had an understanding about that. I was never afraid of embarrassing them in any way and it was a very nice working relationship. But, it occurred to me at that time that many of the people that I encountered, both in the corporation I work for, as well as Arabs and other people that I would meet traveling around, that the attitudes and the ideas and the stereotypes that they held about gay people were really totally inaccurate. At least it wasn’t consistent with what I knew of the community. Not that I was so heavily involved with the community, although I believed I was. So, when I finished a program in Saudi Arabia, I came back to San Francisco and I began to get involved with sports right away – I started bowling and playing softball, and we had an awards dinner. And this was the first year they’d given an award for the Outstanding Gay Male Athlete. Well, I don’t think I was the Outstanding Gay Male Athlete, but my history of having competed in the Olympics I’m sure swayed them to make a presentation to someone who at least had some kind-of reputation. In any case, I got up at the awards ceremony and I said, “Wouldn’t it be great if the City of San Francisco had a Gay Olympics and invited the rest of the world?’ And everyone stood up and raised their hands and began cheering, and I thought ‘My God…’ Well, I had to follow up on that.”