He’s Just Had Coffee

Last Saturday the 6th International Gay Games opened in Sydney. Something like 14000 athletes converged on the place, rendering the street completely crazy (I should probably say: The Street, because I mostly mean Oxford St) - long queues every night of the week, crowds of happy queer folk wandering the streets wearing medals, it’s a buzz just sitting at Taylor Square and watching people pass. As many of you know, I’m not really an organised-sport-kinda-guy, so I approached this week with a level of trepidation - all the smug blandness of Mardi Gras with the sport-obsessed jingoism of the Olympics - YAY! I watched the Olympics opening ceremony on television and was very comfortable with my decision to avoid the whole damn thing. I had the best intentions of doing the same thing with the Gay Games, but… My enormous and talented gym buddy Peretta (hi Mr P) got booked to sing (he’s an operatic counter-tenor) at the opening ceremony for the Games, so I decided I’d drag myself along in support (I would have gone to see him anyway, but being given a free ticket pretty much rendered any discussion moot ). You can find an account of the performances at the opening ceremony in various places, but it’s hard to convey the feeling of 18000 queers in a footy stadium, of welcoming people from all over the place who came here, often facing hardship to do so rather than as heroes of their nation like Olympic athletes, of seeing India and Pakistan decide to march in one team…. I guess what I hadn’t paid attention to is that the difference with these Games is that it’s not about elite athletes fighting for country - there is no national selection process: you register, you compete. The Games is designed to encourage people to get involved and fight to show their best. People march in by country, but it’s more a way to showcase diversity than foster patriotism - Boston team carrying inflatable lobsters, Dutch team with huge orange crowns on, Samoan team of fa’afafines, the single person teams - Venezuela, Iraq, Antarctica (?!?). The programme marked countries where our sexuality is still illegal with a black triangle and we cheered those teams until we were hoarse. I’m risking effusive over-enthusiasm, but all that and then a footy field over-taken by a stadium-scale potted history of the struggle for gay liberation, bracketed by an indigenous welcome and a celebration of Asia-Pacific cultures (in which Peretta sang breath-taking arias from Bali Hai and Madame Butterfly - followed by a few minutes of baroque improvisation in which he hit three top Cs in two minutes - opera queens orgasmed all over the stadium). A few speeches from the various organisers and then a keynote from Justice Michael Kirby, High Court judge and recent victim of persecution on the floor of parliament, who in remarkably few, pithy, cliche-free sentences summed up the whole damn thing. By the end of it all, I’d cried and laughed my way through about four hours of all this and carried out a renewed passion for my mob - all those queer folk all over the world. It’s easy to feel that here in Australia our fight is over and being gay is just a big party - there’s skirmishes still, but it all seems so… small. What the ceremony and Kirby’s speech highlights is that that battle goes on in so much of the world and more that We Have A Job To Do: an ongoing role to help the world accept difference, diversity, freakiness and just get over our squeamishness about it - emphasising our common humanity. To quote Michael Kirby, “Ours is the world of love, questing to find the common links that bind all people.” At our best, that is what we can do. At our worst we can be a pack of inward-looking, bitchy, gossiping, cock-obsessed queens concerned only with shopping, drugs and the next dollop of HotSex. What I took from that day was the conviction that we need to keep struggling, to look outward and see where we can best apply our talent to “be fabulous” as Vanessa Wagner says. We have to confront them with our freakishness and force them to love us anyway. I’m rambling. It’s been a quite a week and I’m a little emotional… Read Kirby’s speech and go be fabulous!