Q Toon: Cot in the Act

Hong Kong was selected in 2017 as the host city for next year's Gay Games, the LGBTQ+ version of the Olympics complete with all the hoopla of opening ceremonies and at least three dozen sporting competitions. Founded in 1982 as the Gay Olympics (but immediately forced to change its name by the IOC), the Gay Games have been held every four years since, featuring LGBTQ+ athletes from around the world — including from countries where it would be dangerous for them to be out.

This will be the first time the Gay Games will have been held in Asia, but there are rumblings that the Games — and the athletes — may not be officially welcome.

Now, attacks on the Gay Games from local lawmakers aligned with Beijing are revealing bigotry in the financial hub, where space for promoting ideas such as equality and diversity has shrunk under China’s tightening control. Amid a crackdown enabled by a national security law introduced last year, the Hong Kong activists who would typically push back against such attacks are either behind bars or in exile.

Leading the crusade is Junius Ho, a pro-Beijing lawmaker who has called the Gay Games “disgraceful” and a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” that could violate the security law. Another lawmaker, Priscilla Leung, said activists could use the sports and cultural event to promote political causes. Peter Shiu, a member of a center-right party, said Hong Kong can “tolerate” but not promote homosexuality. ...

Attacks on the event started in June during a legislative session, when Ho said the Games would yield “dirty money.” He upped the ante last week when he cited Article 23 of China’s national security law, which states that the country should “guard against the impact of harmful culture.” Previously, Ho, who did not respond to requests for comment, had called a TV show that featured homosexual relationships “marijuana coated in sugar.” 

This comes at the same time that Chinese officials have launched a campaign against "sissy culture," trying to convince Chinese youth that heretofore popular "boy bands" are a dangerously androgynous threat to the future of godlessness, ginseng, and moo goo gai pan. Having survived the fall of the Berlin Wall, Beijing has no intention of succumbing to BTS.

In July, the Chinese messaging app WeChat blocked accounts of LGBT student clubs and university organizations in China. A month later, Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, banned a male video blogger after receiving complaints about his “feminine” behavior. A leaked document reported by SupChina, a New York-based news outlet that focuses on China, separately revealed that Shanghai University has been collecting names of LGBT students for an unclear purpose.

Why do I suspect that it's not for assembling Shanghai U's Queer Ping Pong League?

Gay Games People Play

Writing Thursday's Qtoon post, I thought I had already posted a Sportsback Saturday retrospective on the Gay Games on this here blog; but it turns out that I was thinking of a post on my long defunct GeoCities site. GeoCities, for those of you too young or attention deficient to remember, was a web hosting service bought out by Yahoo! in 1999. Ten years later, it and its 38 million user-built pages were demolished by the Vogons of the internet in order to make way for a hypertext bypass or something.

I gave a quick summary of the split between the Federation of Gay Games (FGG) and the Gay & Lesbian International Sport Association (GLISA) Thursday, and I don't want to hash through all the details here, but some context is necessary in order to present the cartoons I drew about it back in the '00's.

The FGG initially awarded its 2006 Gay Games VII to the city of Montreal in the fall of 2001, accepting the Canadian city's bid over those of three U.S. cities. It was a story of interest only to LGBTQ athletes and media, there being other things dominating the national psyche at the moment.

FGG officials grew worried about Montreal organizers' optimistic predictions of doubling the participants from the 2002 games in Sydney, Australia. More worrisome, given that Gay Games IV, V and VI had all lost money, was Montreal's multi-million dollar budget. Two years after awarding the 2006 games to Montreal, the FGG rescinded their decision and awarded the games to Chicago instead.

In the summer of 2005, the Cook County Board overwhelmingly passed a measure welcoming Gay Games VII to town, after which Republicans on the board suddenly discovered that they didn't want to welcome a bunch of FGGot athletes to town after all and vehemently disassociated themselves from the resolution.

The original links to the Chicago Free Press, Chicago Sun Times and Chicago Tribune reports seem to have disappeared, but Wikipedia still has the details:

Commissioners Gregg Goslin, Liz Gorman, Carl Hansen, Tony Peraica and Peter Silvestri, the only Republicans sitting on the Board of Commissioners, withdrew their names from the proclamation. "I'm a pro-family kind of person and conservative on social issues. That's nothing against the gay and lesbian community, but it's nothing I want to advance as a cause celebre," Peraica told the Chicago Sun-Times. In the same report, Gorman said that she doesn't support "special rights for any group."

Trying to explain his original vote in favor of the proclamation, Peraica fumbled, "I must have been out of the room."

Meanwhile, undeterred by the FGG moving their games to Chicago, Montreal continued with its plans to host what would now be World OutGames I that same summer. From my 2006 GeoCities post:

The Gay Games survived the sweltering heat in Chicago in July, to be followed by the Outgames in Montreal about a week later. 

Again, from my original post:

The Chicago Tribune has been covering the Gay Games, although I've missed any coverage in its sports section. On the other hand, the coverage has made the front page, in spite of eruption of hostilities in Israel and Lebanon, a rush hour train derailment, and the President saying "shit" on an open microphone. The Trib stories have dealt with such topics as corporate sponsorship of Chicago's games and the hurdles some third world contestants have overcome to attend at all. ...

The Chicago Sun Times did a nice job of providing coverage, at least on line, including a photo gallery (the same pictures are also in Yahoo!'s photo gallery). The games got their own full page (The Sun Times is a tabloid), with pictures, toward the back of the news section.

That the Montreal games were a financial disaster is indisputable. But Montreal journalist Richard Burnett has pointed out that if you added the 12,000 athletes who competed in Chicago to the 12,000 who competed in Montreal, you would get the 24,000 originally projected by Montreal organizers. There may have been a few athletes who participated in both events, but most had to choose one or the other. Burnett claimed that Martina Navratilova told him that in the continuing aftermath of 9/11, "Europeans opted to come to Montreal because it's easier to get a visa. America is like a prison with barbed wire. They don't want to let anybody in these days."

Ms. Navratilova's comment notwithstanding, the U.S. can hardly be accused of not accommodating Chicago's games. While airport security measures remained in effect, we weren't yet trying to ban Muslims from the country, and the federal government had issued a blanket waiver of a travel ban in effect since 1987, specifically to allow non-U.S. citizens with HIV/AIDS to travel the United States to participate in or to attend the event. (The ban was completely lifted in 2010, in time for Gay Games VIII.)

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Well, just for the sake of ending on a positive note, the one other time I have drawn about either Gay Games or Out Games was in celebration of the 2014 Gay Games in Cleveland, which attracted about 9,000 contestants, and netted a $150,000 profit when all was said and done.

Which is pretty impressive, especially when you consider how often the more famous Olympic games turn out to be a white elephant for their hosts.

And They're Off!

With all that is going wrong in the world these days, what did I choose to draw about this week?

World OutGames abruptly canceled this week's games in Miami over the weekend, to the surprise and shock of athletes as they arrived in town for the competition.

Most of the sports events, along with opening and closing ceremonies, were canceled at the very last minute amid a flurry of financial woes and possible impropriety. By Friday night, Miami Beach Police and the State Attorney’s Office announced they were opening a fraud investigation “due to the potential misappropriation of funds.”

Only soccer, aquatics and country western dance events would go on. The City of Miami Beach, Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau, and the Miami Beach Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce scrambled to keep some of the planned events, but most athletes paid thousands of dollars for nothing.

Ah, well, I suppose there are worse places to be stuck with nothing to do than Miami Beach.

The World OutGames are not to be confused with the Gay Games, founded in 1982 and planning their tenth games in Paris next year. World OutGames split with the Gay Games over the 2006 Games, which were to have been held in Montreal, Ontario, Canada. Montreal's organizers and officials of the Federation of Gay Games (FGG) were unable to agree on budgeting for the event, and the FGG ended up awarding that year's games to Chicago. Montreal went ahead with its plans anyway, and the World OutGames were born.

The Chicago Gay Games ended in the black, while the Montreal World OutGames ended up $5.3 million Canadian in debt. The next World OutGames in Copenhagen in 2009 managed a profit, donated to Danish LGBT charities, but the after the games in Antwerp in 2013, the Gay and Lesbian International Sport Association (GLISA) failed to publish any financial or registration figures.

P.S.: Sorry if you were expecting a cartoon about a topic with which you were already familiar. If we're still debating the meaning of "covfefe" next week, I promise I'll draw a biting cartoon about it.

Q Toon: That's So Gay

Gay Games 9 has been underway in Cleveland and Akron all week The Games wrap up this Saturday, so I would have been better off drawing about it last week, had it been on my radar at the time. Must do something about that cheap-ass radar.

There hasn't been a great deal of news coming out of the Games -- certainly not at the very start of the Games when I was at my drawing board. Mayor Frank Jackson said that they would make a good dry run for his city hosting the 2016 GOP convention, so I considered some gag about it making a good dry run except that the GOP delegates would be more interested than the athletes in Cleveland's hookers.

But that would probably have been seen as an undeserved slam at Cleveland. Or at its hookers, several of whom are probably very fine individuals if you get to know them. Since Cleveland has been so open and welcoming -- heck, as I noted yesterday, even the Cuyahoga County Republicans put out the welcome mat -- I rejected that idea.

Instead, this week's cartoon is about the official slogan of Gay Games 9: "That's So Gay." The slogan is meant to arrest your attention, and it succeeds at that.

My cartoon barely scratches the surface of what events are in competition. Not pictured are such events as ballroom dance, rodeo, darts, billiards, rock climbing, badminton, bowling, martial arts and golf.

Gay Games Archives

Gay Games 9 is underway in Cleveland - Akron, and going smoothly by what little I've heard.

Eight years ago, the Games were in Chicago, so I naturally saw and heard more about them from Chicago media. For example, the Cook County Board passed a resolution welcoming the Games to their city. It was one of those pro forma resolutions that get approved without a whole lot of scrutiny.

Then Republicans took a second look at it and ...

Eight years later, the Cuyahoga County Republicans have actually issued their very own welcoming proclamation.