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But gay rights only came to the fore in the summer of 2013, when the Russian government, which decriminalized homosexuality in 1993, banned the dissemination of “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations” around children-making it more difficult for gay activists to operate and, rights groups allege, fueling a rise in anti-gay violence in the country. When Russia was awarded the Sochi Games, in 2007, the environmental and security concerns that still plague the $51-billion project swiftly cropped up. “You don’t see a single trend anywhere you look.” “The status of LGBT rights globally is schizophrenic,” Jessica Stern, executive director of the New York-based International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, tells me. Ultimately, the costliest Olympics in history may be remembered for marking a period in which gay rights aren’t so much advancing globally as expanding in certain parts of the world while regressing or languishing in others.Īs 6,000 athletes from 85 countries gather in Sochi, the global gay-rights divide will be unmistakable. Controversy over recent restrictions on sexual minorities in Russia-along with threats of terror attacks, concerns about environmental degradation, and protests by the Circassian diaspora-have arguably made the Sochi Winter Olympics the most geopolitically charged Games since the Soviet-boycotted 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Three decades later, sports are once again stirring us to take stock of gay rights around the world. You don’t see a single trend anywhere you look.” “The status of LGBT rights globally is schizophrenic. had “much to learn from Holland, Norway and France where there are national laws protecting the rights of Gay and Lesbian citizens.” “Direct contact” with athletes from these nations, Day argued, would be enlightening for Americans living in a country where international visitors were often denied entry because of their sexual orientation. As the activist Greg Day wrote in the program for the inaugural Gay Games, the U.S. Tom Waddell, a gay Olympian who would die of AIDS five years later, told The New York Times that he had organized the athletic competition to “pull the gay community together globally.”Īt the time, that gay community found itself in vastly different circumstances around the world.
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The Stonewall riots were more than a decade in the past a year earlier, reports had surfaced about rare pneumonia and cancer afflicting homosexuals in New York and California-the first glimmers of what would later be called AIDS. In August 1982, 1,350 athletes from 12 countries gathered in San Francisco for the first-ever Gay Games. A demonstrator holds a rainbow flag and the Russian national flag during a protest against Russia's anti-gay laws outside the Russian embassy in Berlin.