80 More Gays Around the World: Part 28) Gold All The Way

Last time on “80 More Gays”: 76) Chelsea Blackmore is a pioneer in queer archaeology, first championed by 77) Thomas Dowson after doing research into San cave art in Namibia, which became part of a National Geographical archaeological tour for students led by 78) Thomas Egli, who was a volunteer at the ice hockey stadium at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics in which the 79) Canadian women’s ice hockey team won gold.

The full 79) Canadian women’s ice hockey team consisted of 21 members, 19 of them being experienced Olympians. Five of them are currently known to have been lesbian or bisexual, and I’ll briefly look at them individually later. But first, how did they get to the final.

The team were the reigning Olympic champions having won the 2006 Turin competition, beating Sweden 4-1. Since Turin Canada had lost to the USA in the 2008 and 2009 World Championships. They faced each other in the final in Vancouver and the anticipation and expectations of the Canadian home crowd was very high.

The defence of their Olympic title began well for the Canadian women. In their first match they thrashed Slovakia 18-0, the biggest score difference in Olympic ice hockey history, actually beating their own record from Turin 2006 when they beat the home team 16-0.

It came as no surprise to anyone that Canada faced the USA in the final. Again, the Canadians got off to a good start scoring 2 goals in 3 minutes, the only goals of the match. The final score Canada 2 – USA 0.

Let’s move on to the lgbt players. There isn’t really enough space to go to any real biographical detail so I’ll restrict myself to their Olympic experiences. The player with the most Olympic experience was 79a) Jayna Hefford (b.1977). She made her debut at the 1998 Nagano games in the inaugural women’s Olympic ice hockey tournament. Jayna scored one goal in the final match but it was the goal that won the team the silver medal (final score: USA 2 – Canada 1). She was chosen for team for the next four Olympics, making her only one of 6 lgbt athletes to compete in 5 Olympics (only Robert Dover, US equestrian, has been in 6). Because she was on the winning team for those next four Olympics, which included the Sochi 2014 games, she shares joint 4th place with US swimmer Greg Louganis on the all-time lgbt Olympic medal list (both have 4 gold, 1 silver).

Jayna Hefford is one of only 5 Olympians, lgbt or straight, to win a gold medal at four consecutive games. One of the others is the next most experienced member of the 2010 Canadian women’s ice hockey team, 79b) Caroline Ouellette (b.1979). Her first Olympics was the 2002 Salt Lake City games. With her four gold medals Caroline is joint 6th on the all-time lgbt medal list.

Then next most experienced player on the Canadian women’s team was 79c) Gillian Apps (b.1983) who not only has Olympic experience but Olympic blood. Her grandfather Syl Apps, was a pole vaulter at the 1936 Berlin summer games, and her first cousin is Darren Barber, who won a gold medal in rowing at the 1992 Barcelona games. Gillian herself competed in three Olympics – Turin, Vancouver and Sochi.

Like quite a few others she is married to a fellow Olympian, a player on the US team she beat in Vancouver, Meghan Duggan. Caroline Ouellette also married one of the losing team, Julie Chu. Jayna Hefford is also married to a US ice hockey Olympian, Kathleen Kauth, against whom she played in the 2006 Turin final.

79d) Charline Labonté (b.1982), like Gillian, competed in the Turin, Vancouver and Sochi Olympics. They also both came out as lesbian a couple of months after the Sochi games of 2014 in which the Canadians successfully defended their title.

The least experienced member of the 2010 Vancouver team was the only one who was openly lesbian at the time, 79e) Sarah Vaillancourt (b.1985). It was while she was a freshman at Harvard University that she came out to her Harvard Crimson ice hockey team-mates in 2004. Sarah first played in the Turin games of 2006 but due to injury did not return to the Olympic arena.

We stay with the 2010 Vancouver Olympics to reach the last person in our “80 More Gays Around the World”, and there’s several to choose from. It could be Ted Nebbeling, the Minister of State for the 2010 Olympics. It could be Ignatius Jones, the artistic director of the opening and closing ceremonies. It could be DQuared2, the gay twins Dean and Dan Calen, who designed the costumes for the closing ceremony. But instead I’m going for the one person who had the most direct involvement on every day and in every medal ceremony, giving a continuous link from the opening ceremony where 1) k d lang performed to the closing ceremony where the last medals were awards. That person is the designer of the Vancouver Olympic medals, 80) Corrine Hunt (b.1959).

Back in 2014 I wrote about Corinne’s medal design, so go and have a look at that. Since then she has designed the jackets worn by the Canadian snowboarding team at the 2018 PyeongChang games.

And that brings me to the end of “80 More Gays Around the World”. As before it has been a pleasure to research. It has led me on to people and subjects I would not normally have looked into (e.g South African wines and leper hospitals, or the psychological effects of the Polykrates complex).

I hope you enjoyed this series and learnt something new, I know I have, which has been the main inspiration that helped me to carry on even when I hit a brick wall and couldn’t find any direction to take to get me back to the beginning.

Advent 2: Christmas Ghosts

In October I wrote about Amelia Edwards’ role in the foundation of the science of Egyptology. Before she became an Egyptologist Amelia was a best-selling popular novelist. The most popular were her ghost stories.

When it comes to Christmas ghosts stories our mind turns automatically to Charles Dickens and “A Christmas Carol”, published in 1843 (more of that in two weeks’ time). “A Christmas Carol” probably popularised the telling of ghostly or supernatural stories at Christmastime though in some form the tradition goes back hundreds of years. One of the most popular pre-19th century stories is the 14th century “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” (more of that next Sunday).

Perhaps the most famous Christmas ghost, Marley’s ghost from “A Christmas Carol” as portrayed with great gusto (and pain!) by the gay actor Sir Alec Guinness in “Scrooge”.

Amelia Edwards knew Charles Dickens and she was a regular contributor to the weekly magazine “Household Words” which he founded and edited. Amelia’s ghost stories appeared in the successor to that magazine called “All The Year Round”, again edited by Dickens, and later by his son, which ran from 1859 to 1895.

Early in each year Dickens would invite a handful of authors to write a story of the Christmas issue of “All The Year Round”. He gave them a general idea of the overall theme of the issue and he would write the bulk of it himself, often with Wilkie Collins, and write pieces linking his work with those submitted by the other authors.

Amelia Edwards wrote about two dozen ghost stories and they have been reprinted in various anthologies ever since. The ones she wrote for the “All The Year Round” Christmas issues are the ones I’ll write about today.

SPOILER ALERT: If you want to read the stories yourself, and they’re all available in print or online, skip to the last paragraph below if you don’t want to know what happens in each story.

The first ghost story appeared in the Christmas 1860 issue which had the overall title of “A Message From The Sea”. Amelia’s contribution was part of chapter three, “The Club”. There was no individual title for her section though it was later called “Oswald Penrewen’s Story” when reprinted in anthologies.

“Oswald Penrewen’s Story” is pretty tame by modern standards, or even compared against “A Christmas Carol”. It tells of a traveller in Switzerland who meets a music-box seller. The seller says he is to be married soon and can’t wait to get back home, so he decides to take a short-cut over the mountains. The next day the traveller hears the sound of a music-box drifting down from the mountains. Feeling fearful for the seller’s safety he and some acquaintances go up into the hills and discover the music-box seller’s body at the bottom of a cliff. I told you it was tame.

Amelia’s next Christmas story appeared in the issue published on 12th December 1861. This issue was entitled “Tom Tiddler’s Ground”. Amelia’s story, “Picking Up Terrible Company”, is more of a murder story than a ghost story, so I’ll leave it and move on to 1863.

The Christmas 1863 issue of “All The Year Round” is regarded as the most popular work Charles Dickens produced after “A Christmas Carol”. It was titled “Mrs. Lirriper’s Lodgings”. Amelia Edward’s contribution was called “How the Third Floor Knew The Potteries”.

The story tells of a young man called Ben who works as a night watchman at a pottery furnace. Every night his boss, George, tells him of his suspicions about a new employee, a French porcelain painter, who is making advances on his fiancée. A few weeks later George disappears. Then, one night while he is guarding the furnaces, Ben sees George, who walks towards one of the furnaces – then vanishes. The next morning the furnace is emptied and George’s bones are found inside.

The popularity of the “Mrs. Lirriper’s Lodgings” issue led to the 1864 Christmas issue being a direct sequel, “Mrs. Lirriper’s Legacy”. Amelia’s contribution was “Another Past Lodger Relates His Own Ghost Story”. This is the tale of a man trying to get home in a snowstorm by catching a ride on a mail coach (which would accept passengers). He is told of a disaster that befell the coach nine years earlier when it crashed killing all passengers. Gradually the man realises his fellow passengers are very gaunt and pale. The coach then crashes in the same spot as it did nine years earlier and the passengers disappear. The man survives to tell the tale by falling into a snowdrift.

Amelia’ final Christmas ghost story for “All The Year Round” appeared in the 1865 issue. This had a railway theme and was called “Mugby Junction”. For “Doctor Who” fans, this is the issue in which “The Signal Man” appears. In the episode “The Unquiet Dead” the Doctor tells Dickens it his favourite ghost story.

Amelia’s story is called “No. 5 Branch Line: The Engineer”, later published as simply “The Engineer’s Story”. This is a tale of rivalry between two friends, Ben and Mat. While working as railway engineers in Italy they both fall for the same local girl. The friends argue and Ben stabs Mat. Ben then blames the girl for making him kill his friend and tries to take revenge by driving a train on which she is a passenger over a broken track and into a raging river. At the last minute Mat’s ghost appears and stops the train just in time.

All of these stories, and Amelia’s other ghost stories, are still in print or online. Whatever and wherever you are this Christmas I hope you find time to read some of Amelia Edwards’ ghost stories. Let’s try to turn them into a popular Christmas tradition as big as “A Christmas Carol”.

80 More Gays Around the World: Part 27) Guiding the Way

Last time on “80 More Gays”: 74) Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) lived in the same house (though not at the same time) as 75) Margaret Mead (1901-1978), a leading influence on queer anthropology and its related subject of queer archaeology, continued by 76) Chelsea Blackmore).

76) Chelsea Blackmore was appointed Senior Archaeologist at Albion Environmental Inc. in July last year. Albion is a California company that advises and participates in construction and environmental projects, anything from highways, hydroelectric plants and nature reserves, to ensure that the local ecological and cultural properties of each site are handled appropriately. Prior to joining Albion Environmental Chelsea was Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California Santa Cruz.

Chelsea’s doctoral thesis was “Challenging ‘Commoner’: An Examination of the Status and Identity at the Ancient Maya Village of Chan, Belize”, which was one of the first studies into social identity in the Mayan civilisation. She has specialised in Mesoamerican culture and aspects of identity relating to gender, social status and sexuality.

Chelsea Blackmore has been open about her sexuality all her professional career. The lack of visible lgbt archaeologists in her undergraduate years and lack of a queer network inspired her to use gender and sexuality as possible factors in her choice of studies. Shortly afterwards she founded “Queer Archaeology”, a blog aimed at lgbt archaeologists and the study of queer archaeology. Chelsea went on to co-found the Queer Archaeology Interest Group of the Society of American Archaeologists in 2014, though attempts to create such a group had been tried before.

Two publications can be said to have pioneered queer archaeology. The first is “Out in the Field: Reflections of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists” by Ellen Lewin and William Heap (1996), and the queer-themed issue of “World Archaeology” (2000) edited by 77) Thomas Dowson.

In February 2017 I wrote this article about Thomas Dowson and his contribution to the growth of queer archaeology. Not only is he a pioneer in the subject but he is also a leading authority in rock art.

Another aspect of Thomas’s work harks back to the “old days” of the Grand Tour of Europe undertaken by the wealthy in the 17th to 19th centuries. Among these “archaeological tourists” were Amelia Edwards (more of her on Sunday) and Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the gay librarian who made Pompeii a popular place to visit. Both of these people saw the importance of careful scientific study of archaeological sites and their preservation.

For many years archaeologists discouraged tourism of digs and sites. Then the heritage industry took off and governments saw a need to protect many ancient sites. In my childhood archaeology was seen as a very dull subject and you rarely saw the subject covered on television. Only the Egyptian pyramids seem to be of interest. Then came the Viking excavations in Yorvik (York) and the raising of King Henry VIII’s flagship the Mary Rose and the public began to show more interest. Next came unexpectedly popular programmes like “Time Team”, a surprise hit archaeology series that ran for twenty years. The public were now aware of how an archaeological site should be treated and what facts about our past can be uncovered. Today, archaeological programmes are everywhere on almost every channel.

The public’s interest in archaeology has led to tourist companies offering tours of monument and ancient sites like never before. The public are more aware of their responsibilities of visiting these sites. Thomas Dowson was one of the early leaders in modern archaeological tourism. When he moved to France he was naturally interested in the archaeology of the area. There was very little information which was reliable or up-to-date. He thought other people might be interested in the local archaeology so he set up the website “Archaeology Travel” in 2010.

Archaeological tourism among tour companies and institutions has blossomed, and with the help of guidelines produced by the Archaeological Institute of America ancient sites will be better protected and understood. National Geographic organised tours and expeditions for students, including tours took of the San cave paintings which Thomas Dowson studied. One of the tour leaders was 78) Thomas Egli.

Thomas is an experienced tour guide having worked for a variety of companies, including Bali Hai Diving Adventures in Indonesia and Discover Tours Canada. Thomas has Swiss and Canadian citizenship and is currently working in Zurich as a marine ecologist (yes, a marine ecologist in land-locked Switzerland). His claim to fame, though, is that he was voted Mr. Gay Canada in 2012. However, that’s not the connection I’m going to take towards our final steps on this chain of “80 More Gays”.

In 2010 Thomas was a volunteer with VANOC, the Vancouver Organising Committee of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. He was a supervisor at the Rogers Arena where the ice hockey tournament was held. Ice hockey is the most hotly contested sport at the Winter Olympics with Canada and the USA always vying for the gold medal. The men’s ice hockey final between them was the last medal event of the games. The women’s ice hockey final, also between Canada and the USA, was held three days earlier. Canada won both finals.

The women’s ice hockey team final at Rogers Arena contained the team with the most lgbt players at the Vancouver Olympics, and I want to group them all together for the penultimate “80 Gay”. That team was the winning 79) Canadian Women’s Ice Hockey team.

Next time in our last “80 More Gays Around the World”: We discover how we link back to 1) k d lang.

Advent 1: Post Early For Christmas

Today is the first Sunday in Advent, so for this and the next three Sundays I’ll write about Christmas, as in previous years. This year we’ll have a look at some Christmas traditions, most of them literary, and their lgbt connections.

Christmas will be different this year and a lot of traditional seasonal activities may have to be dropped, or at the very least socially distanced. Thankfully, one Christmas tradition can still be enjoyed – sending and receiving Christmas cards.

In an era when people are too lazy to go out and buy a card, write a message, buy a stamp and post the envelope the Christmas card and postage stamp are in danger of disappearing, despite them being more environmentally friendly and having a lower carbon footprint than email, text or electronic message (according to research by the brother of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the internet).

My opinion is that Christmas cards are more personal than a third-party electronic agent. It proves you care enough to make the effort to post it and it actually has your DNA on it, and you can’t get more personal than that – it’s the nearest you can get to physical contact.

Most nations, those of significant Christian heritage at least, have been producing Christmas postage stamps for almost 80 years. The UK was a little late in joining the trend, which is strange considering the UK invented the postage stamp. I can remember the very first UK Christmas stamp because it was the winning entry in a competition held by the UK’s most popular children’s programme at the times, “Blue Peter” (which holds the Guinness World record for the most consecutive annual Christmas editions of any television programme in the world – 61 and still counting). Since 1966 the Royal Mail has issued Christmas stamps every years, and “Blue Peter” has often revealed the designs on their programme.

Back in September I wrote about lgbt designers of postage stamps. To my knowledge only one lgbt artist has designed a Christmas stamp for the Royal Mail, and that was Enid Marx (1902-1998) in 1976, the tenth anniversary year of the UK Christmas stamp. Enid produced four designs, each one based on medieval English embroideries of the Opus Anglicanum school. This is a name given to the best silk and precious metal-thread embroideries produced in London in the 12th to 14th centuries.

Enid’s designs were inspired by scenes of the Nativity that appeared on several ecclesiastical vestments and decorative panels from the Victoria and Albert Museum’s collection of Opus Anglicanum embroideries. She submitted rough designs to the Royal Mail Stamp Advisory Committee in October 1975 when the decision was made to base the 1976 stamps on embroidery. Enid then submitted preliminary sketches to the committee on 12th February 1976 and these were approved.

What I thought I’d do was show how Enid went about designing her stamps. It’s not as straight forward as you think. First you have to consider the scale. A highly detailed image will not look clear on a small postage stamp. Then you have to think about where the price and the Queen’s head (or name of country, if you’re designing for another nation) are going to go. In the examples below you can see how Enid changed the original design to fit the requirements of the stamp. Some of he images below are copyright to either the Royal Mall or the Victoria and Albert Museum and are used purely to show the design process. The examples I’ll give are of the lowest and highest denomination of Enid’s Christmas stamps.

The lowest denomination, the 6½ pence stamp, features the Virgin and Child. This comes from the central point of the Clare Chasuble, a vestment made around 1272 or shortly afterwards. It was made for the marriage of Prince Edmund of England, the Earl of Cornwall and grandson of King John, to Lady Margaret de Clare. The separated in 1294, so it couldn’t have been made after that. Here’s the design process.

The image on the left is Enid’s first design, submitted to the Royal Mail Stamp Advisory Committee in 1975. The central image show her sketch for the stamp which she submitted in February 1976. You can see that she changed the dimensions of the image. On the right is the stamp that was issued on 26th November 1967. Compare it to the original design on the left. The price and Queen’s head are not very clear on the original, and have been separated from the image.

The highest denomination stamp was the 13 pence stamp shown below. It depicts the Adoration of the magi, the Three Kings or Wise Men (or third gender priests, as modern scholarship tends to describe them). The design comes from the central point of the Butler-Bowdon Cope, a large vestment worn by clergy like a cloak. It dates from the mid-1300s and belonged to the ancestors of the Butler-Bowdon family of Pleasington Hall in Lancashire. On the left is a close-up of the actual part of the cope Enid used for her design. Her submitted sketch, in the centre, shows the image reversed. I can’t find out why Enid did this. However, the image was switched back for the final design, pictured right. Again the Queen’ head and the price have been placed to one side to make them more visible.

Below are images of the vestments from which the designs were taken. On the left is the Clare Chasuble, on the right is the Butler-Bowdon Cope. I’ve pinpointed the parts of the vestments that Enid chose for her designs with voided white square boxes.

80 More Gays Around the World: Part 26) Homes Destroyed, Homes Discovered

Last time on “80 More Gays”: The true gender of 71) Dr. James Barry (c.1795-1865) was a secret known to few in his lifetime, including a South American independence fighter who was a compatriot of 71) Carlos de Montúfar (1780-1816) and Simon Bolivar after whom Bolivia is named, a country which attracted many German settlers and military advisors including, 73) Ernst Röhm (1887-1937) who was assassinated on evidence faked by an SS officer who was himself killed, leading to the Lidice Massacre memorialised by 74) Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950).

The Lidice Massacre, ordered by Hitler in retaliation for the killing of the Protector of Nazi-occupied Bohemia and Moravia (the modern Czech Republic), shocked the world. Hitler believed the village of Lidice, 14 miles from Prague, had harboured some of the assassins. He ordered the execution of every man in the village on 10th June 1942. The women were either sent to concentration camps or sent for “Germanisation”, and most of the children were “adopted” by SS officers. Children not accepted for adoption were killed. The village itself was razed to the ground, even the cemetery (the bodies were dug up and burned, the gravestones pulverised). Only one person survived, a man who was in prison for manslaughter. He was released in December 1942 and went home, only to find that the village, his family, friends and fellow villagers, had all gone. No-one had told him of the massacre.

The international response was quick and long-lasting. In Stoke-on-Trent, a town just a few miles down the river from where I live, the local doctor and future Member of Parliament began a fund-raising campaign to rebuild Lidice. In other countries towns added Lidice to their names, and various streets and memorials were named after it.

The world’s press covered the massacre extensively, and 74) Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote an article in The New York Times magazine. This inspired her to write a verse play called “Murder of Lidice”.

Before World War II Edna was an active pacifist and in 1919 she wrote “Aria de Capo”, an anti-war play. From 1940 she began writing poems for the Writer’s War Board and openly supported the Allied Forces. This caused her reputation to tarnish a little, at least with the critics who saw Edna’s war writings as too political.

Edna’s writing career began when her mother persuaded her to enter a poetry contest in “The Lyric Year” magazine in 1912. Edna’s poem came fourth though many people, including the contest’s winner, thought it should have come first. The controversy led to Edna’s introduction to New York literary circles and a scholarship to Vassar College.

From then on Edna’s poetry and plays became popular and she won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923. It was at this time that she entered into a loving, open marriage with Eugen Jan Boissevain (1880-1949) and they lived together until his death. Edna died the following year.

The couple moved into a house in New York, number 75½ Bedford Street (pictured below), said to be the narrowest house in the city, being only 9½ feet wide (3 meters). Its narrowness results from it originally being a carriage entrance between two buildings. Edna and Jan only lived there a year. Many others have occupied the narrow house at various times, including 75) Margaret Mead (1901-1978).

Margaret Mead was a leading anthropologist of her generation. I wrote about a book she and her partner wrote in 1977 called “An Interview with Santa Claus”. This is an example of how she helped to popularise anthropology among the public. Santa Claus? Anthropology? Yes, because Margaret used her knowledge of culture and history to give an explanation for the evolution of this Christmas icon in a way that children could understand without destroying the seasonal magic.

The field of anthropology goes hand in hand with archaeology. Through archaeology ancient communities are revealed and their ways of life are revealed through anthropology. The growth of interest in gender and sexuality in non-Western cultures was pioneered by Margaret Mead. She was a panellist at the first meeting to discuss homosexuality in anthropology called by the American Anthropological Association in 1974. Since then there has been a growth in queer anthropology and queer archaeology.

In April 2013 I chose archaeology for my “Ology of the Month” in a year where I wrote many science-based articles. Have a look at them. I wrote about several queer discoveries and lgbt archaeologists including the discovery of the most northern civilisation near the North Pole by a gay Danish archaeologist. I’ve also written since then about other queer archaeologists and anthropologists and their historic discoveries, like the discovery of a whole new humanoid species and the discovery of Europe’s oldest known urban community. I’ve even written about Lawrence of Arabia’s contribution to archaeology.

One of those 2013 articles for my Ology of the Month was about Mayan cave paintings and their sexual nature. Studies into Mayan gender and culture have been continued by other archaeologists and anthropologists like 76) Chelsea Blackmore.

Next time on “80 More Gays”: From the jungles of Central America and the deserts of South Africa we are guided to the snows of Canada.

400 and Counting

This is a very personal entry, a reflection on my research over the years into lgbt Olympians. If this was an ordinary year I’d be finalising my lgbt Olympian statistics, detailing which athletes had made their debut at the Tokyo games, which ones were the most successful, which had made the biggest impact, and which ones went up or down in the all-time medals table. This will all have to wait until next year. That doesn’t mean that my research has to stop.

Back in July when the Tokyo Olympics should have started I gave a list of statistics as they stood on the planned date of the opening ceremony. The list of lgbt Olympians stood at 391. This had been a big jump since the announcement of the postponement of the games on 24th March. On that day I had 385 names on the list. This gave me optimism in reaching 400 names by the time up the opening ceremony in July 2021.

So, I was very surprised and delighted when I identified and verified the 400th athlete to add to my list on 3rd November.

On several occasions in the past when I have identified one athlete the research has led on to reveal several others. This is how I managed to reach 400, and there are many more names that have cropped up which I am slowly going through and may be added to the list after more research. This has put me in a position where I can say that, if I can verify the gender identity and sexual orientation of each name, and that is by no means certain, then I will have a full list of 450 lgbt Olympians before Tokyo 2020 begins.

After placing the 400th name to my list I contacted Cyd Zeigler of Outsports.com. We have been in contact for several years and he has helped enormously in reaching this milestone. I thanked him for his work, contribution and assistance over the years. He invited me to join him on one of his podcasts to talk about my work, and this will be broadcast on Monday, 23rd November. Check the Outsports website for details.

I’ve never really been sporty, but the Olympics have been around since the day I was born, two months before the Rome 1960 Summer games and a month before the start of the torch relay.

Whenever the Olympic Games, or the Paralympics or the Commonwealth Games, were taking place the family were always watching it. Back in 2016 when I was halfway thought my “Olympic Alphabet” series I wrote about my early recollections of the Olympics and the scrapbooks I made for the 1976 summer and winter games. One fact I gave in that article is worth repeating – there has never been a summer or winter Olympic Games in my lifetime – 60 years - where there has not been an lgbt competitor, even if they were not openly so.

So, what started me on compiling lists of lgbt Olympians? Probably the 2004 Athens Olympics. Both the “Gay Times” and “Pink Paper”, the leading UK lgbt magazine and newspaper respectively at that time, mentioned there were 11 of them. I kept that fact at the back of my mind. The 2008 Beijing Olympics weren’t on my mind for personal reasons, but I was back in Olympic mood for my all-time favourite Winter Olympics, Vancouver 2010. As we approached London 2012 I thought it would be a good idea to write an lgbt history of the Olympic Games for this blog, which I had just started. To begin the research I needed to gather together every name of lgbt Olympians I could find.

All through 2011 I researched and compiled my history and began serialising it on this blog from 14th January 2012. Of course, a lot has happened since then and that original history is very much out of date. Given enough time I’d like to update it.

One of the most significant finds during my early research was the Outsports website. They had a list of 137 openly lgbt athletes and sportspeople. Not all of them were Olympians but it formed the basis of my first list. As I said earlier, the founders of Outsports, Cyd Zeigler and Jim Buzinski, have been extremely helpful and supportive.

The published lists have become very popular. Several media websites have referenced my blog and, to my dismay, I am even used as a reference source on Wikipedia. My lists have never been intended to be authoritative and I would prefer people would go to original sources. Wikipedia may give names of lgbt Olympians but very little in the way of evidence. Similarly, sport fan forums often give names by no source, most of the time they give unsubstantiated rumour, so I don’t add any name to my list unless I can find definitive evidence of an athlete’s sexuality or gender identity.

Every Olympic year I have requests for interviews, and I have been contacted by several lgbt Olympians who had asked to be put their names on the list. There have also been a couple of lgbt athletes who have requested not to be named. My research led to me becoming a member of the International Society of Olympic Historians, the only historical society approved by the International Olympic Committee. In August 2018 my research was used at the Pride House in Glasgow during the European Athletic Championships. It was turned into a pathway leading through the entrance (pictured below).

So that’s the history of my lgbt Olympian list. Originally I also included lgbt Paralympians, but the lists are getting so long that I find it difficult keeping up with both. This is why I am stopping my list of lgbt Paralympians so I can concentrate on the Olympians. I hope there is someone out there who will carry on the Paralympic side of sport.

As I’ve said to one of my friends on several occasions, history is always changing. By that I mean that every new name or detail that comes to light changes our perception or understanding of what has happened. Each new historic name I place on my list changes the history of lgbt Olympians. What is certain is that the list will never be complete. There will always be athletes who come out as new members of the lgbt community, but there will also be others whose sexuality will have gone with them to their graves.

I’ll leave you with this thought – recent research has uncovered about 50 new names for me to look into, and I am on track to have a list 500 lgbt Olympians by the time of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, and that’s only 27 months away.

I hope to present the full list around Christmas time.

80 More Gays Around the World: Part 25) Friends and Betrayal

Last time on “80 More Gays”: 68) Bruce Voeller (1934-1994) was the person credited with coming up with the name “AIDS”, and names form the basis of the AIDS Memorial Quilt created by 69) Cleve Jones (b.1954), for which many companies have raised funds, including South African wine companies, one of which is owned by 70) Gerard Holden (b.1964), while another is located on the site of a leper hospital were 71) Dr. James Barry (c.1795-1865) worked.

After over 40 years service in the British army as a pioneering surgeon 71) Dr. James Barry retired to London where he died. His body was laid out in preparation for burial by a woman called Sophia Bishop. It was she discovered that James Barry was physically female and had successfully hidden this secret from the army for decades. When Sophia was refused payment for her services she took the secret to the press.

The revelation that one of the most revered army surgeons was born a woman caused quite a stir. The army were so embarrassed that they tried to suppress James Barry’s military records for a hundred years. Their attempt failed and the world got to know James Barry’s secret.

James Barry was baptised Margaret Ann Bulkey in Ireland. From adulthood he lived as a man. This suited James’ father who managed to enrol him into Edinburgh University as a medical student in 1809. Women were not allowed to study medicine in those days.

James qualified as a doctor in 1812 and enlisted into the army a year later. He rose very quickly to become Assistant Surgeon to the Forces in 1815. This position gave James the chance to travel the world. His first posting was to Cape Province in South Africa where he became Colonial Medical Inspector. In this role he went to the leper hospital at Hermanus (the location of the present Hamilton Russell wine estate) and immediately set about improving health care and hygiene practices.

James had a reputation for voicing his opposition to many established medical practices wherever he went. He even had a big row with Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War over hygiene (she then stole his ideas and passed them off as her own).

By the time of his death James Barry was well-known and respected, and all because his father enrolled him into Edinburgh University all those decades earlier. Others also kept his gender a secret. One of the family friends was a Venezuelan revolutionary called Francisco de Miranda. The original plan may have been for James to act as governess to Miranda’s children, perhaps in Venezuela, before he made his decision to become a doctor. James wouldn’t have become such a famous figure in the medical world if he had gone to Venezuela because South America was in a state of turmoil as colonies began revolting against their Spanish and Napoleonic rulers. Francisco de Miranda laid the foundations for the liberation of much of South America, assisted by compatriot revolutionaries such as a Simón Bolivar and 72) Carlos de Montúfar (1780-1816).

Carlos’s relationship with the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt is mentioned here. After he and Humboldt went their separate ways Carlos entered the Spanish army and fought in several battles against the Napoleonic French. In 1810 he sailed back to his native Ecuador, a Spanish colonial province then called the Quito Audiencia. There he joined the independence movement with his father, the Marques de Selva Alegre.

In 1812 independence was declared under the name of the Autonomous Government of Quito with Carlos’s father as President. However, a few months later Spanish loyalist troops took Quito city and the revolutionary government, including Carlos de Montúfar, fled. Eventually Carlos joined Simón Bolivar in his independence campaigns in Colombia but was captured at the Battle of the Cuchilla de Tambo in June 1816. The following month he was executed.

Simón Bolivar went on to become the big hero of South American independence, even having the country Bolivia named after him, of course. Strangely, Bolivia attracted many German settlers. Their descendants are recognised as a separate ethnic community to this day.

In the 1920s Bolivia decided to call upon Germany to help them reorganise their army. One of the military instructors that was sent was 73) Ernst Röhm (1887-1934), one of Adolf Hitler’s close friends.

Ernst arrived in Bolivia in January 1929. He was disappointed that a recent conflict with Paraguay has been resolved before he arrived and he was often at odds with his commanding officer, Gen. Hans Kundt. Shortly after his arrival a coup supported by Kundt deposed the Bolivian president. Ernst was rumoured that the new president had chosen him to replace Kundt, but before that could happen Ernst received a letter from Hitler ordering him to return to Germany. If only he had stayed in Bolivia.

What attracted Ernst back was the promise of becoming Chief of Staff of the SA (Sturmabteilung, the Storm Battalion, known as the Brown Shirts), the Nazi’s paramilitary wing which Ernst had helped to found in 1921. By 1934 the general reputation of the SA had deteriorated to the status of armed thugs and Hitler decided to scale back its powers.

Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, the Chief of the SS Security Service, fabricated documents against Ernst Röhm, suggesting that the SA were planning to overthrow Hitler. Most of this evidence centred on the alleged activities of the many known gay members of the SA. Hitler knew Ernst was gay and was at first reluctant to believe the evidence. What resulted was the “Night of the Long Knives”, a pivotal event in the history of the rise of Hitler.

On 30th June 1934 Hitler and SS troops arrested Ernst Röhm and the SA leaders in a surprise attack. After some procrastination Hitler ordered the execution of Ernst two days later. Following the Night of the Long Knives Hitler strengthened Paragraph 175, the law criminalising homosexuality, and Hitler assumed more power.

Reinhard Heydrich, the co-author of the fake documents, became Protector of Nazi-occupied Bohemia and Moravia (modern-day Czech Republic). Czech rebels murdered Heydrich in 1942 and Hitler retaliated by ordering the execution of every man in the village of Lidice, where he claimed the assassins had been harboured. The “Lidice Massacre” horrified the world. Some places still commemorate it to this day. One commemoration was a verse-play called “The Murder of Lidice” and it was written by 74) Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950).

Next time of “80 More Gays”: How a village was destroyed, how reputations were built, and how civilisations were revealed.