Olympic Countdown

GENDER TESTING

It was in the 1960s that gender testing of athletes began to have a major effect – some good, some bad – in many sports.

First, it should be clear that failing a gender test doesn’t make a woman a lesbian. Several women who failed the test have had an otherwise comfortable straight life-style. What qualifies them for inclusion in the broader lgbt community is their genetics – the part of their body carrying the information which says they are female AND male.

Genetics was one of my favourite subjects in biology (I didn’t know at the time that my grandmother was related to Charles Darwin). So I hope I interpret the science behind gender testing in an understandable way.

The chromosomes in every body cell contains all the DNA needed to create YOU. Only one chromosome determines gender. This gender chromosome has 2 types called XX and XY. Only the XY chromosome carries the “male gene switch”.

You inherit half of your gender chromosome from each parent. The halves join together to form a new gender chromosome in 1 of 4 possible combinations that will determine YOUR gender – XX for a girl and XY for a boy. I inherit my X chromosome from my Mum, and my Y chromosome from my Dad (see diagram). My sister inherits one X chromosome from both.

When an embryo is big enough the male gene in an XY chromosome “switches on”. After that male hormones are produced. Like Pass the Parcel these hormones pass the “male message” on to receptors, which they then pass on to the DNA. If all goes to plan the embryo develops into a bouncing baby boy.

Sometimes the hormone receptors don’t work properly and don’t pass on the “male message”. It’s as if the music in the Pass the Parcel stops and the parcel stays where it is when the music restarts. With no “male message” being passed on the embryo goes into “default” XX mode and develops into a bouncing baby girl. The problem is that male hormones are still there and so is the XY chromosome. Sometimes the receptors stop working well into the development process and the baby is born with both partly-formed male and female sexual organs. These individuals have been called hermaphrodite or intersex. There are other medical conditions affecting gender recognition, and with more understanding of the biological processes more accurate medical names have been given.

In gender testing a cheek swab was taken from female athletes. The cells were stained so that a microscope can see the gender chromosome. The XX gender chromosome shows up as a spot. No spot means the cell is XY – male. So women who had XY chromosomes but whose male hormone receptors didn’t work were regarded as male.

In the 1960s there was a lot of talk about some female athletes from eastern Europe being men or had taken performance enhancing drugs. The IOC introduced gender tests in 1967. Almost immediately some very successful female athletes “retired”, the most famous being the sisters Tamara and Irina Press. Between them they had won 5 Olympic gold medals. Whether they retired to escape the gender test or the improved drug test will probably never be known.

The first athlete banned by the IOC was world champion female skier Erika Schinegger. She was preparing for the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble when she failed the test. Schinegger retired from sport and became transgender. Erik Schenigger appeared on an Austrian television programme in 1988 to give the World Championship gold medal he had won in 1966 as Erika to the silver medal winner.

The first Olympian to fail the test was the 1964 relay champion Ewa Kłobukowska. Her story is told here.

Spanish hurdler María José Martínez-Patiño was permitted to compete in the Olympic trials for the 1992 Barcelona games after years of protest. She failed the gender test at the 1988 World University Games. After having 3 years of her personal life being discussed, and away from competition, María was unable to qualify for selection for her home team on home soil. She retired from competition and has since become Professor at the Faculty of Education and Sports Sciences at Vigo University, Spain.

Other female athletes have failed the IOC’s test but most were allowed to compete, including Edinanci Silva who competed for Brazil in judo in Atlanta 1996. In 1999 the IOC dropped gender testing though kept the right to test in certain individual cases. Most recently the case of Caster Semenya created a lot of media attention after her success at the 2009 World Athletics Championships. In 2010 she was cleared to continue competing. But less than a year ago the IOC announced they would instead begin testing women for “higher than natural testosterone levels”.

The issue of transgender athletes at the Olympics is still very blurred. Without an actual case being challenged the current policy is to allow trans athletes at the games only if they’ve completed reassignment surgery, received legal recognition and had a minimum of 2 years hormone therapy.

My next Olympic post will return to the chronological history of lgbt participation and will include the man who founded the Gay Olympics.

Oscar meets Dorian

Tonight is Oscar night. All those “luvvies” will be trolling along the red carpet in their best drag. Some of them will go home with a little man called Oscar.

There are lots of other awards around these days, so people who lose out on an Oscar can win something else – an Emmy, a Bafta, a Golden Globe, a Dorian. A Dorian? Yes, a Dorian.

The Dorian Awards are presented by the Gay and Lesbian Entertainment Critics Association in the USA. They are awarded to the film and television industry which concentrates on film and programmes which appeal specifically to the lgbt community, some awards having slightly quirky names.

The Gay and Lesbian Entertainment Critics Association was formed in 2009 by a group of people who worked as journalist or critics in all areas of the media. The awards are not divided by gender like others, so the is no Best Actor or Best Actress, just Film Performance. This year’s awards were announced on 16^th January, and I thought it might be interesting to see how many of them also pick up an Oscar tonight. Here’s the list:

Film of the Year : “Weekend”

Film Performance of the Year : Meryl Streep in “The Iron Lady”

Documentary of the Year : “We Were Here” (recently broadcast on BBC4)

LGBT-themed Film of the Year : “Weekend”

LGBT-themed Documentary of the Year : “We Were Here”

Campy (Intentional or Not) Film of the Year : “The Muppets”

Unsung Film of the Year : “50/50”

For the full list of Dorian film and tv award-winners and nominations go to http://galeca.com

Out of the Blocks

One of my ongoing projects is research into lgbt participation in sport. This was originally inspired by the Gay Games. When the LGBT History Month chose sport as the theme for 2011 and 2012 I extended the research and produced a timeline of lgbt sport for the History Month website. Since then I have been revising, updating and correcting each entry.

Among the sporting trivia I discovered along the way was that a world champion sheep-shearer won a gold medal at the first World Outgames, and that a 16-year-old cross-dresser played truant from school to climb – unaided – a 200 feet tall sea stack.

The timeline is available on the LGBT History Month website. Perhaps you could print it out and use it in your own celebrations for the Olympics, or for the EuroGames in June.

I also collected various statistics, especially on the Gay Games, and I believe I have the most comprehensive list of Gay Games medal winners in the world – with almost 10,000 names. I’m going to tell you more about them for the 30^th anniversary of the first Gay Games in August.

I keep working on the timeline and will be producing a new version in time for the Olympics in July.

Mardi Gras

Today is Shrove Tuesday, or Mardi Gras (which means “Fat Tuesday”), and signals the start of the Christian season of Lent. During that period Christians are encouraged to “give something up for Lent”, meaning that they should go without something they really like for 40 days until Easter. After the excesses of the Christmas period which officially ends on February 1^st.(in my childhood my chapel always held it’s Christmas parties at the end of January), the denial of favourite things during Lent was a good way of making sure you could still enjoy the next big celebration of the year with ample time to recover from Christmas. Originally Christians gave up certain foods for Lent (particularly meat and diary products) so what they had in store had to be eaten up on Shrove Tuesday. That meant using up flour and eggs by making pancakes. Hence today is also called Pancake Day.

The great feastings and celebrations before the start of Lent tomorrow developed into carnivals and colourful masked parades that were held throughout Europe during the medieval period. Combine this with the river-borne decorated boats (called floats) of other celebrations and you get the typical gay Pride parade, with the fantastic costumes and colour, large decorated vehicles, and half-naked (sometimes fully naked) hunks cavorting around in the streets.

Naked men chasing each other were part of the Roman festival of Lupercalia which was held in mid-February. In the typical role-reversal you find in all these types of festival, priests would dress up in goat skins and chase naked youths through the corn fields. These youths represented wolves, and the priests chasing them represented goats and symbolised the protection of livestock and crops from wild animals. The day ended with feasting and drinking (and no doubt a bit of ritual sex between the captor “goats” and captured “wolves”), and the sacrifice of a dog.

The festival was named after Lupercus, the god of shepherds, the Roman version of the Greek god Pan (Pan’s own gay credentials were revealed in my post on the constellation Capricorn).

The name Mardi Gras has come to be used for carnivals, parades and celebrations at other times of the year – a lot of gay Prides were rename Mardi Gras for a brief time, including London Pride. The most famous one still is – Sydney Mardi Gras. It signals the first of the big lgbt street parades every year and has become one of the biggest and most important of all Pride events.

The Sydney Mardi Gras began as most early gay Prides did, as a commemoration of the Stonewall Riots of June 1969 in New York. Sydney held their first Pride event in June 1978. Being in the southern hemisphere June in Sydney is in the middle of winter so it was moved to their summer in February 1981. Their Pride was already being called Mardi Gras by then, so it was probably a conscious decision to move it to the traditional Mardi Gras season.

Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras now attracts over 10,000 participants and it is a major feature of the city’s tourist calendar. It also holds a unique place in the UK, as the Sydney Mardi Gras parade of February 1999 is the only lgbt Pride parade that has been broadcast on UK national television in its entirety (although it was broadcast 5 months later on 3^rd June).

Star Gayzing - Pisces

Regular readers of these Star Gayzing posts will not be surprised to hear that the constellation Pisces dates back to ancient Babylon. Probably originally representing the two great rivers – Tigris and Euphrates – and their meeting point at the sea, fish were added to the ends to symbolise water. It is in this image that the constellation Pisces is pictured today.

In classical Greek times these fish joined together by a cord came to represent Aphrodite and Eros, the mother and son gods of love and lust (which I’ll come to later). The most common version of the legend relates to the same story I told you about Pan in my Capricorn post. Zeus, king of the gods, had defeated the Titans and locked them up – just like you see at the start of Disney’s animated film “Hercules”. But the mother of the Titans, Gaia (or Mother Earth) sent another of her children to depose Zeus.

This child was a hideous monster called Typhon. As soon as he was let loose he was spotted by Pan who raised the alarm. Several of the gods jumped into a river to escape the monster, including Pan who turned into a half-goat, half-fish creature. Aphrodite and Eros also jumped into a river. As soon as they hit the water they too were transformed, this time completely into fish (or were rescued by fish in another legend). Later legends were created to make the constellation fit the image of two fish tied together with a cord. One say that Eros was still a child at the time of Typhon’s attack, and to make sure he didn’t get swept away in the river Aphrodite tied him to herself with a cord.

Way back when I began my blog I did a series of posts on ancient Greece and the role Eros played in gay sex. He was worshipped at all the gymnasia, where naked youth and men trained for war and sport. There was usually an altar to Eros in every gym, and before battle or sport contest each soldier-athlete would pray to Eros and give him offerings.

On the Greek pottery and vases from the 6^th century BC which depict sex, less than 1% depict male-female sex, and on the 99+% of the rest, the male-male sex, Eros appears as a symbol of erotic love. As I said in August, if a straight man described someone as erotic he should really be referring to another man. The Ancient Greek of that time found nothing erotic in women at all! How times and attitudes have changed!

And on the subject of sex, it seems appropriate to return to the subject next time when we’ll learn about how the stars that connect gay sex with Alice in Wonderland and fluffy little Easter bunnies!

Olympic Countdown

Since this article first appeared a lot of new information has been revealed and new research has been carried out. This article should be seen as a mere snapshot of the information known at the date of its publication. Several facts may now be outdated or inaccurate.



Ondrej Nepela (1951-1989) is the youngest ever lgbt Olympian, first appearing in the 1964 Innsbruck games just a week after his 13^th birthday. Even at that young age he was good enough to become the Czech national skating champion the same year, a title he held every year (except 1969) until he retired in 1973. In 1965 he won his first European championship medal, a bronze, aged 14. His career was truly remarkable, and future successes (to be told in later posts) place him as high as John Curry in the lgbt superstar ratings.

At the 1964 summer games in Tokyo Canadian swimmer Marian Lay made her Olympic debut. She was another teenage athlete, being only 15 at the time. Young Marion finished 5^th in the final of the 100 meters freestyle, a race won by the legendary Dawn Fraser in the first ever under-1-minute finish (Dawn Fraser has been the subject of several rumours of her being lesbian but all are unfounded). Also in 1964 Marion Lay became the Canadian 100m freestyle champion. Before her next Olympic appearance in 1968, as well as being Canadian 100m freestyle champion every year inbetween, Marion won the gold medal in the same distance at the 1966 Commonwealth Games in Kingston, Jamaica.

Also at the 1964 Tokyo games was Polish sprinter Ewa Kłobukowska. She was trained by Stella Walsh, the Polish-American Olympic sprinting champion whose death in 1980 revealed her to be intersex. Ewa won the bronze medal in the 100 meters, and she was a member of the 4x100m relay team that won gold. The same relay team went on to win further success in the European Championships in 1966, but then the IOC decided to ban Ewa from sport and demand she return her medals. The reason? The new gender tests that had been introduced in 1967.

What must have hurt most was the humiliation this straight woman had with her gender being discussed and, by implication (in the press), her sexual orientation as well. Ewa’s exact genetic condition was never revealed, but she proved the IOC testing was flawed by giving birth to a boy in 1968 – women who fail the IOC test shouldn’t have the physical means to conceive a child.

To add insult to injury the IOC demanded that Ewa should return all of her Olympic medals. As part of a relay team you’d think that her exclusion from the medal record would apply to the whole team. If Ewa, as a “genetic male”, gave her an unfair advantage over other female athletes then it gave the whole team an unfair advantage as well. But, no. The IOC said Ewa’s relay team-members could keep their medals.

Gender testing is sport has always been controversial. On 28^th February I’ll outline the history of gender testing at the Olympics.

Flower Power - pansy

2012 seems to be a year full of anniversaries – the centenaries of Alan Turing and Bayard Rustin, 400^th anniversary of the first English Olympics, and 30^th anniversary of the first Gay Games, among others. Someone I mentioned on Remembrance Day celebrates 2 more.

Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu died 250 years ago this year and married 300 years ago. She was one of those rare things in pre-contemporary times – a woman who was respected in her right, rather than an 18^th-century “politicians wife”. Her letters about her time in Turkey were published and became very popular. From them developed the “language of the flowers” which was most popular during the 19^th century. The romantic Victorians compiled a whole pot pourri of meanings for every known flower.

Some flower names also became slang terms, and it is with the most famous slang term for a gay man that I begin my series on Flower Power.

At school I remember teachers and other children using the word pansy to mean any boy who was a bit soft, weedy and too girly. Fortunately I fell more into the “geek” category.

Pansy seems to have been first applied to gay men in America over a hundred years ago. Some gay men have always dressed in a distinctive and slightly camp feminised fashion – think about Quentin Crisp, or the stereotypical gay characters created by entertainers like Dick Emery. Perhaps the word “dandy” could apply to some of these men in a different period. But at the beginning of the 20^th century dressing in this manner was called “pansying up", no doubt comparing the bold colours of the clothes with those of the flower. I haven’t been able to find out if pansying up was a term created by the gay community or one given to it. It seems that effeminate younger men in particular who pansied up were called “pansified”, and from this came the name “pansy”. Since then, camp gay men have often been given the derogatory name of pansy.

In the 1930s during prohibition in America may illicit gay-owned bars and clubs sprang up in New York. They became popular with all sections of society who couldn’t get alcohol anywhere else. The entertainment provided for the clientele included many gay performers and drag artists. These underground bars became the centre of what was called the Pansy Craze.

One artist who has taken the concept of pansy as an abusive term to create a positive-thinking art project is Paul Harfleet. As a gay man he had experience of verbal abuse in the streets. Whenever he walked though those streets again he was confronted by his memories. Paul used the common practice of laying flowers at the scene of fatal accidents or crimes to create his own project. Instead of bouquets of flowers he chose to leave one single live pansy planted as close as possible to the site where he received abuse. He called his project the Pansy Project.

Paul chose the pansy because of its association with a term of abuse and turned the abuse on its head, because the name pansy comes from the French verb “penser” meaning “to think”. It was a means for Paul to think about how the abuse affected him negatively and how he could change it. As Paul says on his website: “Placing a live plant felt like a positive action, it was a comment on the abuse; a potential ‘remedy’.”

Since Paul planted his first pansy he has had to plant many more, even here in Nottingham where he was verbally abused in 2006 when he left a local night club. Paul photographed every pansy he planted and put the photos on his website.

If you want to know more about Paul Harfleet and the Pansy Project go to http://thepansyproject.com