Taking Up Space: When the Gay Games Came to San Francisco

In the summer of 1982, Marsha Veale and her colleagues on the Gay Games Organizing Committee had a herculean task in front of them preparing Kezar Stadium, an aging facility on the southeast corner of Golden Gate Park near the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco, for a first-of-its-kind sporting event: the inaugural Gay Games. The city’s Recreation and Parks Department, which oversaw the fifty-seven-year-old concrete stadium, had largely neglected it. After the San Francisco 49ers, the local NFL franchise, had left Kezar years earlier, the stadium was less of a priority for the city as the gravity of the city’s sports scene shifted to Candlestick Park, the team’s new home stadium.

Still, Gay Games organizers were determined to whip the old building into shape. For weeks, Veale and her team arrived with hammers, wheelbarrows, and saws to fix the decaying stadium. They repaired damaged seats, ripped out those that could not be fixed, filled in holes, and made the old facility safe for their special event.

Kezar had hosted countless events over the years, but it had never staged anything quite like this. On August 28, 1982, a modest but very vocal crowd of ten thousand people made their way into the sixty-thousand-seat stadium to witness the opening ceremonies of the Gay Games. The organizing committee, led by former Olympian Tom Waddell, sought to create an international sports competition that was an antidote to the hypercompetitive Olympic Games. Waddell’s vision was realized beyond his expectations.

Despite the small crowd, the Gay Games was a major success. For the opening ceremonies, more than thirteen hundred gay and lesbian athletes from across the United States and countries as far as Australia and Peru triumphantly paraded around the field. The spectacle of athletes openly and unapologetically carrying flags representing their country and signs signaling their sexual orientation was extraordinarily powerful and emotionally overwhelming for many who witnessed it. In the face of rising homophobia and opposition from the US Olympic Committee (USOC), which refused to let the organizers use the word “Olympic,” the opening ceremonies and the Games were a major victory for LGBTQ communities. As one observer noted: “I have been Gay for 25 years, and out of the closet for the past ten years, but never have I been as proud to be a Gay man as I was Saturday while watching those beautiful athletes file onto the field.”

The freedom movements of the 1960s had achieved significant political, social, and cultural gains for America’s marginalized communities. During the 1970s, black people and other populations of color built on the advancements made possible by the civil rights movement. The second-wave feminist movement gave women entrée to arenas of American life they had been excluded from previously. LGBTQ communities were more forcibly claiming their rights and achieving an unprecedented degree of political representation. The election of Harvey Milk to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977 signaled the potential of gay political power. Moreover, communities of color and LGBTQ communities were revolutionizing popular music and culture by ushering in the disco revolution.

However, these advances ran into strong reactionary countercurrents. White resistance to the Black Freedom movement zeroed in on busing and affirmative action. This was the era of violent white protests against the court-ordered desegregation of schools in Boston, and the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke Supreme Court decision, which banned institutions from using quotas to achieve racial equity in college admissions, began the decades-long rollback of affirmative action programs. Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly attacked feminism by building a powerful campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment. Meanwhile, homophobia intensified during the late 1970s. The “Save Our Children” movement led by Anita Bryant, the famous singer and anti-gay crusader, launched a fearmongering campaign to portray the extension of civil rights laws to gays and lesbians as the sanctioning of pedophilia. At the same time, the fervent cultural backlash against gay influences in American popular culture, such as the anti-disco movement, were reactionary responses to the inroads LGBTQ people were making into US politics and society. These movements, among others, helped to create the conditions for a conservative counterrevolution that resulted in the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980.

It was fitting that the American stadium became a major site of struggle for the gay rights movement. What had transpired in the 1930s, when the stadium was an arena for the struggle against fascism, or in the 1960s, when the Black Freedom movement used the stadium to rally support for civil rights, unfolded again in the late 1970s and 1980s when the question of gay rights intensified in the United States. Chicago’s Comiskey Park became the site of a sudden anti-disco riot, while in San Francisco and New York, two epicenters of the gay liberation movement, the stadium became an important locus of activism. In the face of a powerful homophobic backlash and the onset of the HIV/AIDS crisis, LGBTQ activists pushed back and created their own institutions, like the Gay Games, while they crafted a radical conception of health care. As in previous decades, the stadium functioned as the arena where what it meant to be an American was defined and fought over.

It is perhaps not by accident that LGBTQ incursions into the stadium space occurred when there was a relative lull in stadium construction. After the stadium-building boom of the sixties and seventies, when forty-eight stadiums and arenas were built for Major League teams across the country, the pace of construction slowed considerably. Only four outdoor stadiums were built for major professional sports franchises during the 1980s as opposed to seventeen that would be built for baseball and football teams a decade later. By no means was this a complete stoppage in stadium building. Indeed, eleven indoor arenas were built for NHL and NBA teams during the eighties.

Yet, it was a period when most sport franchises were content to share stadiums and arenas with other teams and other entertainment industries. Before long, sports teams would renew their efforts to make municipalities build new stadiums. In the 1980s, however, most of the existing arenas and stadiums remained teams’ primary homes. The municipally controlled stadium, where public entities exerted influence over usage, was still largely intact during the decade. This arrangement gave the public greater access to these facilities, a situation that activists took full advantage of. Though stadium use largely followed the desires of the sports industry, the stadium continued to operate as America’s public square.

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Excerpted from The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play by Frank Andre Guridy. Copyright © 2024. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.