He Was Dying of AIDS. He Won the Gold Medal Anyway.

In 1986, over 3,400 queer athletes marched into Kezar Stadium while the AIDS crisis raged and the government looked away. Tom Waddell — doctor, Olympian, and man already diagnosed with AIDS — threw a javelin and won gold. Forty years later, the Olympics are coming to Los Angeles, and Pride House is landing right in West Hollywood.

This is the story of Gay Games II and how a community built their own world when the world wouldn't have them. From Rikki Streicher's vision to Greg Louganis diving while the world watched, these athletes showed up for each other when everything else had abandoned them. The Gay Games drew more athletes than the 1984 Olympics the year before. Nobody noticed. Nobody needed to. They showed up anyway.

Now the 2028 Olympics come to Los Angeles, and Pride House is returning to West Hollywood to carry that spirit into a new generation. The institutions that shut them out still exist. So does the community that built something better.

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Transcript

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Sports are your life, and you've been an athlete as long as you can remember. And then someone tells you that you're not allowed to play anymore. So what do you do? Hi there, I'm Chris with a K and welcome back to this week in Queer History, where we try to find hope-filled, inspirational, and strategic moments from queer history that we can pull into today. Forty years ago, 3,400 queer athletes all marched into Kazer Stadium in San Francisco for the second gay games. And this was during the time when the AIDS crisis was killing thousands of their friends, tens of thousands, but the government was sitting by silently. But they showed up anyway, and they ran, they swam, they threw their javelins, all to prove that they were alive and thriving. And today we're gonna connect that defiant moment to something that's amazing happening right here in my own backyard. The 2028 Olympics are coming to Los Angeles. That's just two years away. And Pride House, it's an organization, is coming to West Hollywood. And this is a story of how we got from there, the gay games, to here. This week and clear his story. Stories filled with love and gleam. Now, to understand the gay games, the second gay games, you have to understand that the man who dreamed it all up, Tom Waddle, was a cathlete who placed six at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, breaking five personal records in the process. He also was a physician, a paratrooper, and a gay man living in San Francisco's Castro. After joining a gay bowling league, he had a simple thought. If we can bowl together openly, why can't we have our own international games? He originally called the games the Gay Olympics, but the International Olympic Committee, they didn't like that. They sued him just 19 days before the first Games in 1982. And this is all despite never objecting when the Senior Olympics or the Police Olympics used the same words. Yeah. Model renamed it the Gay Games and went forward anyway. But here's the thing we have to remember: he didn't do it alone. Ricky Stryker, a lesbian bar owner and activist, co-founded the Gay Games and helped create the Federation of Gay Games. Give it up for a lesbian. Yes, they're always there, helping and pulling it all together. Stryker had opened Mods in 1966 in Hay Ashbury, which became the longest continuously running lesbian-owned bar in the country, operating for 23 years. In 1978, she opened Amelia's, named after Amelia Earhart, because she liked the metaphor of the fearless woman aviator. These bars weren't just businesses, they were community centers. Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, they were regulars. And Stryker had an amazing quote, and I love it. Sports are the great social equalizer. It's perhaps the only time that it does not matter who you are, but how you play the game. The first gay games in 1982 drew over 1,300 competitors from 170 cities. Tina Turner, she performed at the opening. And because Waddle disliked nationalism in sports, the athletes represented their cities, not countries. No metal tallies, just participation and pure joy. By 1986, everything was more intense for the gay community. The AIDS crisis was in full swing. Tens of thousands of Americans had died. And Reagan, President Reagan, still hadn't even addressed it or talked about AIDS. Gay men were watching their friends and lovers just disappear, and the federal government sat in silence. And so the gay games and the second gay games arrived like a shout in the dark. And for the second gay games, over 3,400 athletes competed from 17 countries and 251 cities across 17 sports. 40% of the athletes were women. And this was an intentional choice because during these decades, women athletics had remained dramatically underfunded. Rita May Brown, the author of Ruby Fruit Jungle, emceed the opening ceremony. Jennifer Holliday, the Broadway powerhouse behind And I'm Telling You I'm Not Going, performed at the closing. Armistead Maupen presided as the master of ceremonies. And you have to remember the setting for all of this. In 1986, the queer body, a gay man's body, had been turned into a symbol of disease and shame. Mainstream culture coded gay men as dangerous and expendable. So the second gay games was a direct answer. It followed the first gay games, but here were these queer bodies swimming, cycling, lifting, running, and here were these people training through grief, competing through loss, and insisting through the language of sports that they were alive and strong and not going anywhere. Tom Waddell himself was already sick. He'd been diagnosed with AIDS in 1985, but he competed anyway and won the gold medal in Javelin. A man with AIDS standing on a field throwing a javelin, gold medal. He understood the argument that he was making wasn't verbal, it was physical. And in his closing speech, Waddell declared, We are the teachers of the 80s and we are on the move. He died on July 11, 1987, at the age of 49. His last words were reportedly, well, this should be interesting. Ricky Stryker, the co-founder, she lived to see Gay Games 4 in New York in 1994, where she received the Dr. Tom Waddell Award for her contributions to gay athletics, an award named after her co-founder. She died of cancer weeks later at 68. San Francisco lowered its city flags to half-mast. The Ricky Stryker field in Castro was named in her honor. And the gay games kept growing. Gay Games 4 in New York drew 10,864 athletes, surpassing the athlete counts at both the 92 Barcelona Olympics and the 96 Atlanta Olympics. Yeah, that's right. A queer sporting event larger than the Olympics. And the IOC, they never stopped pursuing Waddle's estate for legal fees from the lawsuit. Even after he died, the callousness of that tells you everything about why the gay games needed to exist. Now, fast forward. The first Pride House appeared at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. It was a hospitality space for LGBTQ athletes, fans, and allies. And at the 2014 Sochi Olympics, Russia's government blocked Pride House under their gay propaganda law, which only galvanized the movement internationally. And in Paris, on August 9th, 2024, the exact anniversary of the opening of the second gay games, Pride House handed the torch to West Hollywood. Greg Luganus was there. He has four Olympic gold medals, and he's HIV positive since 1988. The man who hid, who survived, who came out, who kept showing up. Ian Thorpe and Matthew Mitcham stood beside him, three generations of out athletes watching the next chapter begin. In November 2025, the West Hollywood City Council voted unanimously to commit $1 million to build Pride House LA at West Hollywood Park. Los Angeles County added another $181,000. This will be the first LGBTQ hospitality house at an Olympic Games on American soil. 17 days of programming, concerts, exhibitions, a history museum of queer athletes, Paralympic sports exhibitions, panel discussions, and nearly free admission to the public. West Hollywood itself, incorporated as a city in 1984, two years before the second Gay Games. Its first city council was majority LGBTQ. The same political forces shape both, and the AIDS crisis, the demand for recognition, the refusal to be invisible. The Pride House will live in Wiiho. That's not a coincidence. It's a continuation. These members make this work possible full stop. They help me find and share the moments from queer history, the reminds we've always been here, always been resilient. If you want to be a part of that, check the description. And if money is tight, I get it. But subscribing and hitting the bell still helps us reach more people. Thank you for being a part of this. I'm getting so excited for this because the Olympics are coming to my backyard, Los Angeles, and I live in West Hollywood, which is going to be the location of Pride House. It's going to be in my neighborhood, down at the West Hollywood Park. And I can walk there. It's just it's going to be incredible. I'm my mind is blown. I mean, it's only in the last 40 years that athletes have really been able to come out and compete openly. And before that, if you were vocal at all about your sexuality, it meant that you didn't get chosen, or it meant that you lost your sponsors, or that you didn't get to play at all. And Tom and Ricky, they understood that. And that's why they built the gay games, because the Olympics, they weren't friendly to us. So they created a space that was accepting and it was affirming and it allowed queer athletes to compete openly and proudly. And I mean, look what happened. Those athletes, they proved that they were just as talented and just as skilled and just as fierce as anyone else. I'm so excited for the Olympics to be here in LA because I think that we'll be able to show the world what America can be at its best. I mean, California, it leads the country in so many ways. It's progressive, it's so accepting, and visibility that matters, especially right now, because trans athletes are being attacked and excluded from competition. So having spaces where queer athletes can go and feel supported, it's it's not luxury, it's a necessity. So Pride House, it's going to be the answer that we need. I am so genuinely excited about Pride House. I want to contribute programming about queer history and athletes from the Olympics, gay games. I want to help tell their stories, like Waddle throwing a javelin while he was fighting AIDS and striker building community from behind a bar. Luganus diving through fear and silence to become one of the greatest of all time. These stories, they belong at Pride House. And the creators and the people who are running Pride House who are leading this organization right now, if you are watching, please consider this my official pitch. Let's talk about how this week in queer history can bring programming to life for everyone who attends. What I find so amazing and empowering when I look at this is that in 1986, the world looked at queer bodies, people, and they saw disease and shame. But both Tom and Ricky, they looked at those same people and they saw power. They put queer people on athletic fields and said, look at us. We are not defined by a disease. We are not defined by what you say we are. We are defined by what we build. And 40 years later, Pride House will now fill West Hollywood Park with queer athletes and fans and families, and all of them will be taking up space. All of them will be visible and all of them will be inheriting what Waddle and Stryker started. We went from building our own games because the Olympics wouldn't let us play, to hosting our own house at those very same Olympics. And that's not just progress, that's a revolution in what is possible. And I'd love to hear from you. What does being a queer athlete mean? And have you ever competed in the gay games? I'd love to hear that. Or are you planning on attending Pride House in 2028? Please drop your comments. I love to read them and I respond to all of them. And if you want more queer history, check out this video popping up right over here. And if you want to stay connected with me and all of the work that we're doing, join the email list. You'll get free queer history downloads, early word on upcoming releases, and invitation to community moments as we grow this all together. The sign up link is down in the description below. Until next time, stay strong, stay bold, and keep making history.