Who’s in and who’s out at the Montreal Outgames

Awright, fatties, lissen up. The First World Outgames in Montreal are about the beauty of togetherness through sport. And (shh!) sex. And unlike many sporting events, there’s even room for fat-bottomed girls like me. Still, as fab discovered, some people are being left out.

The announcements are coming fast and furious now as organizers try to build up some hometown hurly-burly for the premiere sports event opening July 29. The latest media conference revealed the all-star lineup for the opening ceremonies, with a pleasantly pudgy Martha Wash tagged as a main attraction. Not that the skin-and-bones types should feel left out: Deborah Cox will also take the stage. Heck, there’s one of everything, including a beloved Quebecoise diva (Diane Dufresne) and a dyke siren (k.d. lang).

But in English Canada, Olympic swimming medallist Mark Tewksbury is really the public face of the Outgames – a former Toronto resident who moved to Montreal to produce this Olympics of queer sport. He’s the volunteer co-president. I catch up with Tewksbury on the phone in Alberta, as he criss-crosses the continent in support of his new autobiography, Inside Out: Straight Talk From a Gay Jock, about how hard it was to come out to himself and to others.

Tewksbury says he worked through the homophobia in sport, and others can, too. “I’m pretty effeminate. I look like this strapping guy, but I’m really enthusiastically in touch with my feminine side.” Mix that with his macho Olympic gold medal, and he’s helped change how bigots see girly boys.

Not that there’s anything wrong with being a girly boy – or even cardio-challenged. You can shun marathon-running, and fatties like me “can come and cheer and drink in the beer garden,” Tewksbury says. Or try bowling, or billiards. My billiards skills are an embarrassment to the entire lesbian community, so I settle on the official Outgames sport of bridge.

“We wanted to create an experience for all participants. There are parties, streets are closed. We’re not Olympic-y in terms of elitism,” Tewksbury says. That kind of obsession can be problematic, anyway. The culture of sacrificing all to be number one in the world means “you don’t develop yourself as a human being.” But hanging out and having fun, that’s different. “Sport is just an excellent way to bring people together.”

There are cultural events, too – square dancing, choirs, bears doing whatever bears do – and an international LGBT human rights conference that’s bringing in activists and eggheads from around the world – Irshad Manji, Lebanon’s Ghassan Makarem, Argentinian Supreme Court Justice Eugenio Raúl Zaffaroni.

And then there’s the location. Many see Montreal as the gay capital of Canada. Its easy bohemian feel and Gallic character add to the fun.

It wasn’t always this way for gays, of course. The choice of venue for the Outgames opening and closing ceremonies, the Olympic Stadium, was once a symbol of queer repression. The run-up to Montreal’s 1976 summer Olympics was a time of trial for the gay community, though it actually took a Toronto incident for activists to put two and two together.

In March 1976, two RCMP officers warned a group of gays in Hogtown “not to undertake anything during the Olympics,” notes gay historian Ross Higgins (who co-founded Quebec’s queer archive). The Toronto homosexuals were confused, as they hadn’t been planning to undertake anything at all.

But the “friendly” reminder helped explain the queer crackdown in Montreal, one presumably spearheaded by then-mayor Jean Drapeau, a reformist lawyer who’d come to power years earlier by promising to fight vice and organized crime, and who more and more became obsessed with destroying Sin City.

Cops hassled Montreal homos more than usual in 1975: one sauna and seven gay bars were raided that year, with dozens of arrests. The next year got rougher. During January’s bust of a bathhouse, police refused to use a pass key and smashed doors with axes. In May, another six tubs and bars were hit. Higgins says police toted machine guns to the lesbian bar Jilly’s and “they took everybody’s photo.”

At one business, police seized a 7000-name membership list. “That got people quite wound up,” says Higgins. He calls the events around the Olympics a catalyst for Quebec’s modern gay rights movement.

But revenge is a delight. Homos took over the Olympic Stadium in 1995, when Robert Vézina and the Bad Boy Club Montreal first rented it for the steadily growing annual AIDS fundraiser and circuit party that is Black & Blue.

Vézina is honest about his motives: he wasn’t making a political point. “[The stadium is] about the only venue that could fit us,” he says. The stadium’s loading docks hosted a mere 10,000 partiers back then; now homos and friends take over the central playing field. (BBCM is holding three official Outgames parties at Club Metropolis.)

Tourism Montreal began catering to the gay market in 1995, pulled in the first of many international gay conferences in 1998, financially supports Divers/Cité (Montreal’s Pride festival) and Black & Blue, and provided cash and staff for the start-up of the Outgames. And police are now polite.

Yet, as during every Montreal festival – from jazz to comedy – prostitutes are expecting a police crackdown during the Outgames.

Jenn Clamen is a spokesperson for Montreal’s 11-year-old hooker drop-in centre, Stella. The group is preparing to contact Outgames officials to ask for help in leaning on police to stop the expected dozens of arrests and the jailing and fining of socalled undesirables that prostitutes say still precedes every major public event held in the city. “Sex workers, squeegee kids, drug users – they’re pushed out of the areas they live in and the areas they work in,” said Clamen on a recent “Dykes on Mykes” community radio show.

Clamen said prostitutes understand the need for safety, but that Outgamers don’t need to be afraid of hookers and beggars. Some of Montreal’s street people, she added, are gay teens who’ve run away from intolerable home lives. She said an extra 800 police officers are expected to patrol the Outgames. “It’s so disappointing.”

One of the targets is Viger Square, a downtown Outgames spot that will be turned into a gay “mini-village.” The artist-run centre Dare-Dare, which runs art shows in the neighbourhood’s streets and parks, is being evicted by Outgames. Dare-Dare artistic coordinator Jean-Pierre Caissie says the group, housed in a trailer parked in the square, was given four months’ notice – which isn’t much time, considering they plan exhibits far in advance and need supportive but red-tape-wrapped city bureaucrats to help them find another home. It took them two years to get Viger Square.

Local poverty activists are also cranky about the high costs of attendance at the Outgames: the human rights conference alone carries a $525 registration fee. Organizers have responded to cash concerns with cheaper day and single-event rates ($75 signs you up for a single sports or cultural event). Some heats are free to watch, and viewing stand prices start at $20 for others. There is, according to the website, a bursary program totalling $500,000 for those visiting from outside of Canada, the United States, Western Europe, Israel, Japan, Australia or New Zealand. Half the cash was aimed at women. Outgames press secretary Pascal Dessureault did not return fab’s telephone calls seeking more information.

There’s also the scandal of the Outgames itself. Montreal originally won its bid to host the seventh international Gay Games, but in 2003, negotiations with the honchos at the Federation of Gay Games came to a standstill over arguments about finances and control. The public and bitter breakup shocked gay athletes, and Montreal organizers decided to go it alone with their vision, creating an entirely new sports and cultural event called the Outgames.

The Federation of Gay Games, for its part, called on its members to fill the hole in its schedule, and Chicago was picked to host the 2006 Gay Games, scheduled for July 15 to 22 – a week before the Outgames begin. (The competition between the rivals will continue, with Outgames 2 hosted by Copenhagen in 2009 and Gay Games VIII held in 2010 in Cologne, Germany.)

Both sides claim their shindigs will at least break even (the last three Gay Games lost millions) and insist they’ve nearly reached the registration counts their budgets require. The two sides have each signed big names (the Gay Games has Melissa Etheridge, Cyndi Lauper, Elton John and Margaret Cho). And some Canucks are headed south of the border: Gay Games co-vice-chair Kevin Boyer says about 350 Canadians have registered for Chicago. I wonder if any of them are fat.

Eleanor Brown is a Montreal writer.