Gay Games
international multi-sport and cultural event
The Gay Games, formerly the Gay Olympics, is a worldwide sport and cultural event that promotes acceptance of sexual diversity, featuring lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) athletes, artists and other individuals.
The Gay Games have some similarities with the Olympic Games, such as the Gay Games flame that is lit at the opening ceremony. Similar to the EuroGames, the games are open to all who wish to participate, without regard to sexual orientation, and there are no qualifying standards. Competitors come from many countries, including those where homosexuality remains illegal and hidden.
The 1994 Gay Games, held in June in New York City to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, the modern start of the LGBTQ movement in the United States, "overtook the Olympics in size" with 10,864 athletes compared to 9,356 at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and 10,318 at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.
History
Founding
Founded as the Gay Olympics, the games were started in the United States in San Francisco, California, in 1982, as the brainchild of Olympic decathlete (Mexico City 1968) and medical doctor Tom Waddell, Brenda Young, and others, whose goals were to promote the spirit of inclusion, participation, and personal growth in a sporting event. Waddell wanted to recreate the Olympics' power to bring people of various different backgrounds together through the international language of sport, and the organizers of the first event strived to accommodate differences and achieve gender parity.
Lawsuit over 'Gay Olympics' name
Tom Waddell, the former Olympian who helped found the games, intended them to be called the "Gay Olympics", but a lawsuit filed less than three weeks before 1982's inaugural Gay Olympics forced the name change. This forced volunteers to suspend the sales of buttons and t-shirts in order to remove the terms "Olympic" and "Olympiad" from medals, souvenirs, t-shirts, signs, and programs, which would cost the organization an estimated loss between $15,000 and $30,000.
Event organizers were sued by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) under the U.S. Amateur Sports Act of 1978, which gave the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) exclusive rights to the word Olympic in the United States.
“Gay Games” enters the record as international multi-sport and cultural event. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Games, international and multi-sport can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1130199. The Library of Congress control number is no97026540. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1994, 1992, 1996 and 1982.
Later summaries often reconcile disputed chronology or motive more neatly than the contemporary record permits. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gay Games” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.