Athletes from around the world have spent the past week in Cleveland at the Gay Games, the world’s largest LGBT-friendly athletics event. Skyler Reid found a festival on the up

Four years ago, Konstantin Yablotskiy was not looking to change his life. He had travelled to Cologne to attend the Gay Games, an LGBT-friendly athletics festival. He was a figure skater, not an activist. Most of his friends or family did not even know he was gay. But then he took to the ice in front of a fully accepting audience, receiving whistles and applause on as he spun to a mid-tempo jazz number, later earning gold and silver medals for his performances.

He watched athletes from around the world competing openly, unafraid of expressing their orientation. Before Yablotskiy left, he decided that he would would organize an LGBT athletics organization in his home country, Russia.



When he returned to the Gay Games this year, Yablotskiy was leading a team of 33 athletes representing the 1,000-plus membership of the Russian LGBT Sports Federation.

The Gay Games are a week-long athletics and cultural festival held every four years. This year’s games, held jointly in Cleveland, Ohio, and nearby Akron, and which culminate on Saturday, have drawn nearly 8,000 participants from more than 50 countries, competing in sports from football to bowling to synchronized swimming.

Since they began in 1982, the Gay Games stated goal has been to display the athletic ability of the LGBT community, promoting equality by showing that gay and lesbian athletes are just the same as their heterosexual peers. Organizers promote full inclusion at the events, allowing participation regardless of sexual orientation, gender, race, ideology or physical ability. The long tail of the games, however, has been in empowering participants to create change in their own communities, especially in places where LGBT rights remain elusive.

“Many countries that have very anti-LGBT policies, if you’re doing a sports event they will give it a pass,” says Kelly Murphy-Stevens a board member of the Federation of Gay Games. “They just can’t imagine that this is a big deal.”

As a member of the board, Murphy-Stevens is involved with outreach and providing scholarships for athletes from countries that are underrepresented at the games. In most cases, these are countries that have either strict laws against homosexuality or a strong social stigma. For Murhpy-Stevens, these are some of the most important places to reach. “Sport actually does cross over into a human rights event, and Gay Games is exactly doing that,” he says. “It’s a huge human rights event that we’ve wrapped in sport.”

Even in countries with strong LGBT protections, many gay athletes feel disenfranchised. Gugulethu Makhubela, a soccer player from South Africa, attended this year’s games on a scholarship. While gay and lesbian rights are guaranteed under the South African constitution, social discrimination and attacks are still common.

Makhubela faces many of these challenges at home in Soweto, one the large, underserved black townships formed during apartheid. She grew up playing soccer on dusty fields, often playing with the larger and more aggressive boys’ teams. She played for a handful of local and regional teams before joining the Chosen Few, a team that’s part of an LGBT activism group. “I didn’t even know there were these groups for women, for lesbians,” she says. Through the chosen few she has travelled the country and, through the Gay Games, has got one step closer to her dream of playing soccer internationally.

For other international participants, anti-LGBT attitudes in their home country force them to hide their involvement with the games. Murphy-Stevens remembers receiving an email from a previous scholarship recipient, an Indian competitor who had been to the Chicago Gay Games in 2006. “He wrote me and said, ‘Please, remove my name from the press release, and from the sports results and all articles with me’,” says Murphy-Stevens.

Two years after attending the games, the scholarship recipient was fired for being gay. “Someone emailed his boss or sent his boss a Google search and showed him that he had been at the Gay Games. And he lost his job.” Organizers complied by replacing his last name with an initial.

Even in western countries, including the United States, intolerance remains an issue. Only 48 states have athletes competing, with no participants hailing from North Dakota or Wyoming. One issue, says Murphy-Stevens, is there’s a lack of knowledge. “There are runners there, but they don’t know anything about Frontrunners, or the International Gay and Lesbian Dance Association,” he says. The other issue, of course, is stigma and fear of persecution.

Although discrimination persists, it’s hard not to notice the recent shift in the sports community. Less that a decade ago it was rare for an athlete to declare their sexuality, but it recent years more professional athletes have come out – and, notably, continued competing.

Matthew Mitcham was the only openly gay male athlete at the 2008 Olympics (of 11 openly gay athletes overall). Robbie Rogers was only the second professional male soccer player in the UK to come out as gay when he made the announcement in 2013, and he became the first openly gay professional athlete playing in North American sports when he started with the Los Angeles Galaxy. Since then: Jason Collins in the NBA, Brittney Griner in the WNBA, Michael Sam in the NFL.

Konstantin Yablotskiy of Russia, right, skates with Georg Kling of Switzerland at Gay Games 9. Photograph: Skyler Reid for the Guardian

At the opening ceremony, a pre-recorded video message from President Obama was played from the arena screens. “It’s been amazing to see the games thrive over the years.” he says. “We’ve come a long way in our commitment to the equal rights of LGBT people here and around the world.”

This increased acceptance has been visible throughout Cleveland and Akron throughout the week, despite some initial concerns about hosting the games in a smaller, more conservative location that in previous years. Thousand of people flocked to the Festival Village in Cleveland, residents and visitors alike. Dave Fisher, an Akron resident, spent much of the week visiting the Gay Games’ locations in his city. Fisher was one of a few hundred Christians who organized to pass out pink plastic wristbands that read “God likes me.”

“Recently the church has made homosexuality the No1 sin,” Fisher said. “But that’s not what God says.” While Fisher acknowledged that several churches refused to participate in the outreach, he still said that most of the community strongly supported the games.

For Yablotskiy, the games are no longer just about sport: “This international gay sports movement is a tool for empowering the community to be stronger, to be together, to be united and to keep going.”

But he acknowledges that’s his perspective as the leader of an LGBT organization. He’s also experienced first hand the personal changes games can bring about: at a ceremony in New York on 8 August, the day before the Gay Games began, he got married. “These games are changing the world,” he says. “These games changed my world four years ago.”