by RAF KATIGBAK

Montreal’s gay and lesbian community is abuzz following some exciting news early this week and, despite what you may think, it has nothing to do with Celine Dion’s 500th show in Las Vegas.

From July 26 to August 5, 2006, the inaugural Outgames is slated to kick off in Montreal, bringing together lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) athletes from around the globe to our humble city. In a press conference last Monday, Montreal Outgames CEO Louise Roy, alongside Jean-Marc Fournier, the Minister of Education, Recreation and Sports, and Mayor Tremblay announced the official schedule.

“We are pleased that our regular registration period has yielded a result of over 12,000 participants. We can already say that this will be the biggest happening of the summer and the most important sporting event in Montreal since 1976,” announced the press release on www.montreal2006.org, the Outgames’ official Web site.

While the notion of the Outgames being the “most important sporting event in Montreal since 1976” may be a little overly optimistic (*cough* 1993 Stanley Cup final *cough*), it is certainly something that the city is taking very seriously. In fact, the Outgames slogan—“We play for real,” which will be soon seen on posters and billboards across town—underscores the fact that campy events like drag racing (in which male competitors sporting six-inch heels amble down Ste-Catherine trying to hail a cab at 3:30 in the morning) or any official references to the women’s mountain biking event as a “dyke hyke on bike” probably won’t appear in the program.

What will appear will be Olympic-level tests of strength, endurance, speed and agility. Athletes will be challenged, and doubts will arise: am I strong enough? Am I fast enough? And most importantly, for those competing in the Bridge event, should I choose a drop, finesse or ruffing finesse, or do I duck a trick entirely into the safe hand?

But the competitors aren’t the only ones with doubts. Montrealers are still feeling the sting of sporting debt; we’ve only now just paid off the 1976 Olympics, and last year’s World Aquatics Championships, which left us almost $5-million in the hole, didn’t help.

Also, if the previous Gay Games are any indication of fiscal dependability, Montrealers have a right to be concerned. In 1998, amid widespread allegations of financial mismanagement, the city of Amsterdam stepped in and agreed to pony up $2.5-million (U.S.) to cover debts so the games could continue. In 2002, the Sydney Gay Games fired its CEO three months before the start of the opening ceremonies, and the event lost an estimated $2.5-million (U.S.). Indeed, the fact that the Gay Games, a completely separate event governed by a different body, will also be taking place in Chicago a few weeks earlier (July 15–22) has also raised a concern.

But Mayor Tremblay and Louise Roy remain confident that the event will be fiscally viable, pointing to the fact that many sponsors are already on board and, where much of the cost of hosting a major international multi-disciplinary sporting event goes to building facilities to accommodate the various sports, most events will be using pre-existing sites throughout the city. Furthermore, Roy has forecast a $170-million injection into the city’s economy from the estimated 250,000 visitors from 109 countries expected to descend on Montreal.

It’s true that hosting the Outgames helps Montreal’s image as an open and inclusive city, but what also makes the Outgames appealing, beyond the fact that you can watch same-sex couples whip each other around as they live out their Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers fantasies at the Dancesport competition, is the notion that these games seem to eschew the jingoistic baggage that normally comes with international sporting events.

In an increasingly globalized world, where the boundaries between people separated by nation states are increasingly blurred (especially for Canadians who, for better or worse, shun nationalism), the Outgames seek to celebrate a collective spirit of individual achievement, an ideal more in line with the spirit of the original Greek Olympics which began over 3,000 years ago, with the exception of the week-long Dionysian orgies. Well actually, don’t count that out completely…

Riff-Raff@sympatico.ca

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