The official Gay Games boat at the 1998 Games in Amsterdam. Via Geoff Coupe.
Claire Baker started with softball. She remembers the fun of the vast “dyke softball” community in Philadelphia that extended from weekend games to annual balls.
But Claire’s athletic involvement didn’t end with softball, or even in Philadelphia: throughout the 1990s, she also competed in the international Gay Games as a martial artist.
In 1993 she began studying martial arts at an all-women dojang. Her teacher and her teacher’s partner were both involved in the International Association of Gay and Lesbian Martial Artists—and that’s what led Claire to the Gay Games.
She first competed as a yellow belt—a “newbie”—in the 1994 Gay Games in New York, and eventually passed her black belt test in Philadelphia. In 1998, Claire was competing as a black belt in Amsterdam. It wasn’t easy—“You know there’s black belt and then there’s really good black belt,” she explains. “I got my clock cleaned. I wasn’t hurt or anything but it was… it was nice to participate!”
The Gay Games is an international sports and cultural event that aims to promote equality and acceptance of LGBTQ+ athletes, founded in 1982 in San Francisco. The last one was in Paris, and the next one is in Hong Kong in 2022. The way Claire remembers it, the Games were “very warm and fuzzy, you know. There was competition in the sports but it was really fun and friendly.”
But the Gay Games was also huge: the 1994 games were larger than the Olympics, with over 10,800 athletes participating. The Amsterdam opening ceremony in 1998, she remembers, took forever: “It was just big. It was a giant celebration. It was like a week-long, gigantic pride. It was awesome.”
A lot of people (including herself) entered for the fun of it—the Gay Games had no qualifying rounds or anything to keep people from participating in they wanted to. Of course, there were some internal celebrity athletes competing too, and watching them would be part of the experience for everyone else.
The Gay Games were an opportunity for fun, but they were also an outlet for people to compete in sports who couldn’t otherwise do so at such a large scale. Claire doesn’t remember any of minor celebrity athletes going pro, pointing out that being out as an athlete, especially for men, generally “just makes your life a lot harder.”
When she became the executive director of William Way, Claire got to know even more of the world of LGBTQ+ athletes of all kinds: swimmers, runners, wrestlers, bowlers. Sports associations of all kinds sprung up. People created rules and guides for the way that they wanted their sporting events to be run, sometimes building from scratch to include unique parts of the community—for example, ballroom dancing is a competitive sport in the Gay Games.
“Unless you’re looking for it you might not know that there were—then, and maybe still—all kinds of sports aficionados, you know? People who were doing sports, who were all gay, doing it together.”