A scene from the Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony. (Screen capture via NBC Sports YouTube)
The first days of the Olympic Summer Games in Paris have been a mélange of powerful LGBTQ representation, queer controversy, hookup hiccups and unwelcome weather that started all wet and has turned scorchingly hot.
Weather Woes
The opening ceremony on the Seine was spectacular but soaked athletes, performers and spectators to the bone. And when the rain finally moved on, it left the famed river that was supposed to serve as one leg of the men’s triathlon too polluted for competition, for now. That event is now postponed, in spite of the cleanup efforts that cost Paris $1.5 billion.
But now the athletes have gone from riders on the storm to a different kind of soaking: Sweating in the 95-degree heat on July 30, about 11-degrees above average for this time of year in France’s capital city.
Much has been reported about the lack of air conditioning in the Olympic Village, just outside Paris. It was built with a cooling system that runs cold water through the floors, which officials said can reduce the ambient temperature by 10 to 20 degrees and achieve a target range of 73 to 79. The effort is part of the hosts’ larger plan to make Paris the greenest Olympics in modern history, according to The Wall Street Journal.
But Team USA wasn’t taking any chances: Every single room and some common areas accommodating the 592-member delegation isn’t risking the slightest discomfort. Every single U.S. room and some common areas have been equipped with portable A/C units, according to a spokesman for the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee. Cool!
Cock-Blocked
Team USA may have A/C but no athlete looking for lesbian, gay or bisexual love at these games has access to Grindr’s “explore” function, a location-based feature, just like at the 2022 Winter Olympics. And journalists like Louis Pisano let the world know on social media.
As them reported, Grindr began this crackdown on Olympics app usage after 2016, when the Daily Beast published a story about “hookup culture” in the Rio de Janeiro Games’ Olympic Village. The outlet later pulled the article after a widespread outcry.
Without referencing that report, Grindr explained in a blog post that this is part of a series of enhanced privacy measures the app rolled out for the Summer Games.
“If an athlete is not out or comes from a country where being LGBTQ+ is dangerous or illegal, using Grindr can put them at risk of being outed by curious individuals who may try to identify and expose them on the app,” Grindr said in its blog post. “Our goal is to help athletes connect without worrying about unintentionally revealing their whereabouts or being recognized.”
There are nearly 70 countries represented in Paris which have national laws criminalizing same-sex relations between consenting adults, according to Human Rights Watch.
Gender Testing
Two apparently straight Olympic athletes from countries that have zero representation at these games have been cleared to compete in women’s boxing. Both were disqualified from last year’s World Championships for failing to meet “eligibility criteria.”
Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting was stripped of a bronze medal in the March 2023 event after failing a gender eligibility test, and the International Olympic Committee says Algeria’s Imane Khelif was disqualified in New Delhi for failing a testosterone level test.
As the BBC reported, no further details are available as to why Lin, 28, and Khelif, 25, were disqualified from last year’s World Championships, or exactly what kind of gender tests were conducted.
“These athletes have competed many times before for many years, they haven’t just suddenly arrived — they competed in Tokyo,” said IOC spokesman Mark Adams. In addition, Lin is a two-time winner at the Asian Women Amateur Boxing Championships.
On the 30th, Outsports co-founder Cyd Zeigler reported: “To be clear, these two women are not transgender, though they may be intersex.”
LGBTQ Medalists
Thus far, out gay British diver Tom Daley has won his fifth Olympics medal — his first silver — in the 10-meter platform synchro competition, with diving partner Noah Williams. Out lesbian Lauren Scruggs won a silver medal in fencing for Team USA. And out lesbian Amandine Buchard of France followed up her individual silver medal in the 52kg category of Judo in Tokyo with a bronze medal in Paris. Outsports has updated its count of out athletes competing in the Summer Games to a record 193.
Pride House
A legacy that began more than a decade ago at the Vancouver Winter Games continues and has been expanded in Paris, with a Pride House on the River Seine. For the first time, the Olympics organization has raised its profile by including this refuge on its official website, and celebrating these Olympics as “The Rainbow Games,” as Alexander Martin wrote.
According to Jérémy Goupille, co-president of Fier Play, one of the Paris Pride House organizers, “nobody should hide who they are.’ France’s minister for sports, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, joined Goupille at the inauguration of the new Pride House on the banks of the Seine. She noted the role played by the opening ceremony in positive portrayals of marginalized communities like those who are LGBTQ.
“Like all of us, I was extremely proud of the opening ceremony on Friday night,’ said Oudéa-Castéra. “I think, that this City of Light, this city of love, expressed itself with respect. It expressed itself with a blend of tradition and modernity that honors our country and allowed it to show what it is capable of. And when it reconciles with itself, by embracing all dimensions of its greatness, all of its people, all of its citizens, without discrimination, it is the most beautiful country in the world”, she said.
“The Last Supper” Controversy
Even though the opening ceremony broadcast on NBC on its channels across America and all around the world included two men kissing and embracing and a not-at-all subtle reference to a ménage à trois, there was no outrage about those scenes.
What got the conservative Christian right-wing viewers clutching their pearls was a moment that’s come to be known online as “The anti-Christian depiction of The Last Supper.”
Except it wasn’t. Here’s how The New York Times described the scene:
“A woman wearing a silver, halo-like headdress stood at the center of a long table, with drag queens posing on either side of her. Later, at the same table, a giant cloche lifted, revealing a man, nearly naked and painted blue, on a dinner plate surrounded by fruit. He broke into a song as, behind him, the drag queens danced.”
Among the people who saw the images as a parody of da Vinci’s painting of “The Last Supper” were the French Catholic Bishops’ Conference, denouncing the “scenes of mockery and derision of Christianity,” and American Bishop Robert Barron of Minnesota, who called it a “gross mockery.” A Mississippi-based telecommunications provider, C Spire, announced it was pulling all its advertisements from Olympics broadcasts. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana described the scene as “shocking and insulting to Christian people.”
But the opening ceremony’s artistic director, Thomas Jolly, said the event was not meant to “be subversive, or shock people, or mock people” at a news conference in Paris. On July 28, Jolly clarified further that he had not been inspired by “The Last Supper.”
“It is Dionysus who arrives at the table,” Jolly told a French TV interviewer. For those who don’t know, he explained Dionysus is the Greek god of festivities and wine, and is the father of Sequana, the goddess of the Seine River. “The idea was instead to have a grand pagan festival connected to the gods of Olympus, Olympism,” Jolly added. And educated people on social media backed him up.
And that was confirmed in a post by the official Olympics account on “X”:
But on July 28, the religious right got what it demanded: An official apology from Olympics spokesperson Anne Descamps noting that “If people have taken offense, we are really, really sorry.”
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