Tom Waddell opens the second Gay Games in San Francisco and wins the javelin at his own event while dying of AIDS, a new Ottoman penal code quietly leaves sodomy off the list, and Whitney Houston is born in Newark.
1986
The Word
Tom Waddell was told he could not use the word Olympic, so he built his own games
The United States Olympic Committee went to court to stop Tom Waddell calling his event the Gay Olympics, and won an injunction nineteen days before the first one was due to open in 1982. It had never gone to court over the Special Olympics, or over the California Police Olympics, which used the word for twenty-two years. Waddell painted it off the signs, called it the Gay Games, and opened on time.
He knew what he was building. He had run the decathlon for the United States at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City and come sixth out of thirty-three, breaking five of his own personal bests along the way. He moved to San Francisco in 1972, joined a gay bowling league, and decided there should be an Olympics for people like the ones he was bowling with - not a protest and not a consolation prize, but an international multi-sport competition, open to anyone who entered, with an arts festival running alongside it. Thirteen hundred and fifty people competed in that first one.
The second Games opened in San Francisco on August 9, 1986, with about three and a half thousand athletes from seventeen countries. Waddell had been diagnosed with AIDS the year before. He entered the javelin and won it.
The fight over the word went all the way up, and in 1987 the Supreme Court held, five to four, that the USOC could keep it. Waddell was ordered to pay the USOC’s costs. He died on July 11, 1987, at forty-nine.
The Gay Games have been held every four years since.
The Ottomans are said to have decriminalised homosexuality a century before Britain, and it is more complicated than that
The Ottoman Empire is regularly credited with decriminalising homosexuality in 1858, one hundred and nine years before England and Wales managed it and a hundred and forty-five before the whole of the United States. The law people mean came into force on August 9, 1858.
It was part of a much larger reform programme, and it dealt with sodomy in a single line that was really about public order. Anyone who committed the abominable act publicly, against modesty and shame, faced three months to a year and a fine. What a person did privately was not in the code at all.
The comparison with Britain is worth making, because the assumption behind most timelines of this subject is that tolerance spread outwards from Western Europe, and it did not.
Historians who work on the Ottomans are wary of the word decriminalised, though, for three reasons. The older religious and sultanic prohibitions had very rarely been enforced, so striking them from a new code changed less than it sounds like it changed. The code was modelled on the French one, and leaving sodomy out was a French decision inherited wholesale rather than an Ottoman decision about Ottoman subjects. And the timing runs the wrong way for a story about growing tolerance, because attitudes to open affection between men were hardening across the second half of the nineteenth century, partly under European influence.
What the record does show, for the centuries before 1858, is a long gap between the law as written and life as lived. The prohibitions were severe and mostly theoretical, and the poetry and painting of the period are full of desire between men, written down and admired rather than hidden.
Whitney Houston is born, and Robyn Crawford keeps their story for forty years
Robyn Crawford was the closest person in Whitney Houston’s life for three decades, and at the start of it, for about two years, they were lovers. Crawford said nothing about that publicly for nearly forty years, and then told it herself, in her own book, at the length she chose.
Houston was born in Newark, New Jersey on August 9, 1963. In the summer of 1980 she took a job at a community centre in East Orange and met Crawford there. They were teenagers.
In 1982 Houston signed with Clive Davis at Arista, and not long after she told Crawford it had to stop being physical. She gave her a Bible. Crawford wrote down what she said: “She said we shouldn’t be physical anymore because it would make our journey even more difficult. She said if people find out about us, they would use this against us, and back in the ’80s, that’s how it felt.”
Crawford did not leave. She was Houston’s assistant and then her creative director for the best part of twenty years, and stayed until 2000. Houston died in 2012.
Through all of it - the tabloids, the rumours, the questions put to her directly - Crawford said nothing, and she has been clear since that the silence was hers and that she kept it on purpose. A Song for You came out in 2019.