Photo: Getty Images
The 2008 Summer Olympics kick off tonight in Beijing, marking the one time every four years when you can actually tune into ribbon dancing (and the one time every four years you'll actually find ribbon dancing televised) without feeling a lick of embarrassment. In fact, it's your patriotic duty! To celebrate in our own special way, we felt it was our Popnographic duty to provide you with a few queer tidbits about the Games (besides the above photo of Michael Phelps sporting his new Tom of Finland inspired facial hair):
> Last month a story popped up on OneNewsNow.com, a division of the right-wing American Family News Network, regarding an Olympic qualifying track and field event. An auto-replace feature on the site, which was set to automatically swap out the word "gay" (which is deemed by the site to have too positive of connotations) with "homosexual" (which has that charming clinical pre-1973 "being queer is a mental illness" ring to it) resulted in sprinter Tyson Gay being renamed Tyson Homosexual. To make matters even worse (better?), Gay happened to be facing off against a competitor named Dix.
Once the auto-replace filter had had its wily way with the Associated Press story, it delivered gems like:
--"After the race, Homosexual and Dix looked at each other and slapped palms, then hugged."
--"I'm sore right now," Homosexual said, "'but probably from the victory lap."
--"It means a lot to me," the 25-year-old Homosexual said. "I'm glad my body could do it, because now I know I have it in me."
Confronted with the mix-up, OneNewsNow.com's news director Fred Jackson said, "We don't have the staff to monitor all the Hollywood stories, so we wanted an automated feature." The story was corrected on the site (though you can still read the full uncorrected version here) and Jackson says the word "gay" has been taken off the filter. We're sure pro basketball player Rudy Gay, actress Marcia Gay Harden, and WWII airplane Enola Gay enthusiasts around the world are rejoicing.
> Ever since aquatic Olympic athletes decided to trade in their Speedos for full-body swim suits, we'd just about given up on tuning into anything remotely pool related. But gay Australian diver Matthew Mitcham has us rethinking our decision. The sinewy 20-year-old graces the cover of the new Advocate (shirtless! Hooray!) and tells the magazine that the whole gay thing isn't such a big deal for him -- he's too busy training for the Games. "I just want to be known as the Australian diver who did really well at the Olympics," he says. "It's everybody else who thinks it's special when homosexuality and elite sport go together." He also isn't interested in comparisons to that other great gay diver, Greg Louganis. "We're both gay divers," he says, but "that's about the only similarity -- two things we share out of thousands of millions of qualities and character traits." The entire article is worth checking out, and not just for the picture of Speedo-clad Mitcham mid-dive and bent in two like a jack knife.
> Finally, if you're tired of waiting for the damn things to start, you can indulge in a bit of pre-Gaming by reading a spoiler-heavy report about the previously hush hush details for the lavish opening ceremony (complete with smiley-face fireworks and China's 5,000 year history boiled down into a tidy 50-minute pageant of sorts) at MSNBC.com.
Keep coming back to Popnography all month long to get the lowdown on all the gayest Olympic events and going-ons (hello, men's gymnastics!).
-- NOAH MICHELSON
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