Tag Archives: QC Magazine

Were you sporty in the last century?

Posted on March 18, 2021 by Kevin Allen | Leave a comment

{This week we are sharing a call for participants in a research project investigating local LGBTQ+ sports history.}

My name is William Bridel and I am an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology at the University of Calgary. I am also a 2020-2021 Calgary Institute for the Humanities Fellow. I am a member of the LGBTQ+ community.

*Calgary’s CLUE Magazine and their cover story about the 1994 Gay Games*

I am conducting research to explore sport and physical activity in the lives of Calgarians who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or another LGBTQ+ identity and who participated in sport or physical activity during the time period of approximately 1960 to the early 2000s. My primary interest is in investigating the role sport and physical activity played in individuals’ lives but also in relation to community-building. My project seeks to build on the amazing work of Kevin Allen and the Calgary Gay History Project as well as research done with a former honours student at the University of Calgary, Connor MacDonald. The University of Calgary Conjoint Health Research Ethics Board has approved this research study (REB20-1526).

*A Calgary Softball Team from the 1960’s that was predominantly lesbian*

For this study, I am seeking individuals who identify as LGBTQ+ and who participated in sport or physical activity in Calgary at some point between the 1960s and early 2000s. Participants must also be English-speaking as I am unilingual. You will be asked to participate in an interview lasting around 60 to 90 minutes during which we will talk about your participation in sport—mainstream and/or LGBTQ+ specific (e.g., Apollo, Different Strokes, softball, bowling, etc.)—or physical activity (e.g., YMCA/YWCA). I would also like to discuss the meaning that sport and physical activity has had in your life.

*Calgary’s Different Strokes Swim Club at the Gay Games in Australia (2002)*

I will be conducting interviews virtually given the global pandemic; we can discuss different options such as Zoom, Skype, FaceTime, phone, etc. The interviews will be confidential, and steps will be taken to ensure your privacy throughout the process. If you choose, a pseudonym can be used in place of your name and team and organization names can be altered at your request. Interviews will be scheduled for a day/time that is most convenient for you.

If you are interested in participating in this study, please email me at william.bridel@ucalgary.ca with the following information: (1) name; (2) brief comment on your involvement in sport and/or physical activity during the 1960s to early 2000s; (3) your gender identity and sexuality; and (4) your pronouns. Once your message is received, I will contact you to discuss the study in further detail and to determine if you are still interested in volunteering to participate.

*Womyn’s Annual Golf Classic organizers, Sam & Bailey, organized Lesbian long weekends in Fernie, BC in the 90s*

I am also happy to answer any questions that you may have about the study. I can be reached at william.bridel@ucalgary.ca. Thanks so much for your time and consideration. —William (he/him)

Western Cup Flashback

Posted on April 19, 2019 by Kevin Allen | Leave a comment

There are only a handful of non-profits in Calgary’s gay community that are long storied. In 1981, four members of GIRC created an athletic social group and called it Apollo Friends in Sport. Volleyball was their inaugural sport. Apollo players issued a challenge to a similar group in Edmonton and the Western Cup was born.

Held every Easter weekend since, Western Cup is now 37 years old. In 2019, more than 1500 attendees and athletes will participate in sports tournaments of volleyball, bowling, curling, dodgeball, and hockey. The annual Western Cup Dance is a social calendar mainstay.

Recently, Apollo made a donation to the Calgary Gay History Project, and we gladly committed to working on preserving and collecting the history of this vital organization. Grassroots and volunteer-run since its inception, Apollo Friends in Sport is part of the connective tissue of Calgary’s contemporary LGBTQ2 community and was a harbinger of Pride in the city.

In 1995, I reported on Western Cup, for the inaugural issue of QC Magazine. I interviewed then Apollo President, Matthew Gillespie, and profiled some of the teams in competition. Winnipeg’s Golden Boys won the volleyball gold medal that year. (Calgary’s Fruit Loops came in third and occasionally showered spectators with their cereal namesake).

QC Magazine Photo Montage of Western Cup XIII – May 1995

The Western Cup dance in 1995 was held at the Victoria Park Community Hall with approximately 400 in attendance. I wrote: “The dance had something for everyone and too much for some. With only six beers remaining at 1:30 the place cleared out and those who had the stamina to party further sloshed over to Boystown: Metro.”

Oh dear, I guess I am middle aged now too…

{KA}

RuPaul & AIDS in 1996

Posted on October 21, 2016 by Kevin Allen | 1 comment

Twenty years ago, RuPaul was the headliner for Calgary Cares ’96, a benefit for AIDS Calgary. It was the fourth benefit of its kind in the city and raised approximately $50,000 for the agency.

RuPaul at Calgary Cares ’96. Photo: Shelagh Anderson (QC Magazine, July 1996)

RuPaul had then just been discovered by mainstream audiences, with the 1993 music video hit, Supermodel (You Better Work), and the groundbreaking model contract in 1995 with MAC cosmetics’ Viva Glam Couture Colour Collection. 100% of the proceeds from that collection were donated to the fight agains AIDS. In 1996, that amounted to a $5 million contribution which has grown to over $400 million today.

In the summer of 1996, Calgary was averaging about 10 new cases of HIV diagnoses a month and had the fourth highest incidence rate of HIV infection amongst Canadian cities (after Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver).

RuPaul suffered some flight delays, but after travelling 32 hours to get to Calgary made a late appearance, singing “Dude looks like a lady” for hundreds in attendance, and then hosted an impromptu press conference afterwards with local press.

Calgary Herald copy-editor Terri Inigo-Jones asked a few days later if RuPaul was not “a symbol for the best hopes for humanity’s future.”

In a June 19th, op-ed piece titled Lack of caring spawns new dark ages, the copy-editor characterized the mid-nineties as a downward slide towards the end of civilization. Despairing over neoliberal gains in the public sphere, and a perceived intolerance and pettiness in society, the author found hope in Calgary Cares:

Fortunately, modern equivalents of the early European monasteries may exist and, once again, humanity’s best qualities and best hope for the future may lie on the fringes.

Attending the fourth annual Calgary Cares fund-raising event for AIDS Calgary recently, it struck me that the true moral fibre of which society is so proud is at its strongest beyond mainstream thinking.

The event had a community feeling. About 1,300 people attended and many of them would not find acceptance in the mainstream. Every year, elected officials are invited to the event but none have accepted.

It was unconditional love that drove the 10-person organizing committee to put in 3,000 hours of volunteer labor before the show and that made hundreds of others help out on the night itself. Their efforts are expected to raise $25,000 for people in need. There was not a whisper of whether or not they could afford it or should do it. The only thought was that it must be done.

RuPaul was the star guest of the evening at the Max Bell Arena. A seven-foot, cross-dressing black man in a red patent leather bustier and thigh-high boots and a blonde wig as a symbol for the best hopes for humanity’s future?

Deal with it, folks. Our hope as a society and as a species lies in our unconditional concern and compassion for our fellow men, women and children and in our tolerance for diversity.

After all, without diversity society cannot evolve and without evolution there is no future.

It was in that summer that a corner was turned in the fight against AIDS. In July 1996, the success of new anti-HIV drugs, called protease inhibitors, were announced at the International AIDS conference in Vancouver. Almost immediately the death toll from the disease in Calgary came to a virtual halt.

{KA}