There is now a record 51 openly LGBTI athletes competing in the Rio Olympics. Olympic swimmer Rachele Bruni has won silver in the 10km marathon, and she decided to come out by dedicating the medal to her supportive girlfriend. Thanking her ‘beloved’, Diletta Faina, who had accompanied Bruni to Rio, after her second place finish.
Tag Archive: Olympics
Ian Jobling, Director of the Centre for Olympic Studies at the University of Queensland, looks at the history of gay Olympians. Sport remains “one of the last bastions of cultural and institutional homophobia” in Western societies. The first openly gay Olympians did not compete until the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics. But the first known gay Olympic
Ahead of vote to pick the host for the 2022 Winter Olympics, Human Rights Watch has called out Kazakhstan on it’s anti-gay treatment. HRW recently released a 31 page document, discussing how LGBT people in Kazakhstan are living in a “climate of fear”, facing regular hostility and discrimination – even though homosexuality has been legal
The Lithuanian Gay League has applauded President Dalia Grybauskaitė’s decision not to attend the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, expressing hope that the president would consistently defend human rights in Lithuania, as well. “The political step taken by President Grybauskaitė not to go to the Olympic Games in Russia gives us hope that the Head