Tom Waddell (born Thomas Flubacher; November 1, 1937 – July 11, 1987) was an American physician, decathlete who competed at the
1968 Summer Olympics
The 1968 Summer Olympics ( es, Juegos Olímpicos de Verano de 1968), officially known as the Games of the XIX Olympiad ( es, Juegos de la XIX Olimpiada) and commonly known as Mexico 1968 ( es, México 1968), were an international multi-sport eve ...
, and founder of the Gay Olympics (later known as the ''
Gay Games
The Gay Games is a worldwide sport and cultural event that promotes acceptance of sexual diversity, featuring lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) athletes, artists and other individuals.
Founded as the Gay Olympics, it was starte ...
'').
Early life
Waddell was born Thomas Flubacher in
Paterson, New Jersey
Paterson ( ) is the largest City (New Jersey), city in and the county seat of Passaic County, New Jersey, Passaic County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey.Virtual AIDS Quilt.org Retrieved 18 May 2012 Gene Waddell is one of the men in the famous photograph of acrobats balancing atop the Empire State Building. In high school, Tom Waddell excelled in athletics.
Waddell attended
Springfield College
Springfield College is a private college in Springfield, Massachusetts. It confers undergraduate and graduate degrees.
It is known as the birthplace of basketball because the sport was invented there in 1891 by Canadian-American instructor J ...
in Massachusetts on a track scholarship. Originally majoring in physical education, he switched to pre-medicine following the sudden death of his best friend and co-captain of the gymnastics team, an event that moved him deeply. At Springfield, he competed on the gymnastics and football teams. In the summer of 1959, Tom worked at a children's camp in western Massachusetts, where he met his first lover, socialist Enge Menaker, then a 63-year-old man. They remained close for the rest of Menaker's life, which ended in 1985 when he was 90 years old.
Civil Rights Movement
The civil rights movement was a nonviolent social and political movement and campaign from 1954 to 1968 in the United States to abolish legalized institutional Racial segregation in the United States, racial segregation, Racial discrimination ...
in
Selma, Alabama
Selma is a city in and the county seat of Dallas County, in the Black Belt region of south central Alabama and extending to the west. Located on the banks of the Alabama River, the city has a population of 17,971 as of the 2020 census. About ...
.
Drafted into the Army in 1966, Waddell became a preventive-medicine officer and paratrooper. Entering a course in global medicine, he protested when he found out that he would be shipped to Vietnam. Expecting a court-martial, he was instead unexpectedly sent to train as a decathlete for the 1968 Olympics.
After discharge from the army, Waddell undertook medical residencies at
Georgetown University
Georgetown University is a private university, private research university in the Georgetown (Washington, D.C.), Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Founded by Bishop John Carroll (archbishop of Baltimore), John Carroll in 1789 as Georg ...
and
Montefiore Medical Center
Montefiore Medical Center is a premier academic medical center and the primary teaching hospital of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York City. Its main campus, the Henry and Lucy Moses Division, is located in the Norwoo ...
in
The Bronx
The Bronx () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Bronx County, in the state of New York. It is south of Westchester County; north and east of the New York City borough of Manhattan, across the Harlem River; and north of the New Y ...
. At Georgetown, he did research on viruses at
Walter Reed Army Medical Center
The Walter Reed Army Medical Center (WRAMC)known as Walter Reed General Hospital (WRGH) until 1951was the U.S. Army's flagship medical center from 1909 to 2011. Located on in the District of Columbia, it served more than 150,000 active and ret ...
in
Washington, D.C.
)
, image_skyline =
, image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, ...
In 1970, he began a graduate fellowship at Stanford University.
Waddell established his private practice on 18th Street in the
Castro
Castro is a Romance language word that originally derived from Latin ''castrum'', a pre-Roman military camp or fortification (cf: Greek: ''kastron''; Proto-Celtic:''*Kassrik;'' br, kaer, *kastro). The English-language equivalent is '' chester''.
...
neighborhood of San Francisco in 1974. His medical background enabled him to find jobs easily and in exotic locales. He also served in the Middle East as medical director of the Whittaker Corporation from 1974 through 1981. Part of his job entailed serving as personal physician for a Saudi prince and a Saudi businessman and he eventually became the team physician for the Saudi Arabian Olympic team at the 1976 Montreal Olympics.
In the 1980s Waddell was employed at the City Clinic in San Francisco's Civic Center area; after his death, it was renamed for him.
Sporting career
He traveled on a U.S. State Department-sponsored track and field tour of Africa in 1962.
At the
1968 Summer Olympics
The 1968 Summer Olympics ( es, Juegos Olímpicos de Verano de 1968), officially known as the Games of the XIX Olympiad ( es, Juegos de la XIX Olimpiada) and commonly known as Mexico 1968 ( es, México 1968), were an international multi-sport eve ...
in Mexico City, Waddell placed sixth among the 33 competitors. He broke five of his own personal records in the 10 events.
In 1972, in a track meet in Hawaii, he injured his knee in a high jump, which ended his career as a competitive athlete.
Gay Olympics
Soon after returning to San Francisco in 1972, Waddell joined a gay bowling league. It inspired him to consider organizing a gay sporting event modeled on the Olympics. He followed through with the idea in the early 1980s. The first "Gay Olympics" was to take place in San Francisco in 1982 in the form of a sports competition and arts festival. But a few weeks before the event was to begin, the
International Olympic Committee
The International Olympic Committee (IOC; french: link=no, Comité international olympique, ''CIO'') is a non-governmental sports organisation based in Lausanne, Switzerland. It is constituted in the form of an association under the Swiss ...
(IOC) sued Waddell's organization over its use of the word "Olympic."
Despite the fact that the IOC had not previously protested when other groups had used the name, they alleged that allowing "Gay Olympics" would injure them. They succeeded in securing an injunction just nineteen days before the first games were to begin.
Nevertheless, the games, now re-christened the "Gay Games," went forward. They were a great success, perhaps because they emphasized sportsmanship, personal achievement, and inclusiveness to a far greater degree than the Olympics.
Personal life
While Waddell worked at Stanford in 1970, he met Lee Brian, with whom he had a five-year relationship.
In 1975, Waddell met landscape designer Charles Deaton, 12 years his senior, and they became lovers. An October 11, 1976 issue of ''
People
A person (plural, : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of pr ...
'' magazine featured the couple in a cover article. They were the first gay couple to appear on the cover of a major national magazine.
In 1981, while founding the Gay Games, Waddell met two people with whom he formed major relationships. One was public relations man and fundraiser Zohn Artman, with whom he fell in love and began a relationship. The other was lesbian athlete Sara Lewinstein. Both Tom and Sara had longed to have a child, and they decided to have a child together. Their daughter, Jessica, was born in 1983. To protect Jessica's and her mother's legal rights, Tom and Sara married in 1985.
Death
In 1985, Waddell was diagnosed with AIDS. Although dogged by the IOC's lawsuit, Waddell lived to see the success of Gay Games II in 1986, and even participated, winning the gold medal in the javelin event.''Sports Illustrated'', July 27, 1987. ''The Death Of An Athlete'', by Dick Schaap Retrieved 24 January 2021 He died on July 11 the following year, aged 49, in San Francisco, California. His last words were "Well, this should be interesting."
Waddell's battle against HIV/AIDS is one of the subjects of the award-winning 1989 documentary '' Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt.'' His autobiography, ''Gay Olympian'', which he co-authored with sports writer
Dick Schaap
Richard Jay Schaap (September 27, 1934 – December 21, 2001) was an American sportswriter, broadcaster, and author.
Early life and education
Born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, and raised in Freeport, New York, on Long Island, Schaap began writ ...
, was published in 1996.
Tributes
In 2013, Waddell was inducted into the
Legacy Walk
The Legacy Walk is an outdoor public display on North Halsted Street in Chicago, Illinois, United States, which celebrates LGBT contributions to world history and culture. According to its website, it is "the world's only outdoor museum walk and y ...
, an outdoor public display which celebrates
LGBT
' is an initialism that stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. In use since the 1990s, the initialism, as well as some of its common variants, functions as an umbrella term for sexuality and gender identity.
The LGBT term is a ...
history and people.
In 2014, a street in San Francisco formerly named after
Lech Wałęsa
Lech Wałęsa (; ; born 29 September 1943) is a Polish statesman, dissident, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who served as the President of Poland between 1990 and 1995. After winning the 1990 election, Wałęsa became the first democratica ...
was, due to a homophobic comment by Wałęsa, renamed Dr. Tom Waddell Place. The street already featured the Tom Waddell Health Center.
In 2014, Waddell was one of the inaugural honorees in the
Rainbow Honor Walk
The Rainbow Honor Walk (RHW) is a walk of fame installation in San Francisco, California to honor notable lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) individuals from around the world "who left a lasting mark on society." Its bronze pla ...
, a
walk of fame
A hall, wall, or walk of fame is a list of individuals, achievements, or other entities, usually chosen by a group of electors, to mark their excellence or fame in their field. In some cases, these halls of fame consist of actual halls or muse ...
LGBTQ
' is an initialism that stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. In use since the 1990s, the initialism, as well as some of its common variants, functions as an umbrella term for sexuality and gender identity.
The LGBT term is a ...
people who have "made significant contributions in their fields."
See also
*
Homosexuality in sports
The lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other non-heterosexual or non-cisgender (LGBTQ+) community is prevalent within sports across the world.
There have been several notable outspoken homosexual athletes, including John Curry, Bill ...
*
Principle 6 campaign
The Principle Six campaign, also Principle 6, or P6, was launched in January 2014 as an Olympic protests of Russian anti-gay laws in conjunction with the 2014 Winter Olympics being held in Sochi, Russia. Principle 6 refers to the sixth principle ...