Going back to the essentials

A short history of Pitch Bitch: October 2002, the Sydney Gay Games were fast approaching and the sportingly-challenged staff at the Sydney Star Observer wanted a bit of an insider’s view of the Gay Games, from an athlete’s perspective. Being a seriously second rate soccer player, I was the closest thing they could find.

For those about as interested in sport as my colleagues, a pitch is a large rectangle of grass where soccer is played. And a bitch is, in this case, me.

Recently, a member of my soccer team, the world-famous Code Blue, lamented the fact that my column wasn’t really about her anymore. It used to be about us, she said. Now it’s about vaginal reconstruction and sperm and I don’t even know what else.

So, in keeping with the traditions and rules surrounding Pitch Bitch, here is an update of my team’s doings. I still struggle to make it to matches, we still win games, we still lose games, then we go to the pub.

And it was at the pub after a cold 2-1 loss to Waverley on Sunday when a Code Blue import called vaginas fannies. Like one former Sydney Star Observer staff member who talked to internet porn sites in a baby voice, it was both disturbing and weirdly sweet.

Anyway back to the roots of this column, the Sydney Gay Games: all that insanity, all those parties, all that financial mismanagement, all that sport, all those tourists. The first thing any of us said at the end of the Games was When’s the next one? Actually, some Sydney-siders might have said something like get out of my bed, or ouch, my throat hurts. For married two-bit athletes and triple party-goers like me, it was all about getting to Montreal in 2006.

How times change. Less than two years later, the Gay Games has well and truly fucked itself up. Since the Federation of Gay Games and Montr? have had a fight, the Montr? event promises to be small and mostly Canadian. The replacement Games in Chicago will be a chance for self-obsessed Americans to strut around wearing their medals and showing off their -˜roid muscles. No-one I know is planning to go to either event any more. And we’ll never see anything like it in Oxford Street again.