Written by:
Kate Goldsworthy and Kelsey Truman
Photographer:
Jason Jem
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this Issue of Curve:
Vol. 18#6
The first Olympic torch relay was held in 1936, but it wasn’t until 1968 that a woman, Mexican athlete Norma Enriqueta Basilio de Sotelo, lit the Olympic Cauldron. Since then, several women have ignited the flame, but few have been openly a part of the LGBT community (Ellen DeGeneres is one of these few—she bore the torch for Athens in 2004).
This year, lesbian scholar and journalist Helen Zia carried the torch in San Francisco. Zia has long been a voice for social change spanning a variety of causes, including civil, women’s and LGBT rights; as a Chinese-American lesbian, the intersection of Asian and queer identity in America is the focus of much of her work. Zia is a former executive editor of Ms. Magazine and the author of Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People.
Zia was personally selected to carry the torch by San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, who described the runners as people “of inspiration, courage and selflessness.” Other torch runners included Shirley Olivo, a member of the board on the San Francisco chapter of PFLAG, and John Caldera, a Navy veteran and member of the San Francisco Veteran Affairs Commission, who is gay and lives with HIV.
Runners carry the torch with a message in mind, often politically charged. Zia told CURVE, “There were 80 torch-runners. Every one of us had at least one or two causes, or more….I’m a human rights activist in a lot of arenas and I was also carrying the torch as a voice against the war in Iraq.” She ran partly in support of marriage equality, an issue of particular concern to her after her short-lived San Franciscan marriage in 2004.
Amid the controversy dogging the Beijing Olympics, Zia has been vocal in her defense of the relay. The decision for the Olympics to take place in China this year has outraged many human rights activists due to China’s abysmal human rights records. In particular, China’s annexation and control of Tibet has many activists enraged about the Olympic committee’s decision to honor Beijing with the opportunity to host the games.
Many were inspired to protest at torch-running sites worldwide; in France, protestors extinguished the flame five times, once as a wheelchair athlete carried the torch. Zia said, “I was disheartened and actually repulsed by what I saw in London and Paris. I think attacking people in wheelchairs is way across the line.”
Zia’s decision to participate in the controversial torch running came as an unwelcome surprise to many detractors of the Beijing Olympics. Asian American groups exploded in dissent on the Internet, with one disappointed commenter writing, “Of all people, I would have expected [Zia] to be sensitive to the struggles of the Tibetan people.”
Zia recently published an essay entitled “Why I Will Carry the Olympic Torch” in which she explains the reasons she felt her participation was justified. Zia spent five months in China on the Fulbright Scholar grant and found that her experience revealed a side of the Chinese people that activists removed from the immediate situation often fail to see.
“Being an American of Chinese descent, I grew up hearing constant critiques of the terrible Communist dictatorship. And as an open lesbian, my stay in China felt tenuous since, unlike the many explicit anti-gay laws in America, China doesn’t even recognize that we exist. These reasons might be enough to run as far from the Olympics as my middle-aged body can carry me,” Zia writes. “But my time in China gave me another perspective. I observed the wide-ranging diversity and openness of viewpoints and cultural expression that now exists among China’s 1.4 billion people. I met hundreds of Chinese for my research and was struck by how outspoken and opinionated they are and, yes, even critical of their government.”
Zia expressed concern that the activism against the Olympics, and the disruption of the torch-running in particular, has in a sense backfired. While the protests acted in the interest of human rights, they also moved in a direction completely counter to the message of peace that the act of torch-running is meant to symbolize. “I felt the discussion was getting so polarized that it was contrary to the spirit of why all of us were there to carry the torch,” Zia told CURVE.
In a way, Zia views her run as a form of protest in itself. She said, “If the dialogue around anything—whether it’s Tibet, Darfur, human rights in China, the Olympics, same-sex marriage—gets to the point where everybody’s polarized, then we may as well give up, join George W. Bush and say, ‘You’re either with me or against me.’”
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