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A scene from the Gay Games Hong Kong 2023 dragon boat races on the Shing Mun River in Sha Tin. Hong Kong missed an opportunity to promote its diversity, tolerance and inclusion because a minority of bigots railed against its hosting of the games. Photo: Jonathan Wong
Opinion
Then & Now
by Jason Wordie
Then & Now
by Jason Wordie

Gay Games 2023: the cabal of bigots who stopped Hong Kong sending a message of diversity, tolerance and inclusion to the world

  • Hong Kong could have projected a positive, outward-looking vibe with its hosting of the Gay Games 2023. Instead, an anti-LGBT cabal declaimed against the event
  • In medieval England public nuisances could be silenced with a brank’s bridle, a device that forced the offender’s mouth shut and suppressed their tongue
Jason Wordie
Jason Wordie
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Well, that’s finally over and done with. After several years of periodic fuss, fanfare and a pandemic-caused delay, the Gay Games have been and gone.

According to those who took part – and spectators – the event was an enjoyable success. Doubtless, some extra revenue flowed into the coffers of Hong Kong’s apparently beleaguered hotel industry, food-and-beverage outlets saw a welcome uptick in takings and various airlines scored a few additional bums on seats.

A sudden influx of visitors, flush with “pink dollar” disposable income, should have been welcomed; every little bit helps, after all, in these times when international tourists are thin on the ground. Right along the line, everyone benefited.

And guess what! Contrary to the dire prognostications of Hong Kong’s more vocal Chicken Littles, the sky did not fall in, either during the Games or in the weeks that have followed their controversy-free conclusion.

The opening ceremony of the XI Gay Games 2023 at Queen Elizabeth Stadium in Wan Chai, Hong Kong. Photo: Edmond So

Neither has any further and measurable decline in local moral standards occurred – at least as far as this writer has been able to observe. Life has gone on – just as it had done before. Who’d have thought it?

Properly handled, Hong Kong’s hosting of the Gay Games – the first time this open-to-all series of sporting events has been held in Asia – should have offered the outside world a nod towards tolerance, inclusion and diversity.
Members of the Democratic Alliance for Betterment of Hong Kong, including lawmakers Holden Chow (centre), promote “traditional family values” on the eve of the Gay Games’ opening. Photo: Yik Yeung-man

Such sentiments would, perhaps, have clawed back a little of Hong Kong’s once vaunted “Asia’s World City” mantle and put the naysayers and their “smears” and “distortions” to rout – at least temporarily.

Display of a positive, outward-looking vibe would help – as we are all constantly abjured to do – to tell yet another “good Hong Kong story” to the world.

But no, that happy series of outcomes was not to be. Never slow to miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity, Hong Kong’s cabal of unrepentant bigots and other self-appointed guardians of “traditional family life” could not resist the urge to rant and declaim on the alleged perfidiousness of it all, and proclaim how “dirty money” was unwelcome.

Thomas Leung In-sing (centre), who leads a pressure group, and lawmakers including Junius Ho Kwan-yiu ahead of a press conference on November 1 at which they called for a ban on the Gay Games. Photo: Edmond So
Along with pious pronouncements about “traditional” Chinese morality and the Christian institution of marriage, that all-purpose bogey – the event’s supposed threat to national security – was dramatically invoked by one reliably all-purpose local legal academic, and echoed by several others of similar ilk.

This last-ditch, rather pathetic attempt to shut down any further discussion is not to be marvelled at. After all, these sorts of people instinctively know – as did others in earlier strange and febrile times, elsewhere in the world – that their safety resides in being “more royalist than the king, and more Catholic than the pope”.

And so it is in contemporary Hong Kong, where what passes for rational debate in such matters just becomes more shrilly discordant and deranged with every passing month, especially now that peace, calm and order have been (allegedly) restored after the unfortunate events of “2019 And All That” irrevocably changed – some would say catastrophically diminished – Hong Kong’s once diverse, proudly pluralistic civil society.
The closing ceremony of the Gay Games 2023 at Queen Elizabeth Stadium in Wan Chai. Photo: Edmond So
Listening to these ill-informed ravings about LGBTQ matters – this particular professor never misses an opportunity to pick up the cudgels on behalf of homophobic bigotry – makes one recollect an earlier, quaint-sounding speech crime that was a punishable offence for several centuries; that of being a common scold.

That fearful medieval penalty, the brank’s bridle, was devised to deal with perpetually railing public nuisances; this contraption forced the offender’s mouth shut and suppressed their tongue, rendering speech agonising or impossible.

After more than a century’s disuse, being a common scold was finally struck down as an offence in England and Wales in 1972.

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