Did anyone else notice that one gold medalist’s private life was ignored?

Gay Australian diver Matthew Mitcham was a gold medalist in Beijing, but apparently that didn’t justify NBC showing his longterm boyfriend rooting him on.

The 2008 Olympic Games were quite a spectacle. The opening ceremonies — with all the synchronized drumming, special effects and masses of dancers and athletes — offered China a showcase for its new capitalist face. The games themselves were exciting as usual and I suspect for many LGBT folks a chance to let our inner jocks out to play.

Watching some of the competitions, I was struck by the incredible athleticism of the participants. Needless to say, as a gay man I was also struck by the parade of athletic flesh that crossed my HDTV screen, with the diving competition a bastion of skimpy suits and washboard abs.

In the final days of the event, as Matthew Mitcham made his final dive to scoop the gold medal from the Chinese competitor, I was thrilled. Mitcham, an openly gay Australian diver, emerged from the pool with a wide grin and a breathless excitement.

I waited for the cameras to capture his partner in the crowd, who was there cheering him on. In other events, girlfriends, relatives and trainers were shown sharing in the elation of the wins, but strangely, NBC showed no such image for Mitcham. Instead we saw him smiling and the Chinese diver crestfallen as he fell to second place.

Why no mention of his sexual orientation? Why no shot of his partner, Lachlan? Of all the athletes in the games, barely a dozen were openly gay, and of those Mitcham is the only openly gay man — and a gold medalist! Why is that not worthy of mention on NBC?

China is very big on impressions. Their opening ceremony was choreographed and rehearsed for months; the car traffic was cut by 90 percent in the city to bring Beijing’s choking pollution down to less opaque levels; roadside slums were covered with large posters hung from scaffolds and walls to hide them from the visitors. Even the girl who was to sing the opening song was hidden from view because she was not pretty enough to represent China.

Beijing wanted to make sure that the image that went out of the Olympics was picture perfect. Did that include censoring any stories about people who would be considered undesirable in China? I suspect that was part of the reason.

NBC, like most American TV networks, typically show LGBT people as either victims of a disease or at the center of a controversy. That is the kind of thinking that leads to the invisibility of openly gay people in many walks of life. To show this healthy Australian athlete in the arms of his partner would present him as behaving like any other person who just won an Olympic medal, but the sheer ordinariness of the scene is too politically hot for the network.

Showing LGBT people behaving like everyone else might make the network seem like they didn’t see anything wrong with being gay. Though there is no written policy to that effect, I suspect giving America and the world a glimpse of a happy, out gay man and his partner is too much for them. After all, where is the “news value” in showing that? Maybe if his partner was dying of AIDS… now that’s a story!

   
This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition August 29, 2008.