S.F. Ties Bid for Olympics to Rights for Homosexuals

The Board of Supervisors, perhaps ending this city’s hopes of hosting the 1996 Summer Olympics, has demanded that the U.S. Olympic Committee allow homosexuals to use the term Gay Olympics in their own version of the Games.

The demand was one of several conditions that the board set forth Monday night before San Francisco would agree to host the games. Other demands include a commitment that the U.S. Olympic Committee place a homosexual on its executive board, and that the committee support congressional legislation to remove barriers to homosexuals who want to immigrate to this country.

“There’s a chance that this could present a problem,” Olympic spokeswoman Gayle Plant said of the conditions.

San Francisco is one of four U.S. cities being considered by the U.S. Olympic Committee as the U.S. entry to host the Summer Games in 1996. The others are Nashville, Atlanta and Minneapolis.

But while 45 suburban cities in the Bay Area endorsed the plan to bring the games here, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, backed by newly elected Mayor Art Agnos, voted 6-5 late Monday night to condition its bid to host the Games on the demands.

“They’ll think we’re nuts,” state Sen. Quentin Kopp (I-San Francisco), whose district includes San Francisco and San Mateo counties and who is a main proponent of bringing the games here, said of San Francisco’s demands.

Agnos and others who supported the Monday vote said the door remains open to the Games in 1996. But as a result of the supervisors’ vote, proponents of San Francisco’s bid were considering resubmitting it with San Jose or Oakland as the host city, or dropping it altogether.

The supervisors’ vote comes only six months after then-San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein placed the city in the running by submitting a tentative bid to bring the games here. Before the proposal could proceed, the U.S. Olympic Committee required a vote of confidence from the supervisors.

But Agnos, in only his third month in office, said he would veto a weakened resolution that simply requested--but did not demand--that U.S. Olympic officials consider taking a stand supportive of homosexuals.

“He’s not in favor of welcoming the Olympics so long as it has what appears to be discriminatory policies,” an Agnos spokesman said.

The issue has taken on proportions of a major civic dispute here, with a newspaper columnist sharply criticizing the mayor, and a deluge of phone calls to City Hall, particularly during the just-completed winter games in Calgary, urging that officials drop the demands.

But in a city where homosexual rights play an important role in politics, the U.S. Olympic Committee incurred the ire of gay leaders by suing to bar the San Francisco-based organizers of the “Gay Olympics” from using the word Olympics. That led to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last year that the U.S. Olympic Committee had exclusive control of the word.

Lawyers for the Olympic Committee, hoping to recoup court costs, deepened the anger among local officials by placing a lien on the home of the main organizer of the Gay Olympics, Tom Waddell, a physician and a former Olympic athlete who placed sixth in the decathlon in 1968 in Mexico City.

Olympic officials left the lien intact even as Waddell was dying of AIDS, removing it only after his death and never collecting their costs.

“We don’t want to wait and wait and wait until it’s convenient to deal with these issues,” said Supervisor Harry Britt said, who led the fight to include the demands in this city’s bid. He had failed to line up enough votes for a similar resolution last year when Feinstein was in office.