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Game On In Vienna

Game On In Vienna

EuroGames 2024 celebrated unity in diversity, with a rainbow of athletic talent and a whole lot of glitter…

By Doug Wallace

Vienna doesn’t really need an excuse to show the gays a good time, having been a landmark city for progressive thinkers with respect to sexuality since the late 19th century. But the 2024 EuroGames – a multi-sports event celebrating diversity in sexual orientation, sex characteristics and gender identity – definitely took the torte.

Starting with a turn for the wurst – Conchita Wurst, that is. Who better to headline opening night at the Karlsplatz town square than this Austrian singer, drag queen and LGBTQ+ advocate? No one will ever forget the magnitude of that famous beard when she won the Eurovision Song Contest in front of 195 million TV viewers in 2014. The song wasn’t bad, but the big win was truly for the global queer representation. 

Similar to the Gay Games but different in both scope and regional focus, the EuroGames have a simple goal: to create a safe place for people to come together to play sports, regardless of orientation, identity, age or skill level. It has been held annually since 1992, except in years when the Gay Games are held, which are every four years. 

Game On In Vienna

“Sport unites us all,” said Markus Ornig, a member of the Vienna State Parliament, during an opening ceremonies event. “And the EuroGames show that Vienna is a place where everyone can live freely. Enjoy the fact that you are – in the next few days – not a minority on the edge of society. You are in the spotlight.” It’s always nice to hear these kinds of words coming from the mouths of politicians.

This year, about 3,000 registrants took part in 31 sports – ranging from racquet sports, swimming and rowing, volleyball and basketball, to bridge, chess, climbing and roller derby. The variety seems enlightening, almost toning down the seriousness that competition can generate. Canada was well represented, with 21 Canadian athletes taking part in 11 sports, including volleyball, swimming, track and field, tennis and more. 

Not only did my head spin off with all this sports immersion – the fittest people everywhere you look – I also got a chance to check out Vienna’s queer culture. 

Game On In Vienna

This is a city that since 2015 has had same-sex pedestrian-crossing lights – some two men, others two women, each with little hearts – for both Stop and Go. Other European cities like Hamburg, Frankfurt and Madrid have installed similar lights. Vienna was an early tackler of discrimination, establishing the Vienna Anti-Discrimination Centre for LGBTIQ Affairs (WASt) in 1998. And given the forthrightness of stars like Conchita and drag queens like Candy Licious, it’s no wonder that Vienna’s annual Rainbow Parade plays out in the opposite direction to regular traffic on the renowned Ringstrasse boulevard.

“I think that spending 12 hours in heels is a really good sport!” Candy Licious told me with a few big blinks and a breathless laugh. As a member of the EuroGames organization team, she was definitely heels-on-the-ground – and I’d swear she’s 10 feet tall. “I’ve been doing workshops with some of the leads at the different sports venues about what is gender, what is discrimination,” she said. “I work with people outside of the bubble and give them the opportunity to ask me: what does it mean to be queer or non-binary? What does Pride mean? What does LGBTQ mean? In order to teach companies not to ‘rainbow wash’ things.”

Candy has been part of Vienna’s queer community for more than 10 years, volunteering and participating in numerous outreach programs. “I work with an organization that helps LGBTQ refugees and I’m also a sex educator,” she said. “I also go to schools and do workshops with children about sex education. My whole life revolves around equality. Our rights are not set in stone. That’s why I’m doing what I can.”

Game On In Vienna

I went to a bathhouse…and kept my clothes on the whole time
You wouldn’t think a morning tour of an empty bathhouse would be that interesting, but you’d be wrong. On a gay walking tour – yes, that exists – the first stop was the Kaiserbrundl Men’s Sauna, built in 1889. Just us and the cleaners.

This super-famous bathhouse, in operation as a gay sauna since 1990, is pretty big at 1,700 square metres across four floors. It’s more of a social club than a bathhouse, really, complete with a bar and restaurant. But it is the architecture and artwork that make it part of the grand tour, the Moorish style lending a Moroccan, labyrinthian feel. 

Scandalously, one of the royal Habsburgs was a regular visitor back in the day when the spa was frequented by everyone. Archduke Ludwig Viktor, the youngest brother of Emperor Franz Joseph I, was apparently slapped by another patron for unwelcome touching. “Luziwuzi,” as he was known, was thereafter banished to Salzburg. Such was royal life in the late 1800s.

Game On In Vienna

Vienna’s gaybourhood is near the Naschmarkt – the night market, which connects the 4th and the 6th districts of the city. We wandered the market and the shops around Gumpendorfer Street, before popping into The Café Savoy for lunch. Vienna was a pioneer in coffeehouse culture, since the mid-1600s, and this now-gay hotspot looks very much like it did when it opened in 1896. I mean, the mirrors have to be the largest outside of Versailles. 

We also managed a spin through the Albertina Modern Museum – there are so many excellent art museums in Vienna, it would take a week to visit them all properly. We settled for The Beauty of Diversity, a show comprising mainly women and LGBTQ+ artists that lends visibility to the marginalized and the divergent, with a mix of styles and media. A couple of hours flew by, the equal-rights themes conveniently blending right in with the EuroGames credo.

Game On In Vienna

My highlight of the sporting events came with a morning on the Danube River taking in the rowing. The scene was so romantic and summery. And we were watching the event from a boat ourselves, trying to stay out of the way – and failing, the wind blowing us almost too close to the action a couple of times. We pitched up at the dock of the Vienna Rowing Club to let even more of the EuroGames camaraderie rub off on us. Hanging out with athletes always makes me feel sporty, the rowing singlets an added bonus, of course.

While the Paris Olympics served up quite the show – feats of physical skill and nerves of steel – the Vienna EuroGames and its sense of inclusion and acceptance gets my vote any day. 


DOUG WALLACE is an international travel and lifestyle writer, photographer and custom-content authority, principal of Wallace Media and editor-publisher of TravelRight.Today. He can be found beside buffet tables, on massage tables and table-hopping around the world.

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