T A B L E_T A L K How useful are guidebooks? Discuss your experiences with books and travel in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y The view from Japan By Dave McCombs It's the economy, not the morality (08/20/98) Everest controversy Weston DeWalt's latest response The co-author of "The Climb" responds to Jon Krakauer's most recent comments in Salon about the Everest tragedy of May 10, 1996 (08/20/98) The view from Europe Clinton's Achilles penis and other reactions (08/19/98) The mother of all road trips By Melanie Goldman Bouncing, climbing and kayaking through Chile to win the Camel Trophy (08/18/98) The truth about guidebooks By Dawn MacKeen That 1998 guide has all the latest information, right? Wrong. (08/17/98) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives		AN ARKANSAN IN AMSTERDAM REPORTS ON THE PHYSICAL -- AND EMOTIONAL -- REVELATIONS OF GAY GAMES V. - - - - - - - - - - BY REBECCA BRYANT | When you're 30 and haven't been to Europe, insecurity may gnaw but only as your friends circle, wine glasses atwirl, to reminisce about hiking the Pyrenees. When you've reached 40, still without a pilgrimage to the cultural capitals of the West, and when you hail from the hinterlands of the U.S., another type of insecurity sets in: that of being an American clodhopper in Europe. That was my state of mind as I set out three weeks ago for Amsterdam to attend Gay Games V. I knew that I wasn't completely hopeless. Friends had tipped me about how to avoid sticking out like a sore American thumb -- leave the Nikes behind. Plus, I wasn't beginning the trip from ground zero, someplace like Springdale. The Utne Reader had awarded my departure point, Fayetteville, the title of Most Enlightened City in Arkansas. Still, it was fortunate that I had designed into the excursion a side trip. When I arrived at La Guardia airport, my friend David Kramer, rogue professor of English, whisked me off to Ithaca, N.Y. Crowned the Most Enlightened City in the entire U.S., Ithaca, I realized, would be the perfect gateway to that blossom of Western civilization, Amsterdam. During our five-hour drive to the Finger Lakes region, I confessed my insecurity. "My dear Rebecca," came David's gallant response, "the Dutch have seen everything from the super rich looking for complicated sex to the super poor looking for complicated highs. They won't think anything of an Arkansas lesbian in tennis shoes." Several days later, adrift in air currents over the Atlantic, I began to ponder why I was going to the Gay Games. I don't sport a rainbow sticker on my car. I don't belong to gay and lesbian organizations. When a friend gave me a book about lesbians at midlife, I yawned and tucked it away in a bookcase. But for this trip, I had actually conducted research. I knew that Dr. Tom Waddell, an Army physician, had founded the Games more than a decade after his own experience as a decathlete in the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. Disillusioned by the intense nationalism and by the obsessive focus on winning, Waddell had based his alternative venue for gay and lesbian athletes upon the principles of inclusion, participation and personal best. Waddell also had a more subversive objective. By parading gay and lesbian athletes aglow with sweat and esprit de corps before the world, he hoped these wholesome images would outmuscle drag queens and bull dykes for space in the collective psyche. Waddell named the 1982 San Francisco event -- where 1,400 athletes competed in 11 sports -- the Gay Olympic Games. In a snit, the U.S. Olympic Committee obtained a restraining order, barring use of the word "Olympic," despite their previous indifference toward such happenings as the Dog Olympics and the Beer Olympics. Waddell officiated at Gay Games II, again in San Francisco, before dying of AIDS. In 1990, Vancouver, B.C., hosted the Games. In 1994, 11,000 athletes from 45 countries traveled to New York City, which estimated the economic impact at $400 million. Sixteen hours after take-off, I am sitting at a table in Leidseplein Square, ordering a beer. Gay Games banners and posters showing the outline of a red tulip hooked to a pink triangle plaster the city. Two groups of marauding musicians pass through the crowded plaza, already musical with the twining cadence of many languages. Soon a throng surrounds a new arrival -- a street performer sitting atop a 10-foot-high unicycle. The performer lures a bespectacled, becamerad Pakistani away from his wife's side and persuades the man to light and hold aloft a torch. Against the background of the neo-Renaissance Stadsschauwburg Theatre, the performer bows, stretching a hand toward the Pakistani, "An advertisement for the Gay Games." The setting sun flirts with Amsterdam, embossing the narrow cobble and brick streets with gold. Who needs Nikes, I wonder, when the city itself fits like a pair of old shoes? In the days preceding the Opening Ceremony, Amsterdam, which has been under the sleeping spell of summer vacation, begins to waken and send gezellig -- a Dutch vibe that conducts good times -- rippling through the Gay Games. At the same time, the Gay Games, centered at the expansive opera house (now renamed Friendship Village), begin to coalesce into the kinetic, creative energy that is unique to queer culture, and it ripples out into Amsterdam -- where the two forces meet in the magic of authentic revelry that puts Disney in its third-rate place. For once, we see what it would be like to live in a queer world. Gay men would make sure that everyone had fun, and lesbians, doing most of the work, would handle politics and practical matters. N E X T+P A G E | Olympic Gods and Mr. Cockring