coaches, volunteers, and visitors. They will broadcast the games, provide resources for LGBT people, lectures on human rights, promote cultural events throughout the games, including exhibitions and photos of past LGBT Olympians. Instead of hiding the Pride House away somewhere, this time it will have a place of prominence along Ipanema Beach, perhaps the most famous stretch of sand in the world. No more hiding! Just like in the overall history of LGBT people, dreadful things have been done to athletes who have chosen to come out. Because of this precedent, very few have actually done so before their games, and of the ones who have, most have been fairly recent. From Nazi concentration camps to gender tests and revocation of medals, the LGBT history at the Olympics has mostly been a sad one. Again, until recent history that is. The first documented out Olympian was a German runner named Otto Peltzer, who competed in the 1928 games in Amsterdam. Peltzer would reach wide spread fame in Germany for his athletic prowess on the track, but unfortunately his sexuality later made him a target of the Nazi party and he was jailed several times and released and told never to set foot in Germany again. Years later, while the Nazis were still in power, they asked him to come back home and promised to drop all charges against him for Otto Peltzer homosexuality.
Unfortunately, we know too well how they operated. As soon as he reentered Germany, he was promptly arrested and taken to a concentration camp, where he was lucky to survive his time there, until the allied forced liberated the camp in 1945. Back in the day, society had such twisted ideas about sports, that women were not even allowed to compete in the games until 1928 in Amsterdam, and then only in track and field events. Because Alice Milliat of this overt sexism, a French woman named Alice Milliat developed the Women’s Olympics but was eventually forced to cancel the games because of pressure from the International Olympic Committee which sued her to stop calling her games Olympics. One of the first athletes to bridge the gap from the Women’s Olympics to the official Olympic Games was a Polish born woman named Stella Wa l s i e w i c z , who despite living in the US competed for her native Poland because the US refused to give her citizenship until 1947. During the Helen Stephens 1928 games, an American runner beat her and the Polish team cried foul, claiming that the American, Helen Stephens, was actually a man. A gender test was undertaken and proved the