TRACK AND FIELD RACING THROUGH DARKNESS

ANCY STEVENS, 33, trains for the Gay Games with her running partner at 9,000 feet, high in the mountains of Colorado, where she has clocked a 22-minute, 30-second five-kilometer run (about a five-minute mile). An impressive Rocky Mountain landscape unfolds before her, though Stevens cannot see it.

Born, raised, and educated in Michigan, Stevens moved to Colorado in 1984 to be a ski bum and find herself, working as a dishwasher and skiing three days a week at Winter Park, which has a renowned ski program for the disabled. Before retiring from full-time skiing, she won two downhill gold medals at the 1988 Nationals for the Blind in Vale, and three silvers in cross-country skiing events at Ridder Rennet, Norway's annual sporting event for the disabled.

A more trying aspect of Stevens' life has been her search for information about lesbianism, "because there was nothing accessible in Braille." It was after a friend directed her to Womyn's Braille Press in Minnesota, and their extensive selection of audiotapes, that she could hear for the first time the work of Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and Jane Rule, as well as periodicals like Off Our Backs and Sojourner.

Stevens now lives in Frisco, a mountain community 80 miles west of Denver, where she runs living skills programs for people with disabilities. Her participation in the Gay Games' 5and 10-K races is thanks to New York's Achilles Running Club, which found her a running partner.

A grant from a cellular phone company now allows Stevens to cross-country ski (in set tracks) without a partner, relying on her cellular if she gets lost. "It's a little bit of fear, and a little bit of 'Oh, wow, I'm out here by myself with nobody to tell me what to do!"-ELISE HARRIS

SQUASH

HOMELAND

THE

ITH THE

ΤΕΑΜ

ROAR OF 65,000 SPECTATORS in her ears, Susan Greene and the American team entered the stadium last June as skydivers parachuted onto the field, and an Olympic medalist lit the torch

to open the 14th Games in Tel Aviv. "People were just screaming their heads off," recalls Greene. "That's probably what I'll remember the rest of my life."

Fourteenth Games? Tel Aviv? Last June? Though they're among the largest international games anywhere, the Maccabiah Games-like the Gay Gamessuffer from a lack of public recognition. First held in the British mandate of Palestine in 1932, the Maccabiahs have taken place in Israel every four years since 1957. "I call them the Jewish Olympics," says Greene. Greene, 31 and recently ranked 15th nationally by the United States Squash Racquets Association, is organizing the Gay Games squash tournament. "It's a British Empire sort of game," she said. Play-

Eric Washington is the New York editor of BLK and has contributed to The Village Voice and Metropolis. Freelance reporter Bob Nelson has contributed to The Boston Globe and The Advocate.

DALL

JALLS

DALLAS

ALLAS

LLAS

DALLAS

DALLA

ers from the United

Kingdom, Canada, and Australia are expected. Greene,

Every Athlete Has a

Story

inspired by gay squash clubs in Boston and Toronto, has founded a hometown entry, the New York Nicks. (A nick is when the ball simultaneously hits the wall and floor, and then dies.)

Greene hopes Gay Games can borrow another chapter from the 1993 Maccabiahs, where athletes traded uniforms, so that at the closing ceremonies it was hard to tell teammate from opponent. "You really feel like you're part of one big team," she says.-B.N.

FLAG FOOTBALL FAMILY

AFFAIR

AMES HOLLANDER DOES NOT RELISH his Gay Games flag football practice. "It's like going back to high school." However rough-and-tumble the world of flag football, Hollander can't say he's unprepared: The born-and-bred son of New Orleans comes from a family of five brothers. One played basketball, three played football (for Tulane, Southern Mississippi, and Louisiana State universities), and James is, as he puts it, "the gay black sheep." "When I was growing up," he says, "the punishment was always more sports!"

The past year has brought a more positive sports experience for Hollander, though organizing all the flag football games for Gay Games IV, he says, hasn't brought him any closer to his brothers. "I love my brothers dearly," he says, "but they don't understand how important this is to me or to the community." Occasionally the brothers can bond over a few sample plays, but James was disappointed at their tepid response. "I did this more for me than for them," he says, "I didn't do this to make myself seem more butch. I'm satisfying a lot of parts of me that I couldn't satisfy before."

DALLA

The Gay Games will be the scene for a family reunion of one variety, however: His lesbian cousin will be coming from Columbus, Ohio, with her lover and their baby. "It's better to have someone there who understands it, than someone who can't appreciate it," he muses.-E.H.

IP E P

CHEERLEADING

DISPENSER SI

HE FRESH-FACED MEN of pep squad Cheer Dallas will surely be the belles of the ball this June when they come to New York to support I Team Dallas. But while they are entertaining all of us at the Gay Games' opening and closI Iing ceremonies, team founder Ken Jorns insists they reI I main loyal to the Lone Star State. Cheer Dallas has bal|

looned to 55 members since it was founded in July 1993, and the squad is known to throw some of the biggest and best benefits in the city. Jorns, appropriately, keeps his feet off the ground: "There's so much negativity in our | community," he says. "Here we've got a positive force. It's a high for everybody."-E.H.

ON THE FLY: Cheer Dallas gets into positions.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JANA BIRCHUM