NEPAL: Country prepares to host its first sports festival for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people

Record ID: 276828

  • Title: NEPAL: Country prepares to host its first sports festival for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people
  • Date: 11th October 2012
  • Summary: PARTICIPANTS TRAINING FOR PAGEANT SHOW TRAINER LOOKING ON PARTICIPANT WALKING AND POSING
  • Embargoed: 26th October 2012 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Nepal
  • Country: Nepal
  • Topics: Sports
  • Reuters ID: LVA3A9K9KHW3LG773IS6D0INDU9P
  • Story Text: Nepal on Thursday (October 11) geared up to host the first Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) sports festival.
    The two-day event is set to start on Friday (October 12) at the national stadium and will feature sports like track and field, volleyball, football, martial arts and tennis.
    Organisers said more than 200 Nepali LGBT amateur athletes and more than 150 foreign athletes from over 17 countries would be participating.
    Sunil Babu Pant, the chairman of the Games, said all the participants have embraced the sports festival.
    "The whole LGBT fraternity of Nepal are really excited, some have already arrived in Kathmandu, even few days earlier, some are already taking their bus to reach here," he said.
    Homosexuality remains a largely taboo subject in Nepal, a conservative nation where homosexuals were once arrested or beaten, but it has become increasingly gay friendly since emerging from a decade-long Maoist-led civil war in 2006.
    Participant Bhakti Shah, who plays football, says his team will be competing with another group from Kathmandu, and two other international ones.
    "We are doing this to send a message that these people are capable of participating in such games," he said.
    Pant, who also runs Nepal's leading gay rights group, the Blue Diamond Society, said he hoped the Games would set a precedent for international events not to discriminate against LGBT people.
    "Because of being gay, lesbian, transgender, people have been discriminated, they are being discriminated, I know it's not being reported but they are discriminated from Nepal's Olympic Team in order to participate in the national team or international events, but also largely even today, the Olympics, the international Olympic discriminates on the grounds of gender," he said.
    Pant said that the aim of the sports festival was to help boost the confidence of LGBT people.
    "If you organise LGBT Sports Festival in Nepal it will help boost the-self esteem of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people of Nepal," he added.
    The festival also includes a beauty pageant, although Pant said the point was to take part, not necessarily to win.
    "As it is so much not about competition, but it's more about message, more about the solidarity, more about supporting the event and also the supporting the community here," he said.
    In Nepal, same sex marriages have taken place in public though such unions still remain unrecognised by law. Pride parades and gay beauty contests have also been held.
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