Gay curling league are a hot thing in Canada, with 12 LGBT-oriented leagues playing the game involving brooms, curling stones and ice. A feature on the leagues made Page 1 of the New York Times this week.
Gay curling leagues have blossomed in recent decades, highlighting a distinctly Canadian aspect of modern gay life. The country’s oldest gay curling league, Rotators, was started in Toronto in 1962 and went publicly gay six years later. Its founders were largely men who worked as train porters.
“They were the flight attendants of the railway,” said Murray Leaning, the president of Rotators and Riverdale, the nation’s largest gay curling league, comprising 56 teams.
Canada has 12 gay curling leagues with hundreds of four-member teams. The leagues take a communal pastime beloved for its traditions of friendly competition and drinking and add campy humor and flamboyantly themed tournaments, or “bonspiels” in curling lingo. …
During one recreational tournament, players dressed as Disney villainesses and as the sartorial embodiment of a “Sound of Music” lyric: girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes. In Winnipeg, Manitoba, players have dressed as characters from “The Golden Girls” and “The Wizard of Oz.” This year, the Riverdale tournament had a “shipwrecked” theme.
The names of some of the teams, playing off curling lingo, are the best:
- Don't Curl for Me Argentina
- While You Were Sweeping
- Fruit of the Broom
- Golden Curls
- Bailey’s on Ice
- Another Round…uh…OK!
- Sweeping Beauties
- Dykes on Brooms
- 50 Sheets of Gay
- You Can't Sweep with Us
- We Swept with your Boyfriend
- Shooting Blanks
- Hurry, I'm Hard
- Better From Behind
- Sheet Faced
- Is It In?
- Sweep Child O' Mine
One more reason to love Canada.
