* Charlie Carson was founding member of Team New York Aquatics and International Gay & Lesbian Aquatics, and past Federation of Gay Games board member.
I've been keeping a running tally of the word "vest" and it's up to three. I have at least two more.
It's not much of an exaggeration to say that Paul and I were on the phone every day for about 4 years as the swimming co-meet directors on behalf of Team New York Aquatics at Gay Games IV in 1994.
For that reason alone I'm honored to have been asked to speak today about Paul and his history with TNYA, the Gay Games, and International Gay & Lesbian Aquatics, or IGLA.
Just a little background -- I was one of two swimmers and a diver from New York who attended the first Gay Games in San Francisco in 1982. News about Gay Games I's success -- including both the self-confidence it was building up in individuals and the barriers it was breaking down in society -- spread quite quickly in large cities and not just within the LGBT community but through mainstream sports organizations like United States Masters Swimming.
I became the contact person for gay swimmers in New York -- the gay teams that already existed on the west coast would refer their friends to me and I began a roster of local names and addresses. Many of us were non-natives who'd come to New York for professional reasons or the "bright lights of Broadway" -- and so we weren't all tapped into the local swimming community, whether Masters or age group or college.
We were hearing that the Red Tide team was considered a bunch of radicals and free spirits and probably had the highest percentage of people who might be inclined to participate in Gay Games II in 1986, so several of us joined.
As the second Gay Games got closer, Eric Miji contacted various pools including CCNY so that our small subgroup could have some workouts together before the Games. Well, Paul worked at CCNY and it turned out he already knew about the Gay Games and had decided to go -- and that made it that much easier to get some specific pool time for Gay Games preparation.
As we got to know each other, Paul immediately stepped into the role of split-taking statistician and informal coach. In San Francisco, he attended the Gay Games coaches meetings and lined up our relays and worked with people like C.A. Hutton to discover athletic ability they never knew they had. Paul was also at the team leaders meeting when we decided we were having too much fun to wait another four years and to begin annual meets in 1987 -- those annual meets developed into the IGLA Championships.
After Gay Games II, we continued to swim with Red Tide for several years but as our gay and lesbian contact list grew it was inevitable we would begin a separate LGBT-identified team.
Paul was among those with the most mixed feelings about it -- Red Tide had been a wonderful home. But Paul coached us during the transition as we started the first workouts at the High School for the Humanities in the fall of '89 of the New York Aquatic Homosexuals -- otherwise known as "Nyah" -- although we used "Nigh-yuh" in polite company. Paul handled the paperwork for us to become our own Empire Masters club in February 1990.
The High School for the Humanities was where Gotham Volleyball played so it was kind of gay sports central in Chelsea but the pool was from another era and could barely hold us. Fortunately, Foster, Paul and others with Red Tide had the connections to get both "Nigh-yuh" and Red Tide into the remodeled John Jay College pool right when it opened -- and we started those workouts in March.
At the spring 1990 USMS Nationals in Los Angeles, we had a meeting of IGLA team leaders and Paul and I represented New York. The group decided it was time to formalize IGLA's structure. At IGLA's next meeting during Gay Games III in Vancouver that August, Paul's extensive knowledge about swimming rules had earned him respect such that people essentially drafted him to be one of IGLA's first two co-presidents, along with Allison Beezer of Seattle.
At the end of Gay Games III, New York was declared the host of the next games in 1994. Obviously, Paul was going to be heavily involved with that. Meanwhile, the name "Nyah" was reconsidered and we became Team New York Aquatics. Paul's familiarity with other team's organizational structures put him on a TNYA bylaws committee that also had Karen and Kate.
Concurrently, during Paul's 2-year term as an IGLA co-president he also helped develop IGLA's first bylaws. He was part of the group that helped secure IGLA's name in the International Swimming Hall of Fame's Walk of Fame -- something we considered huge because there was significant opposition to these new LGBT teams at the time, but Paul was among those attending the USMS conventions who helped others see that this wasn't just a lark -- we were serious about our sport. Paul was co-president during IGLA Championships in Los Angeles and Seattle. After two years, he stepped down in order to switch his focus to New York's Gay Games.
With TNYA's support, Paul and I became the official co-chairs of swimming. We attended countless New York in '94 sports meetings. He and Karen, Bruce Hayes and I also represented swimming on a committee that investigated and was eventually successful in shifting the originally announced dates by a week (that was a controversial issue... and we won).
I think Paul would agree the Gay Games aquatics competitions were the biggest challenge of our lives. New York hadn't hosted such an aquatics event in decades -- I think possibly never -- and Paul was in charge of the actual competition aspects. He had all the contacts at Riverbank, Rutgers and Asphalt Green when we were trying to figure out where the heck we could hold a meet for more than 1000 swimmers, plus diving, water polo and an open water swim.
He consulted with a long list of people like Lorraine Martinelli and Mike Ritter and the Galluzzis. Eventually and happily we landed at Asphalt Green. Paul came up with about 8 potential schedules and worked out a timeline based on each event's average at meets between 1000 and 1500 swimmers and in the end his calculations were astonishingly accurate -- we finished on time or ahead of schedule every day.
Despite some drawbacks -- including the botched start of the 800 freestyle and cancellation not once but twice of the open water swim -- Paul headed up a meet whose swimmers set 16 world, 31 U.S. and 3 British records, and a Swiss mark.
OK, at this point I have to say that every one of us, when we go -- our friends are going to laugh about what we screwed up. In Paul's case, that botched 800 freestyle -- which wasn't his fault but was his responsibility -- led to one of the hardest decisions TNYA ever had to make.
For whatever reason of burnout, Paul didn't take the time to work out the unfinished results the rest of the summer. As we started back up in the fall he began saying he meant to get around to it but now coaching was taking up too much of his time. Well, people around the world were still waiting for their medals. We had to relieve Paul of his coaching duties to force him to finish.
In a case like that, a lot of people would finish the particular project and resist if not completely walk away from future involvement with a group. But that wasn't Paul's nature. He remained a loyal member of the team and -- not only that -- proved of enormous help to our new head coach, Izhar Harpaz, through the next Gay Games in Amsterdam. Over the years he was instrumental in the ongoing success of our Hour Swim and was always available to help TNYA even when his chief coaching duties were elsewhere.
Gail Motyka was the team president during the Gay Games in New York. She wrote a paragraph about TNYA's 1994 team leaders in a newsletter and provided this perspective about Paul. Quote:
Paul. The bane of my existence. Divisive...yes. An administrative nightmare...absolutely. But Paul also has given tremendously to this team over the last 4 years and we are indebted to him for that. No one was there as consistently, to pick up that extra workout, coach the holidays that no one else wanted, attend those boring Empire meetings, carry around an astounding array of forms -- in a bag of astounding size -- and take splits endlessly -- and I mean endlessly. Thanks, Paul. We look forward to seeing you, at last, IN the pool, and without your vest.
Unquote. (That's four.)
Time passed and we invited Paul back to coaching TNYA for a while, then he took another break, and during the last several years he had become one of our key coaches again. He and I were personally spending a lot more time together again as he coached Baruch's Saturday afternoon workouts where I was taking attendance -- during which he constantly wanted to know what was going on with the Gay Games.
OK, some quick things and I know others will add more later:
- Also at Gay Games III in Vancouver in 1990 -- One of our fastest teammates, John Egan, fell while biking the day he landed in Vancouver and broke his shoulder, which was personally devastating. John had been pointing towards the Gay Games for a long time and would have challenged for medals but suddenly he had to overhaul what he hoped to get out of the week. Well, Paul put John on a freestyle relay late in the meet in which John swam one-armed butterfly. John wrote a letter to the team afterwards in which he singled out a couple of people for helping him get through the ordeal and Paul was one.
- We have skits at our gay meets -- in an event called the Pink Flamingo -- and New York is legendary for having 40 identical Marlo Thomases at Gay Games III. Yellow A-line dresses with flowers like on the backdrop of the Dating Game, black wigs with white headbands. (A number of people in the room were one of the Marlos -- could you raise your hands?) Well, for some reason after those Games, in our team awards Paul received the Jerome Robbins Most Promising New Choreographer Prize for his invaluable-if-unseen contribution to the Marlos. I have totally forgotten what that was for so if anyone else here knows...!
- More formally, at our annual meeting in November 1990, we presented Paul with TNYA's first annual Raul Companioni Award for the team's hardest worker for spearheading our efforts at the Gay Games.
- The next spring we produced a special newsletter with profiles of all the team members that we took with us to the 1991 IGLA Championships in Los Angeles. Everyone listed things like their favorite color, movie, ideal day, zodiac signs, dating availability. There were only 2 of us who did not know their zodiac sign -- Paul, of course ... and the other was -- Karen. You Fortouls...!
- Paul did a Pink Flamingo once. He and Karen both did at the Northwest Gay & Lesbian Sports Festival in Seattle in 1991 with me, John Goodwin and Buck Broker. We wore the Rudi Gernreich topless bathing suits that TNYA had worn in the Gay Pride Parade a few weeks before -- Karen wore a t-shirt so she was modestly attired. Paul joined in gladly and without any arm-twisting. There are incriminating photos in Foster's slide show.
- Paul talks about the Gay Games and his history in a great interview he did with Greg Campora in Team New York Aquatic's March 1995 newsletter. My favorite part is when Greg asks Paul if he enjoyed the Gay Games meet. Paul's answer is in parentheses -- Laugh. Pause. Laugh. Paul had a distinctive laugh that was a kind of a-HUH a-HUH. So: Pause. A HUH a HUH.
A quick list of what Paul handled for Gay Games IV:
- Lined up officials and other key volunteers and staff.
- Had two big boxes with a file on every swimmer and how they were registered in their home country, as we were determined to run the meet by the book.
- Supervised the one-meet registration application and fee with volunteers like Marcia Cleveland for swimmers like the fussy Germans who didn't like "all these rules."
- He worked with New York in '94 to supervise the HIV transmission and risk training sessions for the Asphalt Green staff.
- He tracked existing records so that we knew immediately when they were broken and supervised the data input group that included Ron Luce, Helen Lemay, and a dozen others.
- And he dealt with special cases such as the two under-18 year old swimmers in the youth program and our 3 hearing impaired Russians.
In recent years, Paul was very proud that the number of IGLA team members attending the annual USMS convention had grown so that they no longer fit at just one table at the banquet.
Paul had an incredible amount of good-natured patience. He was tease-able and he usually didn't get upset. It was rare that you'd see him get really angry. He put up with endless jokes about crunching data or his glasses or his vest because he was in on the joke. He knew that's just how he was and he seemed fine with it. And even if he did something that drove you crazy you couldn't stay mad at him long. "Paul, can we please do something simple like ten 50s on a minute just once? Please?"
I don't know what we would have done without him during those early years of our team. We would have done something, but it wouldn't have been the same, or as easy, or any better. He was the perfect New York swimmer to have come out of the closet right before Gay Games II because afterwards he helped us create something new and special. I know many of us feel that his death was so sudden it was like he was in an accident in which we didn't get a chance to let him know what he meant to us. I am sooo glad I called him the weekend after I got back from the Gay Games meeting last October and spoke with him when he was home before his final hospital stay -- we even laughed about something; I can't remember what but I do remember thinking how glad I was he could laugh.
Team New York Aquatics lost a lot of members to AIDS in the late '80s-early '90s before current treatments were developed. It's been a long time since we lost any of the original team members like Paul and in the other cases the illnesses lingered so that people could really visit and have some sense of closure. This was different, and it's been hard, and I can't imagine what it was like for him.
To conclude -- Regardless of one's feelings about religion, I have envisioned this scenario of St. Peter ushering Paul onto the other side of the pearly gates back in December and Paul immediately volunteering to help supervise and time a group including Rick Reynolds, John Egan, Cliff Myrbo, Tito Villar, Raul Companioni and Carlos Leon as they went swimming through the clouds.
It's just February so they're probably still waiting for their medals, but... [kiss to the sky]
One thing more -- Team New York Aquatics just had its annual meeting and that's when we give out our awards. This year the board decided to present the President's Award for outstanding service posthumously to Paul, and they'd like to present it to his family.
Our next speakers will be the parents of Red Tide, Foster de Jesus and Jane Alpert. Jane will speak first.
3/13/2008