Tom Waddell next to the original Gay Olympic Games poster, showing Olympic covered due to the lawsuit over the name.
School period
College/University
Gallery of Thomas Waddell
263 Alden St, Springfield, MA 01109, USA
Waddell attended Springfield College in Massachusetts on a track scholarship.
Gallery of Thomas Waddell
185 S Orange Ave, Newark, NJ 07103, USA
Waddell attended medical school at New Jersey College of Medicine (now New Jersey Medical School), and in 1965 undertook his medical internship at Beth El Hospital, Brooklyn.
Waddell attended medical school at New Jersey College of Medicine (now New Jersey Medical School), and in 1965 undertook his medical internship at Beth El Hospital, Brooklyn.
Gay Olympian: The Life and Death of Dr. Tom Waddell
(Tom Waddell perhaps did more to flout gay stereotypes tha...)
Tom Waddell perhaps did more to flout gay stereotypes than any other American. He was not effeminate; he was a world-class athlete. He was also a pheneomenon - a revelation to mainstream America when he appeared with his lover in People and on ABC's 20/20 when he was dying of AIDS. Now, celebrated sports writer Dick Schaap teams up with Waddell to offer an inspiring biography.
Thomas Waddell was an American physician, who specialized in infectious diseases. He is also remembered as a decathlete who competed in the Olympic Games in Mexico City in 1968, and as a homosexual who founded the Gay Games. Waddell also authored "Gay Olympian: The Life and Death of Dr. Thomas Waddell", which was published after his death.
Background
Ethnicity:
Thomas Waddell was born to a German-American family.
Thomas Waddell (born Thomas Flubacher) was born on November 1, 1937 in Paterson, New Jersey, United States to a Catholic German-American family.
His parents separated when he was in his teens, and at the age of fifteen he went to live with Gene and Hazel Waddell, for whom he did chores; they adopted him six years later. The Waddells were former vaudeville acrobats and encouraged Tom to take up gymnastics.
Education
Tom Waddell excelled in athletics in high school.
Waddell attended Springfield College in Massachusetts on a track scholarship. Originally majoring in physical education, he switched to pre-medicine following the sudden death of his best friend and co-captain of the gymnastics team, an event that moved him deeply. At Springfield, he competed on the gymnastics and football teams. In the summer of 1959, Tom worked at a children's camp in western Massachusetts.
Waddell attended medical school at New Jersey College of Medicine (now New Jersey Medical School).
Waddell traveled on a U.S. State Department-sponsored track and field tour of Africa in 1962. In 1965 he undertook his medical internship at Beth El Hospital, Brooklyn.
Later, drafted into the Army in 1966, Waddell became a preventive-medicine officer and paratrooper. Entering a course in global medicine, he protested when he found out that he would be shipped to Vietnam. Expecting a court-martial, he was instead unexpectedly sent to train as a decathlete for the 1968 Olympics. At the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, Waddell placed sixth among the 33 competitors. He broke five of his own personal records in the ten events.
After discharge from the army, Waddell undertook medical residencies at Georgetown University and Montefiore Medical Center in The Bronx.
Waddell established his private practice on 18th Street in the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco in 1974. His medical background enabled him to find jobs easily and in exotic locales. He also served in the Middle East as medical director of the Whittaker Corporation from 1974 through 1981. Part of his job entailed serving as personal physician for a Saudi prince and a Saudi businessman and he eventually became the team physician for the Saudi Arabian Olympic team at the 1976 Montreal Olympics.
In the 1980s Waddell was employed at San Francisco's Central Emergency facility; after his death, it was named after him as Tom Waddell Health Center.
In addition, he founded the Gay Olympics in 1982 in San Francisco. The international sporting event was later renamed the Gay Games after the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) sued Waddell for using the word "Olympic" in the original name.
After testing positive in 1986 for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, Waddell relinquished his position as chief physician at the Central Emergency facility in San Francisco. He died from AIDS on July 11, 1987 in San Francisco, California. His last words were: "Well, this should be interesting".
(Tom Waddell perhaps did more to flout gay stereotypes tha...)
1996
Religion
Thomas F. Waddell was born in a Catholic family.
Membership
Thomas F. Waddell was a board member of the northern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Connections
In the summer of 1959, Tom Waddell worked at a children's camp in western Massachusetts, where he met his first lover, socialist Enge Menaker, then a 63-year-old man. They remained close for the rest of Menaker's life, which ended in 1985 when he was 90 years old.
While Waddell worked at Stanford in 1970, he met Lee Brian, with whom he had a five-year relationship.
In 1975, Waddell met landscape designer Charles Deaton, 12 years his senior, and they became lovers. An October 11, 1976 issue of People magazine featured the couple in a cover article. They were the first gay couple to appear on the cover of a major national magazine.
In 1981, while founding the Gay Games, Waddell met two people with whom he formed major relationships. One was public relations man and fundraiser Zohn Artman, with whom he fell in love and began a relationship. The other was lesbian athlete Sara Lewinstein. Both Tom and Sara had longed to have a child, and they decided to have a child together. Their daughter, Jessica, was born in 1983. To protect Jessica's and her mother's legal rights, Tom and Sara married in 1985.