My personal best: competing in his first Gay Games, renowned Philadelphia screenwriter Ron Nyswaner reports on the challenges and colors of Sydney 2002. (Gay Games).

Imagine you have trained for 22 months to run your first marathon (that's 26.2 miles). When you arrive near dawn at the start line--eager, with a knotted stomach--you learn your race has been canceled due to quickly rising summer temperatures. You congregate with chagrined fellow runners chanting "mar-a-thon, mar-a-thon," clapping hands, and stomping the floor. A protest is mounted, evoking the spirit of an ACT UP rally. A lawyer, a nurse, and a writer prepare a manifesto. The race authorities are confronted by determined, articulate, lawsuit-threatening athletes. A compromise allows the race to proceed (with a time limit imposed to clear runners from the course before the tropical heat reaches dangerous levels). You run for three hours across sweltering pavement, fending off blackflies, until you encounter a hairy-legged man in a spangled miniskirt waving pink and white pom-poms and pointing toward the finish line.

Welcome to Gay Games VI.

I traveled to Sydney at the end of October, joining 13,000 athletes and several thousand spectators and Cultural Festival participants (drag-king comics, "positive" hip-hop artists, aboriginal sister-girl painters) for my first Gay Games. For nearly two weeks, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered visitors from around the world (mostly the prosperous parts of the world, namely North America and Europe) swarmed the streets, restaurants, hotels, and stadiums of Australia's glittering and friendly largest city, feeling welcomed by the smiles of the "Sydneysiders" and the orange and blue Gay Games banners that seemed to flutter everywhere.

The massive and moving opening ceremonies, directed by 2000 Olympic Games veteran Ignatius Jones, ran like clockwork, with k.d. lang, Jimmy Somerville, and Australia High Court justice Michael Kirby lifting the spirits of the stadium's capacity crowd to nearecstatic heights. Within a day or two, I proclaimed Sydney paradise and the Gay Games a smooth-running, community-based, inclusive celebration.

Then came the sweltering heat, reports of a looming financial boondoggle, some competitions held in sparsely attended venues, and evidence of scattered disorganization and discontent.

"It's the experience of a lifetime," said out Sydney-based actor Anthony Wong, a Games participant in tennis who will be introduced to American audiences in the upcoming Matrix sequels. "There was so much affirmation, celebration, unity--and fun--among gay people from different countries. But some aspects need to be improved."

The opening ceremonies remained the highlight of the Games for me and many others. I'll never forget marching across the field with two teammates from New York, embraced by the earsplitting cheers of the crowd. I will always remember two sights: a rugby player marching solo under the Iraqi banner (he lives in London) and competitors from India and Pakistan dancing into the stadium holding hands.

"Think of the people who extended so much effort to be here," said James Hormel, former U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg and a tennis gold medalist in doubles. "That's what it's about."

Swimmer Manuel Bello, with the Nadadores of South Florida team, disagreed. "I'm here for the sport," he said. "Everything else is extra."

And make no mistake: Gay Games VI was about sports, offering 33 events in 36 venues and tough competition for high-caliber athletes. The divers, for example, were spectacular, exhibiting grace and skill worthy of any international competition. I met marathoners who planned to finish in an impressive three hours (or less). And several Gay Games swimming records were set during the first two days of competition.

But I used the goal of the Games to become an athlete, specifically a runner of marathons. I had been trotting half-heartedly on a treadmill at my gym when two friends encouraged me to join them at the Sydney Games. It was a difficult time--my mother had entered a nursing home in the final stages of Alzheimer's, and my father was losing his decade-long battle with heart disease. I had heard that long-distance running was a reliable method of venting frustration and relieving stress. I registered for the Gay Games' marathon and bought a serious pair of running shoes.

I abandoned the treadmill and began jogging over mountain roads near my home in upstate New York. I took to running, clocking respectable times in 10K's and half marathons. Sports--in my childhood, the dividing line between social glory and ostracism--belonged to me; I reclaimed it in my uncloseted adulthood. And to prove it, I planned to run my first full marathon at the Gay Games.

"That was Tom Waddell's ideal," explained Ambassador Hormel, referring to the founder of the Games, who envisioned an inclusive athletic event in which novice competitors mixed with elite athletes. "He saw a milieu in which everyone fit and shared a sense of belonging and was inspired toward a personal best."

A personal best for the Swinging Riots--the women's fast-pitch softball team from Malaysia--was defined by the center fielder. "We're going to try and not get massacred." They were true novices when they began playing: "We didn't know which end of the bat to use."

Malaysia's underground gay and lesbian community supported the team's journey to Sydney with fund-misers, but players told families and coworkers they were attending a "happy international competition." Some players worried about marching into the stadium under the Malaysian banner. "Homosexuality is illegal back home," the outspoken fielder explained. But she worried more about her competitors, whom she spotted on the line for accreditation. "Some of them are big," she joked, "like barns on legs."

Montreal will host the Games in 2006, and Lowell Selvin, president and CEO of PlanetOut Partners (which owns Gay.com, the largest cash sponsor of the Sydney Games), hopes to see some changes in the next four years: "There needs to be art application of fundamental business practices, like integration of ticketing and registration and improved focus on sponsorship development so the Games can be better funded."

Sydney Gay Games cochair Peter Bailey thinks the ideal of unlimited inclusion must be examined: "The logistics of running an event of this magnitude with volunteers is a nightmare. It's bigger than the Olympics. We have to ask ourselves, for future Games, can we set some maximums? Should we close events at a certain number [of participants]?"

In the end, I did not finish my marathon. The race authorities pulled many of us off the course at the 20-mile marker as the temperature soared to record levels. One runner was carted away by ambulance. I left Sydney Olympic Park exhausted, dehydrated, and downhearted, thinking of the hours I'd spent training and the miles I'd covered--at home in Woodstock, in New York City, Los Angeles, even Hanoi and the coal mining region of southwestern Pennsylvania, where I visited my mother in her nursing home and tended my father as he died.

I returned to my hotel room and slumped into bed with aching legs, feeling that my trip and the months of training had been wasted.

But I roused myself and attended the open-air farewell party at Sydney's Fox Studios, holding hands with the new man in my life, walking among lesbian power lifters, transgendered volleyball players, bisexual chess players, and at least one straight athlete (with the water polo team from Los Angeles, validating the Games' mission of inclusion). My feelings of defeat faded with my sunburn; I was safe, enlivened, and flee.

See you in Montreal in 2006.

Nyswaner's latest project is Soldier's Girl, a Showtime original film about the murder of Pfc. Barry Winchell.