The World’s Best Ski OUTting: Aspen Gay Ski Week 1977-2021

Gay Ski Week originated in Aspen, Colorado, and is a week-long ski event for members of the LGBTQ+ community. At the root of Gay Ski Week, lies greater issues of civil rights and political injustice. In 1977, a group of gay locals and tourists visiting Aspen got kicked out of a bar for dancing with each other. This incident turned into a push by Coloradans to secure gay rights protections in Aspen. Since then, it has evolved into a global celebration. Gay Ski Week, at first glance, may seem to only be solving LGBTQ+ marginalization from the sport of skiing, but through research and interviews, I argue that this event has evolved into a leader in guiding all-encompassing inclusivity in skiing. In my podcast, I’ll walk through the history of Gay Ski Week and describe its founding principles, and then transition into what the event has come to be today and how the event is changing the ski world for the better. I’ll then have experts Melissa Temple, President of AspenOUT and Kimberly Kulgia, Executive Producer of Aspen Gay Ski Week weigh in.

Thank you to Melissa Temple and Kimberly Kulgia for participating in two incredible interviews and thank you to Lukas Volk for granting copyright permission on these images!


Bibliography

Birkhold, Nicole. “41 Years of Aspen Gay Ski Week.” Aspen SnowMass. 2018. https://www.aspensnowmass.com/inside-aspen-snowmass/stories/40-years-of-aspen-gay-ski-week

Branchick, BJ. “Out in the Market: A History of the Gay Market Segment in the United States.” Journal of Macromarketing, 2002.

Bransford, Stephen. Gay Politics vs. Colorado and America: Inside the Story of Amendment 2. Cascade, Colorado: Sardis Press, 1994.

Cutts, Joe. “Gay for Aspen.” Ski Magazine, June 7, 2019. 

Herbert, Christopher Douglas. “Out on the Slopes: Activism, Identity, and Money in Whistler’s Gay Ski Week, 1992-2012.” BC Studies: The British Columbian Quarterly 181: 105-126, 2014. 

Hill, Ronald Paul. “Marketing and Minority Civil Rights: The Case of Amendment 2 and the Colorado Boycott. Journal of Public Policy & Marketing Vol. 15, No. 2, pp. 311-318, 1996. 

Keen, Lisa. Strangers to the Law: Gay people on Trial. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1998.

Tribe, Laurence H. “Lawrence v. Texas: The Fundamental Right That Dare Not Speak Its Name.” Harvard  Law Review, 2003.

Walters, Trudie, and Allan Stewart Jepson. Marginalisation and Events. London: Routledge, 2019.

Zamansky, Stephen. “Colorado’s Amendment 2 and Homosexuals’ Right to Equal Protection of the Law“. BCL Rev. 35: 221, 1993.

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