Diving for Equality: Tom Daley brings the LGBTQ+ cause to Commonwealth Games

Tom Daley has long championed LGBTQ+ rights across the world. In a landmark moment, the Olympic gold medallist sprinted into Birmingham’s Alexander Stadium with the Queen’s Baton during the opening ceremony, flanked by activists and athletes, including India’s Dutee Chand, holding Progress Pride flags. The 28-year-old diving great did not hesitate to dive right into the brass tacks of his show of assertion. After travelling through Commonwealth countries where homosexuality is still illegal for his BBC documentary Tom Daley: Illegal to Be Me, the Plymouth plunger chose the Games stage to highlight the plight of LGBTQ communities across the Commonwealth. Daley was typically uncompromising, even alluding to the colonial legacy of existing anti-LGBTQ laws.

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“Tonight at the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games 2022 in Birmingham, myself and 6 extraordinary LGBTQ+ athletes and advocates from around the Commonwealth will be carrying the Queen’s baton into the stadium. In over half of the Commonwealth countries, homosexuality is still a crime and in 3 of those countries the maximum penalty is the death sentence. These laws are a legacy of colonialism. This opening ceremony for us is about showing LGBTQ+ visibility to the billion people watching,” he wrote on his Instagram.

However, Saima Razzaq, Head of Diversity and Inclusion at Birmingham Pride, cautions against the Commonwealth Games’ organizers’ guilt-free posturing of LGBTQ rights:

“We didn’t have any laws that criminalized LGBTQI individuals before the British arrived. We think about the history and context of the Commonwealth and how those laws came into the Commonwealth. Well, it was at the hands of colonialism. If the people who did the colonizing are now saying, oh well, you need to do better, there is no nuance there,” she said to Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

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There are 35 countries in the Commonwealth where homosexuality is deemed illegal, with 3 of them handing out death penalties as maximum punishment for homosexuality.