Queer Book Club: The Other Olympians
Schedule
Sat Apr 18 2026 at 03:00 pm to 04:30 pm
UTC-04:00Location
Rainy Day Paperback | Bethel, CT
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Participate in Bethel CT Pride's book discussion in person or online!About this Event
Book club is now in-person at Rainy Day Paperback Exchange! But you can always drop in and leave comments about the book whenever you have time, or reply to other people's comments.
ABOUT THE BOOK
The Other Olympians by Michael Waters
WINNER of the 2025 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Nonfiction. A Finalist for the 2024 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History and the 2025 Mark Lynton History Prize. Named one of the Best Books of 2024 by The New Yorker, NPR and BookPage.
The story of the early trans athletes and Olympic bureaucrats who lit the flame for today’s culture wars.
In December 1935, Zdeněk Koubek, one of the most famous sprinters in European women’s sports, declared he was now living as a man. Around the same time, the celebrated British field athlete Mark Weston, also assigned female at birth, announced that he, too, was a man. Periodicals and radio programs across the world carried the news; both became global celebrities. A few decades later, they were all but forgotten. And in the wake of their transitions, what could have been a push toward equality became instead, through a confluence of bureaucracy, war, and sheer happenstance, the exact opposite: the now all-too-familiar panic around trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming athletes.
In The Other Olympians, Michael Waters uncovers, for the first time, the gripping true stories of Koubek, Weston, and other pioneering trans and intersex athletes from their era. With dogged research and cinematic flair, Waters also tracks how International Olympic Committee members ignored Nazi Germany’s atrocities in order to pull off the Berlin Games, a partnership that ultimately influenced the IOC’s nearly century-long obsession with surveilling and cataloging gender.
Immersive and revelatory, The Other Olympians is a groundbreaking, hidden-in-the-archives marvel, an inspiring call for equality, and an essential contribution toward understanding the contemporary culture wars over gender in sports.
You can get the book from us or pick up the audio version from libro.fm https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9781250350756-the-other-olympians?bookstore=rainydaypaperback
Accessibility info:
Parking and bathrooms nearby. No ramp access to shop. Small set of steps to entrance. During warming months, call ahead to see if bookclub will be outdoors or indoors. If outdoors, noise may be loud / close to road.
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Where is it happening?
Rainy Day Paperback, 81 Greenwood Avenue, Bethel, United StatesEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
Tickets
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