Forty thousand people were at the opening ceremonies of the Out Games in Montreal on Saturday evening (29 July) in the huge Olympic Stadium. It was an odd mix of athletes, elders, conference nerds and people there to hear kd lang, Canada's gift to lesbians worldwide.

The event marked the end of the largest gay rights conference yet held. Nearly 2000 participants from over 100 countries. Rights conferences had been held at earlier Gay Games - pioneered, not surprisingly, at the Amsterdam games - and repeated in Sydney.

This conference had a celebrity lineup. Topping the list was Louise Arbour, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Arbour took the UN job after sitting on the Supreme Court of Canada, the most gay-friendly top court in the world.

It was a risky move for Arbour to go to Montreal. UN political bodies are badly split on even adding LGBT non-governmental organisations to the thousands of NGOs already granted the rights to show up at UN human rights meetings and occasionally speak. During the time of the conference the vote on the accreditation of four organisations was put off for three months.

The second UN celebrity was Hina Jilani, Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Human Rights Defenders. She is one of the independent experts with a mandate to investigate and report on specific issues or specific countries. She is part of what is vaguely called the "special procedures" at the UN - one of the parts of the huge UN system that has become LGBT friendly.

Hina Jilani was currently being sharply criticised by reactionaries at the UN for writing a letter supporting the accreditation of LGBT NGOs. She was praised for that initiative.

The celebrity jocks were Martina Navratilova and Mark Tewksbury. Women crowded the podium taking pictures of Martina.

Mark is less well known, but an Olympic gold winner for Canada in swimming at the Barcelona games. He was the most charming hunk within a thousand miles of Montreal, with a gee-wiz beaming smile. He gave a startlingly frank talk about having accepted lavish gifts, along with other members of the Olympic committee, when assessing candidate cities for the games years earlier. And he had to endure fag jokes from other committee members.

Five of the plenary sessions were chaired by an out judge - from the US, France, South Africa, Brazil and Australia.

Michael Kirby of the Australian High Court (the top court) chaired the session on Asia-Pacific. Edwin Cameron of the South African Court of Appeals, out as gay and out as HIV+, chaired the session on Africa.

There were celebrity politicians.

Volker Beck, member of the German parliament for a decade, was there. Videos from the attempt to hold a pride event in Moscow were shown as part of the plenary on Europe. We saw footage of Volker Beck in Moscow, blood running down his face from an assault. That picture went around the world.

It was said that Poland backed off banning a gay march after the Moscow violence. The last thing Poles want is to look like they are the same as Russians.

Georgina Beyer told her story. A part-Maori, former sex worker and transsexual from New Zealand. Fiesty Georgina was the first transsexual to be elected to a national parliament in the world. Since then there have been transsexuals elected to a regional legislature in Japan and to the national parliament in Italy.

Vladimir Spidla, former Prime Minister of the Czech Republic, now a Commissioner of the European Union, not gay, gave the most boring speech of the whole conference - but proved that LGBT equality was a well established principle for the EU. Not at all radical, these days.

Waheed Ali, the youngest member of the British House of Lords, and the first out gay there, gave a spirited speech recounting how the UK had moved from having one of the worst records on LGBT human rights in Europe to becoming a leader. Equalisation of age of consent. Opening up the military. Non-discrimination legislation. Registered partnerships.

And Canada's Svend. Svend Robinson was the first openly gay member of a national parliament. Now there are a scattering of individuals at the national level, and a bunch at lower elected levels.

There was a religious celebrity, Bishop Gene Robinson, the out gay Episcopal/Anglican Bishop of New Hampshire. His appointment brought the developing crisis over homosexuality in the Church of England to a head. He called for all of us to return to our churches - a call which India's famous gay activist and theorist Ashok Row Kavi later said ignored all those who colonisers had deemed pagans, like his Hindu self.

In addition to the plenaries, there were hundreds - yes hundreds - of workshop sessions. One had to choose from an array of 25 sessions each time. Maybe at the next conference, to be held with the 2nd Out Games in Copenhagen in 2009, they can stretch the conference by an extra day or two so we can participate in at least 10 per cent of the sessions on offer.

Doug Sanders is a retired Canadian law professor, now living in Bangkok. He can be contacted at sanders_gwb@yahoo.ca.