June is Pride Month and a handful of MLS, WNBA, and MLB teams will host Pride Nights over the next few weeks. While summer celebrations make sense from the perspective of queer history, Pride Month occurring in June allows many men’s professional sports leagues, such as the NFL, NHL, and NBA, to ignore the occasion as it takes place during those leagues’ championships and offseason.
12 MLB teams have Pride Night events planned for June and half the league’s teams will host an event at some point during the season. Many in the LGBTQ2IA community celebrate these night’s as markers of acceptance and inclusion of people like us on the part of our favourite teams.
I have a more ambivalent relationship to Pride Nights at sporting events. Pride Night is often symbolic and lacks any real indication of what daily realities can be like for queer people, who might find themselves vulnerable to assault and harassment in cishet-dominated sporting communities. When teams announce Pride Nights or You Can Play Nights (as they are more commonly referred to in the NHL), I want to know what concrete, structural changes each organization is making to ensure the ballpark or arena or stadium is more welcoming to all queer folks. I want to know if these efforts will be sustained throughout the year. I want to know if players will be held accountable for their racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic actions on and off the field. I want to know if these statements of inclusion include those who work for the team; from team management to game day personnel to venue staff. Unfortunately, Pride Night is not currently about any of these things.
Pride Nights are not the result of a sustained effort to communicate with a team’s QUILTBAG community or the result of listening to and meeting the needs of LGBTQ fans. Ultimately, men’s professional sports approaches LGBTQ2IA inclusion through a lens of whiteness, by decentering queer people, and by emphasizing queer commodification.
MLB teams have excelled at promoting queer inclusion as a branded experience. Pride Nights are often an excuse to design and promote team-branded, rainbow coloured merchandise. Caps, t-shirts, and jerseys all featuring the distinctive and familiar rainbow stripes have become a ubiquitous part of these evenings. This sort of queer consumption is primarily for cishet people who want to support queer folks without actually doing any of the difficult and sustained work this requires. When an instance of anti-queer behavior occurs on the field, such as when Toronto Blue Jays centerfielder Kevin Pillar called Atlanta pitcher Jason Motte a faggot last month, it just creates a marketing opportunity for the league, not a moment to interrogate baseball’s anti-queer biases and discriminatory practices. Limited-edition rainbow merchandise is designed to make money for the team, not to help queer people.
This is not to criticize queer baseball fans who are eager to purchase such team merchandise or who are happy to buy tickets for Pride Night games. Hats and jerseys typically sell belonging; fans flock to team colours because they illustrate connection to a player, team, or city. It makes sense that queer folks want to achieve a similar connection to their teams by buying rainbow coloured team merchandise; other fans have access to this expression of fandom and comradery all the time.
There’s nothing wrong with buying or wearing rainbow-coloured merchandise. It’s perfectly fine for queer people to have fun at a game. In fact, it should be encouraged; sports are after all entertainment. More importantly, queer representation, especially in men’s sports, remains incredibly lacking. Wearing a rainbow ball cap or a t-shirt with a rainbow logo is not only a statement of identity but a moment of visibility in a sports landscape still too frequently barren of queer representation. There are publicly out queer athletes but they exist on the peripheries of mainstream media attention because of their gender, their race, and the sports they play. In such a landscape it makes sense that some LGBTQ2IA folks want these moments of visibility.
But visibility does not create the same opportunities across the LGBTQ community. When queer representation is present in mainstream media it is most often white, cis, and male. Visibility might benefit the white, the cis, and the affluent among us, but it exacts an increasingly hostile and violent toll on trans women and femmes, especially trans women and femmes of colour. Lack of visibility also proves dangerous. Many LGBTQ folks, especially trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming individuals, rarely see ourselves represented in the entertainment and sports we consume; our high suicide rates are the collateral violence inflicted by a cishet world that tries its best to erase us from view.
When queer issues do take centre stage in men’s sports, too often it’s non-queer people who occupy the spotlight. A few days after Pillar used a slur, Anaheim Ducks forward Ryan Getzlaf called an on-ice official a cocksucker during a playoff game. The people who decided what punishment, if any, each player would face were largely cis, straight, white men. The people who were paid to break down both controversies in the news were largely cis, straight, white men. The people who blogged and podcasted about both incidents were largely cis and straight. Is it any wonder that the sexist, homophobic, and transphobic implications of these incidents were simplified or ignored by the cishet men who were paid to lead the post-game discussion? Is it surprising that these same men failed to highlight that both Pillar and Getzlaf, regardless of the differences in their apologies’ tone and content, were forgiven and will be forgotten largely because white athletes have the luxury of repeated seconded chances?
It is so predictable that the conversation about discriminatory, anti-queer slurs failed to centre queer voices and instead centred the cis, straight, white men who believed it was accepted to say “faggot” and “cocksucker”. Even when queer issues are raised to prominence in the sports world, queer voices are marginalized.
Unfortunately, LGBTQ advocacy organizations, ally groups, and queer publications have focused what little attention is given to queer issues in sports on the coming out narrative, which necessarily privileges and elevates the athlete experience above the queer fan or queer worker experience. But for the sports landscape to be truly safe and inclusive for queer folks, that safety needs to extend beyond an individual queer athlete on the field or on the ice. Queer fans must feel safe, queer stadium workers need to feel safe, queer coaches and executives need to feel safe. A player’s queer family needs to feel safe. This is especially true for those queer families existing outside of heteronormative standards. Queer families need to feel safe participating in sports and attending events. The conversation about queer inclusion in sports needs to extend to these groups. Pride gear and Pride Nights can provide visibility and inclusion for a broader queer sports community that is so often ignored in this discussion.
The problem is sports, especially men’s pro sports, treats queer inclusion and the queer community as a commodity, a newfound market to exploit financially. This cishet exploitation is compounded by the willingness with which many of us white queer sports fans consume these products. When we, as white queer sports fans, buy tickets to Pride Nights, are we doing so because we want to celebrate our community? Because we want to feel safe attending a game? Because we want to help foster an environment welcoming to all LGBTQ folks? Or do we participate in such events and buy rainbow-themed merchandise because it helps sanitize and normalize the queer community for a broader sports-viewing public controlled and mediated by whiteness? Do we, as white queers, in our desire to create space in the sports landscape consider the needs and concerns of more marginalized LGTBQ folks, who can’t buy these things or actively participate?
This is not a new problem for the queer community. Pride Nights at baseball, basketball, soccer, or hockey games are only the latest extension of Pride, a tradition that goes back decades and has grown from marches and parades to week-long events and now to month-long celebrations. Those early Pride events were inherently political, born out of various discrimination and violence against the queer community; formative events like the Stonewall Riots or the Bathhouse Raids furthered grassroots political action and organization by queer communities for the benefit of queer communities. But as Pride parades and Pride Month have grown bigger, more commercial, and more mainstream, the emphasis for some in the queer community, particularly white, cis, gay, affluent men, is no longer social justice but instead capitalist consumption. When the concerns of white queers are prioritized above all others within the QUILTBAG community the result is not inclusion, but assimilation. When affluent white queers prioritize their assimilation at the expense of other queers, Pride events harm the queer community. We see this when Black Lives Matter chapters protests the inclusion of uniformed police officers in Pride parades because police continue to target the lives of queer people of colour at high rates, and white cis gays and lesbians side with the police. We see this when white queers prioritize corporate sponsorship and white queer purchasing power for events like Pride while ignoring the ways those sponsors actively harm more marginalized LGBTQ folks. Even in the sporting world, the emphasis ally organizations and queer publications place on the publicly out white cis gay athlete who plays a major sport, prioritizes the needs of a select group of queers while actively downplaying the risks such athletes take and ignoring the more marginalized in the community who are frequently already pushing the sports world toward greater inclusion.
In their current form, Pride Nights operate with the same priorities of the larger mainstream Pride movement. This is a problem.
By selling tickets and team-branded Pride merchandise, sports leagues and their teams suggest that inclusion can be bought, that consumption secures the rights of the marginalized. If queers just buy enough Pride Night tickets and Pride merchandise, the belief goes, sports marketing departments will realize how many queer fans want to come to games and will make conditions more favourable to the LGBTQ purchaser. In other words, it’s a calculated appeal designed to draw in the affluent among us at the cost of more marginalized. It is also a purely capitalist appeal — if selling to queer people stopped being profitable, these leagues and teams would stop. It is not remotely about queer acceptance.
We cannot ignore the complicity of affluent, white, cis queers in this queer consumption. We want to be accepted on the field and in the stands so we accept and promote cis, straight folks to speak on behalf of queer athletes and fans. We want to highlight our queer identity so we buy Pride merchandise but don’t ask who benefits financially from that purchase and don’t care that it’s not the queer community. We applaud our favourite team when they hold a Pride Night but we don’t probe their commitment to queer inclusion; instead we soak up this acknowledgement and ignore that our favourite teams are not allying with the queer community, but instead using the queer community to illustrate the inclusivity and diversity of the organization to non-queer allies.
I understand the appeal of a Pride Night, but inclusion requires more than just one day. The ballpark or arena should always be inclusive of queer fans. Discriminatory language, such as the slurs recently used by players like Kevin Pillar and Ryan Getzlaf, shouldn’t be acceptable and should be consistently called out. This policy should also extend to fans. In the aftermath of the Pillar incident, a white queer baseball fan messaged me about her frustration at the homophobia in the Majors; she wondered where her standing ovation was when players use homophobic slurs. She was referring to the reception given to Baltimore centerfielder Adam Jones by the Fenway crowd the day after he was racially abused by Boston fans. But in her desire for visibility, she did what so many of us white queer sports fans do: prioritize the white queer experience. Surely queer people were impacted by the racism at Fenway that day, or the racism at Rogers Centre last fall. White queers must find racism, sexism, ableism, biphobia, and transphobia just as unacceptable as homophobia at the stadium if such spaces are to be truly safe for everyone.
Our understanding of the relationship between queer people and sports must also extend to more marginalized LGBTQ2IA fans and it must include team employees and stadium personnel. Surely LGBTQ inclusivity and safety includes the people who staff the venue and provide vital work behind the scenes. LGBTQ2IA workers lack safeguards and regulations that protect them from workplace discrimination and termination in many states; what rights are secured are subject to attack and erasure in the current political climate. Just as fans require all gender or gender neutral washroom facilities that are also accessible, so too do queer workers. Queer workers need their specific health care needs covered by employer health care plans, just like queer fans. A stadium cannot be an LGBTQ-inclusive space, cannot be safe, if these changes do not extend to queer workers. If a team does not respect and protect the humanity of its queer workforce, then it follows that they do not respect the humanity of queer fans. But these issues are never what Pride Nights are about.
In reality, what Pride Nights and similar LGBTQ activities at the arena or stadium highlight is the lack of commitment to queer inclusion on the part of professional teams and leagues. From the perspective of owners, commissioners, executives, and players, professional sports teams and leagues do not exist to create a safe community for anyone. This mentality is why Kevin Pillar catching a ceremonial first pitch thrown by a member of Pride Toronto is seen as redemptive, when in reality it is a meaningless act that is in no way connected to systemic change. It’s why the Seattle Mariners can give away rainbow ball caps and consider their attempt at inclusion a success. It’s how the Washington Capitals can continue to trumpet Braden Holtby as an LGBTQ ally each time he marches in a pride parade and ignore his history of transphobia targeting trans women. Their priority is not safety and inclusion, merely a calculated appearance of embracing those priorities.
Ultimately, sports leagues and teams have a greater responsibility to initiate systemic change and to foster safe spaces for all queer fans because of the role sports, especially men’s sports, play in creating, maintaining, and sustaining heteronormative and cisnormative culture. Sports like baseball and hockey elevate a certain kind of manhood that emphasizes physical strength and participation in violence as appropriate expressions of masculinity. Discarded in its wake is everyone who does not fit this white, cis, straight masculine ideal, including LGBTQ folks. This culture is not just present at the highest level of the sports landscape but permeates each level of play and influences the way children and teens are instructed and coached. It impacts women’s sports, where queerness is increasingly minimized and erased. It is not confined to the sports world but rather spreads to and influences other aspects of our culture. Without continued pressure from QUILTBAG fans to make sport more inclusive of all queer folks this will not change. Without assertive, direct, and sustained policies of queer inclusion and without active community work to benefit the LGBTQ communities in the cities in which they operate, a team’s Pride Night will always be hollow. Without effort to dramatically change the cultural of a game like baseball, the financial earnings of events like Pride Night will always be tainted by the violence to which the queer community is frequently subjected.
A Pride Night cannot, must not, be the sole focus of LGBTQ inclusion at sporting events. Being protected and welcome for one night does not mean the other 161 games become safe to attend.
