Discover Top Posts Tagged with #pride jersey

Gestures and the Pride Jersey-Tape Thing

I guess I start by saying I speak for no one but myself, but with things continuing apace, the urge to say something has gotten quite strong, even if it's only to myself, here on Tumblr dot com. I don't have hockey friends, my family has no history of hockey fandom. I'm a weird hockey outlier in my own life, so if I want to talk about this, I don't really have anywhere to get into it, except online. So here I be. Not because others haven't said anything, or that good points haven't been made, but because I feel like the loudest voices, both for and against, have been people who - for lack of a better term - don't have much skin in the game.

I've been reading the comments for months, watching the jubilant trolls seize this topic and run with it, regurgitate every tired cliché, exult in this mask-off moment. I've watched people push back, make arguments - some good, some not so good - and express their honest disappointment. Over and over, I've seen some variation - from both sides - of "it's only a jersey, what's the big deal?" And that's not a terrible question, but it's a simple question with a very complicated answer, one that touches on something the people in the community (and in other minority groups) know as a multi-faceted issue and a representation of something more amorphous than a shirt or being told we're "welcome," whatever people seem to think that means. Namely, the gesture of it meant some assurance of safety. And that has been stripped away because corporate NHL is worried about the brand.

But how so, safety? Let me tell you a story. It's a personal anecdote and I'm not claiming it isn't. I'm also not claiming to know what the people in the story were thinking or intending. I'm not a mind-reader. I can only tell you how the incident affected me and my experience that night. I can only tell you how that reaction informs my approach to hockey and hockey fandom, layered on top of all my other apprehensions and perceptions of hockey and hockey fandom. Not as a matter of fear, but as a matter of self-preservation - defensive driving, if you will. A sort of lifestyle mindset that certain people and groups have to adopt to move through the world in order to minimize the interference of other people's disgust with who they are in their daily lives.

Because that's what it is: disgust. But we'll come back to that. Story first.

For some background, right around the time I felt comfortable coming out more widely as ace and gray-romantic, it was 2015. Around the same time, there was a huge spike of homophobic assaults in Dallas' gay neighborhoods. Those assaults, which continued well into at least 2017, were specifically targeted at the community and resulted in damaged storefronts and serious injuries like concussions, stabbings, fractured eye sockets and skulls, and even one person being thrown onto a fire.

(To my knowledge, the only people ever arrested in the years following were two men who pled guilty to a separate campaign of targeting men on Grindr for muggings and homophobic attacks. These assaults were said to be perpetrated by a range of people, not just one individual or group of individuals. Still, no arrests.)

Sure, I lived in Fort Worth at the time, a fifty-minute drive from the Oak Lawn neighborhood. But Fort Worth is also more conservative than Dallas per capita and just in general, culturally. And I was already well aware that my gender non-conforming appearance, mild as it was on the scale of gender nonconformity, was losing me jobs and getting me attention that was dismissive at best and outwardly hostile at not-best. So I was careful coming out. I could lose work at first - I made a gradual switch of my employers and clients to prevent this. I told individual people, but didn't broadly share my identity with social groups, especially ones that had folks in them who advertised their “Southern pride” or GOP perspectives. I wasn't fully out until I moved to LA. Not because hate doesn't happen here, but because it's less culturally tolerated and worker protections are worlds better. The community was bigger too, even for aces. The relief of not having to watch out for yourself quite so aggressively was immense. Imperfect, but an improvement.

A year ago, in the 2021-2022 season, I made a point of going to the Pride Night game for my hockey team, the LA Kings, playing the Nashville Predators. There were guests, a special free hat giveaway, a community member sang the anthem, and the players wore warm up jerseys and used rainbow tape during warmups. It was nice to see, "welcoming" in a tangential sort of way. It was a gesture - minimal, but a gesture nonetheless. Of course, the players were participating as much as the organization provided ways to participate and it was all an initiative, but we'll come back to why that still actually matters, even to someone as cynical as I am.

Some time in the second period, a pair of young women who were sitting along the glass in the next section over to my left got on the jumbotron. They seemed to be a couple, or at least enough of a couple that they kissed for a bit while on camera. They were young and attractive, seemed to be there deliberately for Pride night, and followed the kissing up with dancing together during the breaks in play. They got on the jumbotron for the dancing at least one more time.

I wouldn't have thought anything more about it except that I became aware in stages that a trio of men to my right — in my row, but a few seats away — had become...intensely interested. There were two older men, retirement age, and one younger man, probably in his 30s. They weren't, to my recollection, wearing team-specific gear.

Now, lots of men come to games in multi-generational groups or in just their street clothes from earlier in the day (it was a weekday), so that wasn't odd. And I’ve of course overheard the “joke” over and over when the audience engagement part of the ice crew comes out that this is some dude’s “favorite part of the game.” While these sorts of comments are tiresome in the extreme, I’m not clutching my pearls over here any time some guy decides everyone in the vicinity needs to know he finds twenty-something, tightly-clad women sexually attractive. (To the Kings’ credit, they also have male audience engagement ice crew members, and the actual ice crew is dressed casually post-pandemic.)

What was odd was that the older men had the younger man film the two young women dancing from where we were sitting. The younger man was also instructed to take a picture of a gay man — a VIP guest, I believe, but not one I recognized — who rode on one of the Zambonis between periods. There was also a LGBTQIA+ veteran there as the usual "Hero of the Game" honoree, who was shown at least once on the jumbotron dancing with his guests (who were wearing queer-coded outfits), he in his uniform and all, clearly having a good time. That sparked a spirited conversation amongst the men in my row, not all of which I could hear because, y'know, a loud stadium with a hockey game going on. It captured their attention, I'll say, rather than hazarding a guess as to what exactly their take was.

Essentially, these three men were paying a lot of attention to the people who were visibly queer at the Pride Night game. Now, I've reasoned with myself since that maybe the older gentlemen were themselves members of the community and were reacting with enthusiasm. (Why they’d want video of the girls dancing, though — well, that’s where that reassurance falls apart.) In the moment, I lost track entirely of the game in front of me and became very aware that I was at the game alone. And that I was in the same row as these men, who were paying undue attention to queer-presenting folks and even recording them specifically. Situational awareness red flags were going off left and right, is what I'm saying. Enough so that I made sure I was following them out after the end of the game and not the other way around. Enough so that I kept an eye on those young women until I saw them get out of the building. Enough that I made sure I kept moving with the crowd on the way back to my car. Enough that I can't even remember if the Kings even won that night, just those men and the wariness that colored the back half of the evening for me.

I do remember a kid on the jumbotron waving the cheaply made Pride night themed hat after a goal, his parents cheering in the background. I remember seeing lots of cis-het presenting people wearing those hats. I remember initially feeling like the crowd had shown up knowing what night it was and that it would be a predominately supportive environment. I remember a warm feeling going cold and sitting still and trying to not draw attention. I remember creating a couple of exit and emergency plans in my head if I needed them. Later, I remember considering trading games for the 2022-2023 season’s Pride night game and deciding against it, even before all of this began, even knowing I sit in a different section now and that I never saw those men again for the rest of that season. Still, I opted to trade for the Dustin Brown retirement night instead. And I remember regretting missing out on the amazing Pride night jerseys the Kings wore for 2023 — seriously, not making a small commercial run of those? C'mon, now.

(Much love to the season ticket holder who very clearly wore the jersey he got from this year's Pride night auction to seemingly every game of the rest of the season. Those jerseys were amazing and deserved to be seen.)

Now, there's a very real argument that nothing happened, that I might have been reading into things. The problem of course being that there was no way of knowing that for sure unless something really did go pear shaped in some way. But after growing up in Texas and spending a lot of my early adulthood there, I know as well as anyone that a lot of racism and queerphobia and xenophobia and even misogyny is quiet in public — it's attention paid and hushed conversation in undertones and scoffing quietly until the doors are closed. Right up until it isn’t.

And that night, those men were giving that exact energy, whether or not they knew it or intended it that way. The recordings and photos taken rated a notch higher on the volume than usual and really tipped things over into a place I couldn't ignore.

And that's what I mean by "safety." That need to be on guard, to watch your back, and to spend more of your mental capacity at any given moment waiting for someone to lash out at you because, on some level that you can't control, they think that you deserve it. A lot of folks would assert that safety was never really at issue here, that I am making a mountain of a molehill. Fair enough, but that's exactly where the gestures and the Pride nights and the jerseys and the pride tape come in, if you'll stick with me.

There's a great episode of the first season of Welcome to Wrexham that deals with the masculinity and multi-generational bonding that is pro sports for its fans. It talks about how, for lots of men, they experience their highest of highs, their core formative male bonding moments with fathers and grandfathers and uncles, and are allowed to express their lowest lows in the context of sports fandom. It's an interesting thesis, though obviously incomplete in some ways. I'd say one of the incompletions has to do with the valorization of the players themselves as archetypes of ideal manhood.

Young, in peak physical condition, revered for their toughness and grit and highly specialized skill sets, often wealthy (at the highest levels of the sport, as in the NHL), well-dressed but still physically imposing, locally famous and in demand, with the perceived ability to sleep with, date, and marry the most beautiful of women and support their families to lavish, affluent lifestyles. Is this not the idealized modern North American man?

I think we can all generally agree that folks flock to sports fandom not just for love of the game, but for all sorts of reasons. One of those reasons is because it is a form of storytelling about how life could be, a sort of modern adventuring lifestyle that falls in line with all the things we tell men and boys they should try to become.

Now, of course, this manifests differently depending on age and other factors. Little kids, especially kids who play hockey, make heroes of players in different ways and for different reasons than teens and adults. Little kids, after all, value different things when they evaluate "coolness" than do teens and adults. For our purposes here, then, let's leave the hero worship of small children and kids aside and instead focus only on the ways in which players are role models to teens and adults.

In some ways, it's not quite fair that we make role models out of very young men, barely out of their own childhoods, who've spent much of at least the last ten years of their lives primarily focused on physical supremacy in their chosen sport. They won't have met many people or had many experiences outside that arena, though they may indeed have — strictly speaking — done more traveling and working shoulder-to-shoulder with people from other parts of the world than their average age mate. But we can all agree those engagements are still within the insular realm of hockey, where everything is pulling in that one direction.

They're asked to grow up fast in some ways while simultaneously living in a social bubble of sports, sports culture, and sports people. Still, young pro athletes have hit the lottery of time, resources, and genetics to enter a tiny, highly competitive professional field in the, let's face it, wider entertainment industry. That comes with a degree of public interest in and attention to their choices, actions, and behaviors. They become role models and idols by mere virtue of the fact that they are highly visible to the public and have more access to a broad platform. Players advertise things quite literally at times - gear and services and such, obviously. Sometimes, that's by virtue of team level contracts and sometimes, they are individually contracted as spokespeople.

None of this is new information, but I can hear the furious clacking of keyboards now, in a comment section somewhere on The Athletic or Deadspin, confidently asserting that "if you make decisions based off what a player does, then you're an idiot." This is the standard rebuttal to the argument that entertainment public figures like actors, musicians, pro players, etc. are role models; that to be influenced by a public figure is foolish. It is, of course, quite a foolish assertion in itself. It leans on the practical understanding that to literally and unthinkingly do what someone tells you is foolish, while ignoring that the vast majority of decisions people make, even just around sports fandom — like which jersey number to buy, as a for instance — are highly influenced decisions.

Sure, your personal taste comes into play, but there's a reason advertisers pay to have their logo on the ice or to have an deer-in-the-headlights 24 year old winger deliver a line of ad copy in his flat-est monotone against a white background. It's because they lend a sense of legitimacy to the brand, a sense of authenticity. Hospitals and insurance companies pay AEG top dollar to heavily imply that the LA Kings players get their medical services. That kind of bump, over and over again, says that "hey, these guys who need to be in top physical condition and often get injured, well they vouch as a team for this medical system. Maybe that'll work for me." We all know this is happening, all the time. There's no shame in being influenced, but so too is there no honesty in pretending that there isn't influence being traded on.

So, here are these young men — archetypical ideals according to Western standards of wealthy, predominately white, young, heterosexual, “red-blooded” men who have a physical-but-cool job and access to absurd resources and beautiful women — and the teens and adults who watch them track their stats, their accomplishments, their successes. In a lot of ways, they're interchangeable to the wider fanbase, especially as stat-tracking has become ascendant. Still, and very much in hockey specifically, there is a culture that projects goodness and a specific kind of virtue onto these players. There is an admiration that fans and the public more generally have for players. Team social media posts their outfits, their workouts, their relationships. It is not the hero worship of children, but they are role models for their adolescent and adult fans all the same. Their approval, for lack of a better word, comes to matter, comes to model what is cool, what is good, what is acceptable.

You see where I’m going with this? A player, wearing a jersey, says “this is acceptable.” A player, wrapping his stick in Pride tape, says to that audience of teens and adults, “hey, don’t be a dick, because these people are acceptable.” It says that disgust and displays of disgust are not acceptable. (There's that word again!) Sure, he only does it for a couple of minutes on an unaired portion of the in-arena game night production, but it says to those three guys to my right on that Pride Night, “hey, you won’t be in step with us players and the team as an institution if you bring homophobia to the table with your fandom.” It says to people in the community, “hey, you don’t have to keep your interest in the team at home, you can be enthusiastic about hockey without fear of backlash that you’re not ‘right’ for the sport.”

Is that a flimsy assurance when said aloud? Sure. The truth of the message is paper thin even on a good day when you pressure test it in the real world of the men’s hockey universe. But we’re talking about the unspoken conversations that happen around the appearance of inclusion and welcome. The appearance of welcome is a powerful thing when it comes to increasing the level of safety the community feels in approaching hockey in-person. Because that appearance acts as an unspoken buffer; it says “if you jump the queer person in your row after the game because they don’t ‘belong,’ we the team might take your in-person hockey rights away because we align with being welcoming.” The conglomerates running the hockey teams decided to align with being welcoming rather than exclusive and openly disgusted by diversity because they want revenue from every kind of group they can get — what is capitalism if not the pursuit of endless growth, amirite? But the players, the coaches, the staff — they can, if they choose, use their platform provided by the late-stage capitalism of the sports entertainment industry, be visible examples of the welcome provided to anyone who enjoys the sport. They can provide that extra incentive, with their unspoken indication of acceptability, to not be a dick outwardly, even if you’re a dick inwardly. And that makes the community safer, even beyond the realm of hockey, because these men are the ideal, right?

If your heroic ideal of manhood says being a dick isn’t part of the ideal, well, some people will still be dicks. There were plenty of apologists during this whole conversation that declared with their whole chests that they don’t think any of the current hockey players really believe in broad acceptance or inclusion — they are, as the assertion goes, just putting on the uniform handed to them and making nice for the cameras because it gets butts in seats, which is part of their job.

And yeah, that’s probably true for a lot of the guys on a lot of the nights. “Here’s a St. Patrick’s jersey, have a great game, Kopi, our proud Slovenian captain.” I’m sure Kopi pulls the sweater on and then off again for most of these theme nights while running game strategy in his head and thinking no more about it, kind of like all of the non-American, non-Canadian players stand during the national anthems trying not to be too obvious that they’re just waiting to get going and hoping their muscles don’t start to cool as they all stand around for a few minutes listening to someone warble out an anthem they don’t identify with.

And, in specific terms for the Pride jersey brouhaha, don’t think it escaped my notice that Vladislav Gavrikov wore a Pride jersey in Philly the night of Provorov’s abstention and then wore a Pride jersey again after being traded to the Kings a few weeks later — all without a peep. I don’t have any idea what his personal opinions are, except that he wasn’t taking it personally or publicly that he was asked to participate on either occasion.

These things are gimmicks a lot of the time, a way to spice up the in-arena production and reach out to other communities in the host team’s city. That’s not a bad thing. It’s just a thing. Going to a pro game with no bells and whistles at all, on the production level of a kids’ municipal soccer team match, wouldn’t justify the ticket price. They have to make it an event, but that event needs to draw in the curious and the on-the-fence, not just the die-hards. Which means you need to make a gesture to those groups that aren't already bought in, or who are rightly wary of your in-group culture.

But we also live in a culture that highly esteems authenticity, so there needs to be more than a vague gesture — which is where the outreach and the initiatives come in. You couldn’t just say “Hockey fights cancer,” and do nothing else about that statement. It would be insincere in the extreme, right? So there’s a fundraiser, there’s outreach to the communities affected, there’s visibility for survivors — there’s some authenticity to the gesture, even if, at the end of the day, it’s a corporate gesture.

So, a level of authenticity in the gesture and the idealized image demonstrating acceptance. This is what the Pride jerseys and the Pride tape mean. They mean, in the simplest terms, a visible lack of disgust for difference. Are they incomplete efforts? Yes, but they are efforts. They are a projection of safety — of the intention of safety — for the community to join in the sport of hockey in public. That’s so very far from nothing, and the loss is substantial when they’re taken away from the most visible part of hockey: the players on ice.

So here's where we get back to disgust. The thing that drives, for instance, the 2015-2017 homophobic attacks in Dallas, the 2010s serial killer of gay men in Toronto, and others, is cultivated disgust that has been set loose and targeted at someone who does not conform to whatever is the attacker's idealized way of life. This disgust is taught, but it always needs a catalyst or an excuse to be expressed. So, here comes religion, politics, or a desire for unchallenging homogeneity to preserve an artificial sense of order. Whoever fails to adhere becomes an object of encouraged disgust.

So now we have an excuse (and often the originating instruction itself) for the disgust to act itself out, for the "other" to be punished with everything from ostracization to outright violence. This seems extreme? Consider Reimer's bland Evangelical-Christianese statement trying, as is so often the case, to have it both ways:

"...I have no hate in my heart for anyone and I have always strived [sic] to treat everyone that I encounter with respect and kindness. In this specific instance, I am choosing not to endorse something that is counter to my personal convictions which are based on the Bible, the highest authority in my life. I strongly believe that every person has value and worth and the LGBTQIA+ community, like all others, should be welcomed in all aspects of the game of hockey."

In essence: I love everybody and I respect everybody, but I just can't get behind wearing this jersey. Right? But the thing is, if you're allowing your disgust, however latent or unacknowledged, to dictate to you that you may be intolerant of the acceptance or the presence of the outward visibility of another group of people, then that's ultimately intolerance. You can't make the rational argument that it isn't.

(And before anybody jumps down my craw about "oh, well, it's always progressive people who want tolerance, but then are intolerant to those who don't agree," listen, bud. You and I are neither of us going to pretend you haven't heard of the Paradox of Tolerance on Tumblr dot com. Let's not be silly.)

Now, I think I speak with a lot of marginalized folks of one kind or another that we would rather have the James Reimer statement, that players self-identify as someone who is ultimately intolerant — someone who harbors this unchallenged disgust — than to be given a sugar coating of sameness and a big branded curtain for all individual beliefs to hide behind. I'm all for continuing to wear jerseys and individual players just opting out of wearing the themed jerseys during warm-ups and wearing their game jersey instead. If that's what the players want to do, by all means, tell me that you harbor this deep-seated disgust for who I am or who someone else is and that we are not adhering to your idealized concept of the "correct" way to be human.

But, in this effort by Bettman and Co. to protect and shield the NHL from any possible scandal or discussion of difference or question of professed ideals for the industry by simply refusing to acknowledge that friction may exist, Bettman has — in effect — done exactly what the Paradox of Tolerance grapples with. He has allowed intolerance to take over the supposedly tolerant atmosphere and win out over a model of broad acceptance.

And all of this in an effort to keep players from being individuals with individual personalities and beliefs that might challenge the primacy of the NHL brand overall. The community loses safety for the maintenance of a corporate brand. Every community loses inclusion, acceptance, and safety for the maintenance of a corporate brand. That’s the bit to get cynical over; not the fact that they ever made the gesture in the first place, but that the brand, the cup, the club is so flimsy that it can’t take the individualism of the players employed by it.

People would much rather know from a player abstaining from a special jersey during warm-ups, unpunished by fines but still visible, whether they’re safe with them, rather than for the NHL to cover everyone up and make fandom for marginalized folks an absolute crap shoot again for the sake of the brand. Since we were talking about unspoken gestures before, this too is an unspoken gesture — that queer people in particular are less important than the brand, and that the NHL’s professed commitment to broad inclusion is as flimsy as wet cardboard in a hurricane.

And it’s not just fans who are hearing that — it’s players too, current and future. Why struggle against an obviously antagonistic tide in hockey if there’s no commitment, even just a gesture, to your safety and acceptability within the sport? Lots of players of various communities have fought back against that tide and succeeded, but so, so many have given up and walked away. It should be a little less cute and little more concerning how many dynasties and sibling groups are in the NHL. It’s a ready indication that the pool of pro candidates hasn’t gotten all that much wider in the last twenty, thirty years. The next twenty aren’t looking all that much better at present.

And, if it needs saying, Bettman and Co. have also stripped out players' ability to express their tolerance and enthusiasm for diversity in the sport. Players no longer have the ability to do the most visible part of the supposed gesture of NHL tolerance, the "hockey is for everyone" demonstration, however limited it was. If the players, at least a handful of them, aren't buying in, then shut it all down and revert to the ironclad homogeneity of the NHL as squeaky clean, predominately white "good ol' boys" who never have a public-facing opinion that isn't in hockey PR speak. Individualism is dead from all sides and all we got is this lousy t-shirt. Oh, wait.

Although we know that's breaking down anyway. Although we've already heard individual players don't want to be gagged on this subject or on any of the other community subjects. I have to imagine the Hockey Diversity Alliance isn't liking the headwinds coming out of this kerfuffle.

But what about players being "cancelled," you say? First, point me to a person who's actually been cancelled. Second, it is impossible for a minority group of fans to do anything to these guys except not like them. They're all insulated within the hockey world. Nothing that gets said is going to really rattle that insulation. Sure, there could be one crazy outlier, but for the most part, these dudes probably wouldn't even notice a difference.

And, as to the "keep politics out of sports" argument: being alive is political. If you haven't figured that out yet, it's because the politics of life have mostly been in your favor up to this point. Maybe look around a bit and figure that glaringly obvious reality out for yourself.

So sure, it’s just a shirt. Sure, it’s just tape. Why does it matter? It matters because it’s a huge step back. It matters because it rescinds the most important part of the gesture — that the team will use their platform and briefly model the acceptability of diverse people into the sport. Everything else is happening offscreen, if you will. It’s big tax-deductible checks and handshakes and press releases, most of which the fans never look at, hear about, or pay attention to. But the players, if they choose, could be highly visible, could participate in the loudest gesture the NHL seems capable of making — that of the players making practice shots while studiously ignoring fans for ten minutes — and the NHL brand got scared by any indication that their players might be individuals and took that away.

So yeah, it matters. And it is extremely disheartening that 7 dudes just made the whole prospect of going to games that much more dicey for people in marginalized communities, especially the queer community.

TL;DR Gary Bettman sucks.

#pride jersey

Trending Tags

Recently Viewed Tags

#pride jersey