I look at something like this, and even if I'm being charitable and assuming that everyone involved really does want to show support for the queer community and just didn't think about how this completely erases LGBTQ fans from their own damn event, it makes me think:
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As a queer fan, it's exhausting to even contemplate from a distance. But for a player in that position, having to think through it all, knowing they're likely going to cop abuse on the ice, and from fans - and, let's be honest, from management and teammates, too? It's brutal.
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What makes it even more frustrating from a fan perspective is knowing that hockey teams - internally, at a management/marketing level - are something of a broken base. Especially re: the
@Avalanche, you've got a fun, progressive SM team, but also some bigoted shitbird owners.Show this thread -
Every time the
@DallasStars post about YCP or pride on their Instagram, the majority of the comments are from homophobes complaining about "politics in sports," as though military nights are not also fundamentally political, because Being Gay Is Bad.Show this thread -
So any queer players - on top of everything already mentioned - have to deal with the fact that their own organisations are going to have wildly different reactions were they to come out, at all different levels, with different degrees of complication and consequence.
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Returning to the original tweet, I want to be angry when queer fans are erased like this in favour of lauding "allies"(and I am), but who am I angry at? What part of the organisation is responsible for this one particular hurt, that I can single out as a proxy for hockey culture?
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I don't have much else to say, except that, whoever eventually comes out first is gonna be entitled to a whole heap of "fuck you, I want this" about it. Because if they're going to be unfairly criticised no matter what, then why even try to be polite about it?
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ANYWAY. We now return you to your regularly scheduled Thursday. Also the Blackhawks logo is racist and the Bruins suck.
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ONE FINAL TWEET, because I missed it out before: there's also a double burden on any queer POC players because the league is so goddamn white. To be one of only a handful of black players AND the first out player? That's gonna involve even more extra bullshit, and it sucks.
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End of conversation
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