What drives me nuts is that, because of how sports media works - and regular media, too, but sports media is the most salient here - and because of the entrenched culture of homophobia in so much of hockey in particular and sports in general, there's no perfect way to come out.
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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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