If a player comes out in the offseason, they're a coward for doing it away from the media and making it an issue for teammates in the leadup to training camp. If they do it at any time during the season, they're selfish for being a distraction.
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And let's not even get started on what happens if a player comes out as pan or bi rather than gay, especially if he's married or dating a woman or has done so in the past! Cue endless rants about why it was even necessary if he can just "choose" a woman, the full biphobic works.
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And then, of course, there's The Russia Issue. Just about every team in the league has at least one Russian player, the vast majority of whom, regardless of whether they think differently in private, are never going to risk criticising Putin's anti-gay stance in public.
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That's not just obliviousness or bigotry (although it certainly can be) - it's awareness that family back home might suffer for what they say here, a desire not to make waves in turn; hell, just fear of not getting to play for a national team because of it.
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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.1 reply 1 retweet 11 likesShow 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.1 reply 0 retweets 13 likesShow 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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