[1216 words, ready for grading]

hi it's me with unfiltered thoughts (and also let me have this title it's good ok)

It's been a pretty weird year to be lgbtq+. There's a lot going on in terms of laws and stuff that are really difficult to keep track of, and that's extended to hockey as well, as we're now up to four teams (Isles, Rangers, Wild, Blackhawks) that have announced their intent to wear Pride jerseys and then cancel at the last minute, and four individual players (Ivan Provorov, James Reimer, Eric and Marc Staal). Unsurprisingly I have many opinions on this, but rather than saying the same thing five different times to overlapping groups of people I wanted to just lay all my cards on the table and talk about something that's near and dear to my heart, and undoubtedly many others as well. I'll try and do this in a kind of point by point form, hopefully this makes enough sense.

"What's the point? It's all just lip service anyway"

It is, and we're not trying to pretend that it's not. I'm not going to declare homophobia solved simply because a team wore a rainbow jersey for 15 minutes for a night. Rainbow capitalism isn't some new thing that popped up yesterday. However, in a sport that has historically been very conservative in terms of its participants and who is promoted, seeing at least a gesture that LGBTQ+ fans are wanted, are valued as fans of the game is really nice to see. Heck, even though us old curmudgeons know the game that's being played, think of what seeing a sports hero wearing a rainbow jersey would mean to a young queer kid who is just getting into the game - a sign that said game sees and accepts who they are! With these teams cancelling the jerseys and closing rank it sends a message that fans of marginalized groups are welcome only as long as they don't make the old guard of enthusiasts uncomfortable, and it's a gut punch for sure.

"but free speech/religion!"

Players are entirely allowed to make whatever statements they want, and we as fans are entirely free to judge those actions based on our own beliefs and values. Players can sit out the warmup if they don't want to participate to the fullest, and we can think they're off base for doing so. (To some extent, with players like Kaepernick and JT Brown, this has already happened, just different people's priorities that got mad about it that time.) Players can believe in their religions, but when that religion believes people like me shouldn't (openly) exist I'm free to think they're full of it. The Panthers and Sharks both went fully ahead with their events despite individual players doing their thing and from what I saw both nights were very well-received by fans. Players having their constitutionally-protected hissy fit shouldn't interrupt an opportunity to do a lot of good in the community.

"NHL teams should just not do any theme nights then!"

This is an argument that I've seen made a lot since this has started happening, and I don't really think it's the answer to this problem. Pro sports teams have a massive reach within their communities and can motivate change - for example, in 2017 the NBA delayed Charlotte's hosting of the All-Star Game to 2019 after North Carolina passed a "bathroom bill" and in 2021 MLB moved its annual festivities out of Georgia when the state passed ballot suppression measures, not to mention the 2020 athlete walkouts in the wake of a police shooting. Even in the NHL, the San Jose Sharks used their Twitter account on Pride night to draw attention to LGBTQ+ issues.

While that's probably a lot of things I just threw out there, the point is that the NHL, along with the other major sports leagues, has a lot of power through their platform to really be able to motivate change and celebrate with their communities. Sports don't exist in a vacuum, and I think reacting to this issue by having sports teams just not do community outreach nights like these is really throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Sports teams can amplify issues that otherwise wouldn't be heard, and this in my opinion has a lot of value. Teams also often tend to work with local charities during special event nights, and those organizations would be adversely effected by not being able to participate on that stage.

"But Russia!"

Yesterday, Bill Daly said in an email to The Athletic that, essentially, there is no evidence that any Russian players face any threat for wearing Pride jerseys. Many players like Evgeni Malkin, Alexander Barabanov, Sergei Bobrovsky and Evgenii Dadonov have all worn them for their respective teams with no issue. It's unfortunate that we saw, for example, the Chicago Blackhawks use this argument a few days ago and citing Philipp Kurashev, Nikita Zaitsev and Anton Khudobin, when it's more likely that it was simply a decision made by a boomer owner - same goes for Rocky Wirtz and James Dolan, the owners for two of the other teams involved. While there's been lots of talk of potential harm to Russian players, it's just not something that's being borne out in reality.

~~~

I don't know how much I've talked about this before, but one of the things that I love about writing my Sophie character media is that I can effectively write a world where homophobia/sexism doesn't have to come into play (I've written a couple chapters that were loosely based off real-life issues). One of the things that's made doing this so simple is that there's a community of people here in the SHL who actively come together to foster inclusion, leading to more people feeling comfortable to share aspects of their identity. I grew up playing youth (ball) hockey in the 2010s, and even if I had known who I was back then I never would've been able to come out because casual homophobia/misogyny was just something that happened and never got stopped. That's where hockey is right now in my opinion, with too many parties content to just maintain the status quo for the sake of PR and/or the bottom line. My hope is that one day soon the real-life hockey community can get to kinda where the SHL is now. I'm proud of what we've built here.

To cap this off, part of why I posted this really is because I've been seeing significant discussion online of the possibility that many teams could just not do Pride nights next year, and I think that would be a mistake. Teams doing this are essentially saying that they're so risk-averse that they would rather sacrifice the good that these events can do for marginalized communities in order to prevent their players maybe looking bad. This also sends a message that the balance of decision-making power (and who can influence decisions) is still in the hands of people and groups who continue to contribute to others being marginalized, and thus have a vested interest in keeping things that way. I hope that teams will keep doing these special events and not get scared away from fostering that better hockey culture that we have to keep working towards.