Anti-Rainbow Keyboard Warriors
Anti-Rainbow Keyboard Warriors
A Lesson for Those Who Lashed Out About a Sports Logo
Myfavorite sports team’s 100-year-old logo is red. For about half the games it’s white on red. For St. Patrick’s Day, it has been green. A small group of feisty, hardworking players who were fan favorites wore the logo in black and that apparel trended in the stands for a while.
This June, the organization posted the logo on social media in the rainbow colors associated with Pride Month, the celebration of the LGBTQ community.
The reaction was swift, angry, misspelled, and probably still raging.
If you’ve ever put on a hazmat suit with a disposable vitriol shield and waded into the comments section anywhere, you don’t need me to tell you what it was like. I’m just surprised that the simple change of the hue of a sports logo would trigger the kind of anger that it did.
Breaking it down:
It’s a logo. I’m well aware that people take great “pride” (irony unavoidable) in the logo because I have the logo tattooed on my leg in the original candy apple red, the kind of candy apple that gets discarded at a cider mill and brings armies of ants and swarms of bees, the same way the homophobes flocked to devour this harmless rainbow incarnation of a sports logo, this simple gesture of goodwill, posted on a team page.
The logo itself doesn’t truly represent the fans: It represents a small group of skilled individuals from all over the globe who over the course of a century have been financially compensated to play a sport in a northern industrial town. Fans of that sport in this particular town have both revered and reviled the team, as many citizens of many cities across the globe do their own teams.
Why? Maybe because it’s really difficult for a city to get excited about its Water and Sewage Department. You know, sewage, like what flowed from the mouths/keyboards of people who seem to think that the logo is meant to represent only them, their way of life and their worldview. Which doesn’t make sense.
Over the years the players who were chosen to represent the team have been black and white and Canadian and Finnish and Swedish and Indigenous and Christian and Jewish (the league also has Muslim and Sikh players but I’m not aware of any who play or who have played for this particular team).
Oh, I left out Russian. Russians have represented this team, worn this logo, the same Russians who once suited up for the Central Red Army, which was considered such an enemy that our country spent trillions on a nuclear arsenal to defend ourselves against them.
All seemed to be forgiven and forgotten when those same players were winning games for this precious logo, though they had once been paid by the very people who threatened our way of life in North America. It was called The Cold War.
These fans didn’t give politics a moment’s thought when they were flocking for autographs and photo ops, throwing their arms around virtual strangers they knew nothing about outside the sports arena.
And that brings me to my point:
This logo palette, this temporary design that sang to the gay community “you’re welcome here, we’re glad to have you supporting our team”; it’s inanimate. It’s a thing. Franchises move. Logos change. But such a simple, innocuous color alteration exposed such hatred for real living, breathing human beings.
The Russians… What do they have to do with this?
The Russians were the lesson.
No one knew it then, in a world before the internet, but those Russians played their way into people forgetting that they were once the enemy.
You can shout your anti-gay bias at an abstract two-dimensional drawing. You can tell the whole world that you will never let your son or daughter “be gay”. In many cases, too late. Sorry. They are.
And someone’s gay son will walk into that arena one day and put on a show. And win a game, and win more games. All that hateful bullshit that was typed in all caps, that electronic ink will drip down that page of history, when the homophobic commenters are standing in line with a jersey to be signed, or sprinting across a bar for a photo.
So I say to all the people that shouted twisted homophobic rhetoric at strangers on social media, asserting your straightness, or dog-whistling about some separation of “politics and sports”: Don’t wait.
Unlike the Russians, gay people were never your enemy. They have never posed a threat and will never pose a threat to you and to your way of life. They are in your family. They are at your work. They are on your favorite teams.
Apologize now. Go back to that social media page with that “horribly offensive” rainbow logo, and think about how little you’ve known about your sports heroes’ private lives over the years.
Think about what’s going to happen when a real human being who is openly gay is wearing the logo that means so much to you that you screeched and hollered when it was slightly altered, as though it hasn’t been altered before.
Remember that Rock Hudson didn’t become a lousy actor when you found out he was gay.
Realize that Ricky Martin’s voice wasn’t ruined by putting another man’s penis in his mouth.
And being gay isn’t going to prevent a good athlete from being a good athlete, despite having to endure all the incredibly abusive comments and mistreatment for a lifetime. We’ve already had plenty of gay athletes represent this country with grace and dignity.
One day they will represent the logo that you identify with.
They will excel. You will ask for their autograph. I guarantee you. And the autograph will look much better next to a screenshot of your apology than it will next to a screenshot of your mindless hatefulness.
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