Three years ago, a disagreement erupted on some ball fields just south of Seattle. The 2008 Gay Softball World Series was under way, an alternate universe of competitive sports that moves each year to a different city, bringing with it nearly 200 gay softball teams from across the United States and Canada, as well as thousands of spectators. Drag queens rally the fans. Shouts of “Giiiiirrrl” carry across the grass. Guys with their arms draped over other guys stand in the dugout, next to women with biceps bigger than their own.
It’s serious competition, with all the usual intensity and emotion—including, in 2008, suspicions of cheating.
For the Seattle world series, the San Francisco Gay Softball Association, one of the oldest gay softball clubs in the United States, sent a team that called itself D2. They’d been together for some time, but so far the best they’d ever done at the Gay Softball World Series was place fourth. LaRon Charles, a short, scrappy, goateed military veteran, was serving as the team’s coach. As he would later recount in court documents, he and his team decided early on that in order to win, they would need to push themselves “harder than we ever had.”
Down in San Francisco, during the regular season, D2 added practices on weekdays for the first time in the team’s history. Players traveled to weekend tournaments to get in top form. The club held fundraisers to defray hotel and airfare costs for getting people to Seattle.
The work paid off. On August 30, 2008, having sailed through the early rounds of competition at the Seattle Gay Softball World Series, D2 found itself in the semifinals. Their opponents were the Atlanta Mudcats, and they beat them in a blowout, 23–3.
There was just one game left: a championship match against the Los Angeles Vipers.
The night before that final game, rumors began to swirl.
D2 was cheating, the rumors went, and doing so in a way that is unique to the world of organized gay sports.
The accusation, which ended up spawning a federal lawsuit that could change the way gay sports are played around the country, was simple and yet very hard to prove: D2 was fielding too many heterosexual players.
The North American Gay Amateur Athletic Alliance, which puts on the Gay Softball World Series, was founded in the 1970s by gay players in San Francisco and New York seeking to promote a safe and separate space for gay softball. The group has a long history of limiting the number of straight people allowed on the field during world series play; in the organization’s early years, straight people weren’t allowed on the field, period.
Which is not to say that many straight players wanted in. This was the 1970s and 1980s, after all.
It wasn’t until 1993, as hardened cultural animosities toward gays were beginning to crack, that the flat-out ban on straight people loosened. “The rationale for changing the rule,” said NAGAAA commissioner Roy Melani, “was that we now had advocates in the straight community. Plus, we also had family members, whether it be sons or parents, who wanted to play.”
A new rule was adopted: Two straight players per team were allowed during the Gay Softball World Series.
Melani and I were seated across the table from each other at Scandals, a gay bar in Portland, as he told me about this evolution. He’s 51 and trim, and wore a purple striped dress shirt. He pitches for a gay team known as the Portland Brewers, and he apologized in advance for the way he speaks—explosive emotion, chopping hand gestures—saying it’s a combination of his passion for gay sports and his Italian heritage. His lawyer, Roger Leishman of Seattle’s Davis Wright Tremaine, sat next to him, listening closely.
Melani told me right up front that playing against straight teams in the Portland city leagues has convinced him it’s important to have a cap on straight players for NAGAAA’s premier annual event.
“The amount of slurs and the amount of abuse that we take—in Portland, Oregon!—is amazing,” he told me. “Last year, we arrive to play against another team, and the umpire says, ‘Oh, here come the crossdressers.'” On the field, he’s heard opposing players call out “Faggot!” or “You throw like a girl!”
“Meanwhile,” Melani said, “we beat the shit out of these guys.”
He went on: “There was one time, a few years ago, where we split a double header with a straight team—they were ready to take baseball bats and come to blows because we were gay. Mind you, my team was not out there hugging and kissing everybody. That was not what we were doing. We were playing softball. And we were beating them. And that was a problem for them.”
This is one of the many hard-to-duplicate experiences that come with playing on a gay sports team, this opportunity to humble—and enrage—straight people who aren’t used to gays being good at sports. It’s a reminder that, to make the clichéd metaphor literal, the playing field still isn’t even. Even in our quickly shifting culture, gay people still face discrimination and hostility, still spend a certain amount of time crisscrossing the divide between explicitly queer spaces and dominantly heterosexual spaces. Partly because of this, for many in the gay community there’s still a powerful pull toward moments, like the Gay Softball World Series, in which that kind of divide-crossing gets put on extended pause.
The problem comes—as NAGAAA is now finding out in federal court—when a group of people tries to defend queer space by enforcing a limit on exactly how many non-gay people can be included.
In Seattle, figuring out who had a right to be included involved a kind of tribunal, with players being hauled before a “protest committee” to answer pointed questions.
All the suspicion made a competitive atmosphere even more charged. “In the first innings of the championship game, we were playing well,” LaRon Charles, the D2 coach, recounted in a March declaration to the court. Then, suddenly, the game was stopped for a discussion of the fact that D2 was being officially protested based on the allegation that it had too many straight players. Charles went on:
The game resumed, and we were leading the Vipers by about 10 runs when play was stopped again in the third inning. Again, there was a discussion about the protest against our team. Then the game resumed. This happened at least one more time… People had started coming up to our dugout asking questions about different players and what their names and jersey numbers were… Between the interruptions and the buzz growing in the park about our team being protested, we lost focus and lost our momentum. We ended up losing the championship game, 31 to 28.
What happened next is at the heart of the federal lawsuit, filed in April of last year by the National Center for Lesbian Rights on behalf of Charles and two other D2 players who were brought before the tribunal.
NCLR lawyers allege that at the tribunal, Charles and the two other D2 members had their privacy unlawfully invaded and were illegally discriminated against based on their sexual orientation and race. (All three plaintiffs are “men of color,” according to court documents.) The NCLR is demanding unspecified monetary damages for the “emotional distress” suffered by its clients—described in court documents as “vivid flashbacks,” “loss of sleep,” and feelings of “humiliation, embarrassment, and anger”—plus a nationwide injunction against enforcement of the two-straight-players-per-team limit at the Gay Softball World Series. “Nobody should be put into a situation where they’re marched into a room and forced to answer questions about their sexuality,” said Chris Stoll, the NCLR’s senior staff attorney.
This is the first time the NCLR has ever sued another gay group. It’s taken the unusual step, in part, because it has a profoundly different sense of the current culture—and what’s required to defend gay space—than Melani’s organization does.
“These rules are a legacy of an older time,” Stoll said, speaking of the two-straight-
players-per-team cap at the Gay Softball World Series. “Given how much progress we’ve made, they seem kind of antiquated. Today, a rule that limits participation based on sexual orientation just isn’t necessary to have in a gay sports league, or any kind of gay-friendly space.”
The disagreement is bigger than just this lawsuit. Across the world of gay sports, there is wide divergence on how to handle straight players.
This summer, Vancouver, BC, will play host to the North America Outgames, an Olympics-style competition involving gay teams competing against each other in soccer, swimming, hockey, volleyball, running, mountain biking, badminton, golf, poker, and, yes, softball. The Outgames makes an explicit point of not discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation—meaning straight players and teams are theoretically welcome. That’s a very different policy than at the Gay Softball World Series or in the National Gay Flag Football League, which also limits the number of straight players allowed on a team to 20 percent.
This kind of protective discrimination is not unique to gay sports. According to court documents, the Black American Softball Association allows just four “non-black” players per team and demands birth certificates as proof of race; the Native American World Series has a cap of two non-Native softball players per team and requires players to carry “Indian identification”; and the SMASH Softball Tournament for Asian/Pacific Islanders allows only three non-API players and requires “proof of ethnicity.”
The 2008 tribunal, Charles recounted in his court declaration, “was held in a small conference room inside a complex at the park.” All the D2 players waited outside as, one by one, their teammates were brought before a panel composed of leaders in the national gay softball association. Accounts of what followed differ considerably between the plaintiffs and the defendants, but Charles said in his declaration that “more than 25 people were crowded into the small hearing room” and that “the atmosphere felt like a circus.”
According to Charles and his fellow plaintiffs, people inside the hearing room were texting private information to people outside while the questioning was taking place. “When I came out of the hearing room, people I didn’t even know were making comments about my marriage and other things we said in the hearing,” Charles said. (He is married to a woman.)
Meanwhile, the hearing itself seemed to have incomprehensible and shifting standards for how to prove one’s sexuality. Bisexuality, in this recounting of events, was not sufficient evidence to convince the members of the tribunal that a person was not heterosexual.
“Someone on the Protest Committee read me NAGAAA’s definition of ‘heterosexual,'” said Steven Apilado, one of the challenged D2 players, in a March declaration to the court. “I was asked whether it defined me, and I said yes. Then someone on the Protest Committee read me NAGAAA’s definition of ‘homosexual,’ and I was asked whether that definition defined me. I said yes to that question, too.”
Apilado, who is African American and Filipino, had been introduced to the gay softball world when his brother invited him to play on his team. He was ruled “non-gay” by the tribunal and claims that until the hearing, “I had never disclosed my sexual orientation to anybody.”
Charles, who is African American, said that when he, too, professed bisexuality, one of the NAGAAA board members in the room told him, “This is the Gay World Series, not the Bisexual World Series.” Multiple votes were taken with regard to Charles’s sexuality, he said, and “on the final vote, I was voted to be ‘not gay.'”
John Russ, another of the challenged D2 players, refused to answer the tribunal’s questions. “I didn’t want them getting into my personal business,” he explained in court documents.
Russ is African American. Just like the other men of color brought before the tribunal, he was ruled “non-gay.” Curiously, Russ said, another D2 player—a player who is not a plaintiff in the lawsuit—was questioned by the tribunal and refused to answer. That player is white and was ruled “gay.”
What was the racial makeup of the tribunal? “All but one of NAGAAA’s protest committee members were Caucasian,” according to court documents filed by the NCLR. Leishman, the lawyer for Melani and NAGAAA, said there were five committee members, four men and one woman. One of the men was Asian and the rest were Caucasian.
All five committee members have been offended by the suggestion that racism played any part in the proceedings, Leishman said, contending that they made their decisions based only on “the demeanor of the individuals”—meaning, Leishman said, “which ones seemed evasive and not forthright.”
“By the time the voting was over, I was extremely upset,” Russ said. “I raised my hand and I asked how they could ask me these few questions and determine what my sexuality is. Nobody responded.”
With three of D2’s players now ruled “non-gay,” the team was retroactively disqualified from the Seattle Gay Softball World Series and forced to forfeit its second-place trophy.
“I felt like we had gotten hit by a train,” Charles said.
“I started to cry as we were leaving the complex,” said Apilado. “I didn’t want this to end there.”
It did not end there, and Melani now hotly disputes the plaintiffs’ recounting of what went on that day. “First of all,” he told me, “I want to say: They were not treated poorly in any way, shape, or form.”
They certainly feel that way, I told him.
“I know that,” he said. “But you need to hear the other side of the story. This is a really hot button for me. They are at the Gay World Series. Is it unreasonable for someone to say, ‘Are you gay?’ at the Gay World Series? It is not.”
Even so, did this particular line of “Are you gay?” questioning go a bit off the rails?
“They have said that this is a kangaroo court that they were brought in front of,” Melani replied. “In no way, shape, or form was it done like that.”
Central to Melani’s account is his contention that the D2 players never said at the hearing that they were bisexual. “If they’d have said that,” he told me, “we wouldn’t be sitting here.”
At the time, the policies of NAGAAA allowed bisexual players to play in the Gay Softball World Series and not be counted as straight, said Leishman, admitting, “Some people seem to have been confused.”
But he contends that no one with a vote on the tribunal was confused, nor did any of the voting members make any statement about it being “the Gay World Series, not the Bisexual World Series.”
In any case, Leishman said, the gay softball association’s policies have now been clarified. Bisexuals are even more explicitly allowed to play in the world series—as are lesbians, transgender people, and limited numbers of straight people—and the way the organization determines a person’s sexuality is simple: self-declaration. “We don’t have cards, we don’t have pink triangles, and no one’s gaydar is perfect,” said Leishman. “All you can do is ask.”
Stoll, of the NCLR, isn’t sold.
“It’s hard to understand what’s particularly important about the magic number of capping it at two heterosexual players,” he said. “And the real problem is that any way you try to enforce a cap like this is going to have real, devastating consequences. Just look at what happened to the guys in this case.”
Plus, what about the cap’s implication that a gay team can’t—
Melani cut me off.
“Don’t misconstrue,” he said.
“But you know what I’m going to ask.”
“I know exactly what you’re going to ask,” he said.
“Okay, let me just ask it, just for the formality of it: Are you saying that a gay team can’t beat a straight team?”
“No, I’m not saying that. I’m saying that they have, and that’s breaking down the barriers of sports.”
Still, Melani feels there’s a place for that kind of majority-gay versus majority-straight competition, and a place for majority-gay versus majority-gay competition—and the Gay Softball World Series is the latter.
After his trip through the tribunal, Charles came away with a very different impression.
“I felt, and still feel, offended that someone would think that having players who were voted by a group of strangers to be ‘non-gay’ would make the difference in whether we win or lose,” he said. “A straight player is no better than I am.”
A trial is set for June in Seattle before US District Court judge John C. Coughenour. One of the more interesting legal questions that lawyers are preparing to debate is whether the Gay Softball World Series, as it manifested itself in Seattle, constituted a “public accommodation.” The phrase is important because it connects to Washington State’s nondiscrimination law, which is designed, for example, to prevent people from being denied access to a water fountain because of their race or kicked out of a business establishment because of their sexual orientation.
As we were sitting at Scandals, Leishman pointed out: “This is a public accommodation.” His message was that if the bar were located in Washington State, a person couldn’t be denied entry because of his or her race or sexual orientation.
In court filings, the NCLR has argued that the Seattle Gay Softball World Series was a public accommodation (it was played on public fields and advertised widely) and that by denying “non-gay” people the ability to participate, NAGAAA violated the state’s nondiscrimination law.
Leishman, returning to his example, explained that essentially what the NCLR is demanding here is not just the right for anyone to enter a gay bar regardless of race or sexual orientation, but also the right for anyone to leap over the bar and start pouring beer for customers. At the 2008 Gay Softball World Series, anyone could buy a ticket regardless of race or sexual orientation, but not everyone was allowed on the field. “You can’t just walk off the street and pick up a bat and start playing on a team,” Leishman said.
Additionally, Leishman argues, the group that puts on the Gay Softball World Series is a private organization—like, say, the Boy Scouts of America, which explicitly excludes homosexuals and in 2000 successfully fought all the way to the US Supreme Court to defend its right, as a private organization, to do so. It just so happens that NAGAAA discriminates in the opposite direction.
Melani, frustrated by a sense that his group has been unfairly singled out, challenges the NCLR to be consistent. Why, Melani asks, has the NCLR not also filed suit against lesbian softball teams that allow only women, or taken some of the race- and ethnicity-based softball competitions to court?
“Are rules like that possibly illegal?” Stoll asked in response. “I think it’s entirely possible.”
Talk to Melani about his path into the world of gay softball, and it quickly becomes clear why a safe space for gay players is so important to him.
It begins with a flashback to high school, which is common: Adult gay athletes are competing not just against their on-field opponents, but also against the memories of what happened to them back then. Craig Kelly, the coach of the Seattle Quake rugby team, sees this all the time in new players, many of whom have never before played organized sports. “In high school, they probably weren’t encouraged to be athletes,” Kelly said. “They were probably singled out as nonathletic when they were younger. Or maybe their own desires were growing—you don’t want to pop wood in the shower.” Michael Coleman, who runs Jet City Hoops, Seattle’s gay basketball league, sees the same thing. “They were either the last person picked on a team, or not picked way back when, and they just want to come out and be a part of that now,” he said. “There’s obviously a comfort level if you’re with other gay people and other people at your skill level.” Plus, he said, “You can say to your fellow players, ‘That guy’s kinda hot.'”
“I played football, I played basketball, and I played baseball,” Melani said of his high school years. He was good, and no one knew he was gay, though Melani was beginning to wonder.
He also was beginning to observe how gay men who had a harder time masking their homosexuality were treated. “I remember,” Melani said, “when we were in gym class, and there were a couple guys I knew were gay. You just know. And the poor guys were the last ones picked. And I remember some sense of ‘If I could make a difference in that situation…'”
I asked whether a kind of survivor’s guilt—a guilt at being able to pass as straight and thrive in the world of high school sports—was behind Melani’s later involvement in the world of gay softball.
“It may well have been,” he said.
If his gay softball association hadn’t had insurance against lawsuits like the one the NCLR is bringing, Melani said, “we would be defunct.” The pretrial legal bills alone would have sunk NAGAAA.
But there’s another money issue that Melani now worries about: If, as a result of this legal fight, the purity of the gay demographic at the Gay Softball World Series is diluted by court order, will NAGAAA still be able to receive lucrative sponsorships from gay-targeting beer companies and the like, the kind of sponsorships that make the event possible?
Adding frustration to his fears, Melani said that one of the men who’s suing NAGAAA over its cap on straight players has himself been playing in the SMASH Softball Tournament for Asian/Pacific Islanders—that’s the tournament that sets a cap of three non-API players per team and requires “proof of ethnicity.”
Interestingly, all the parties involved seem to think that someday there will no longer be a need to fight in federal court over how to defend this country’s gay sports space.
The sticking point is just whether that day is in the future or right now.
Jeff Card, commissioner of the Emerald City Softball Association, which oversees 35 gay softball teams in Seattle, told me: “My view is that eventually this cap on straight players will probably go by the wayside, anyway. It’s just a matter of when. If there’s any judicial action, it would have the effect of simply speeding up the outcome.”
During the regular season, Seattle’s gay softball teams don’t enforce the cap—and aren’t required to by NAGAAA. A good number of straight players participate, some because they simply find gay sports teams more supportive and fun than straight teams. However, Seattle’s gay softball teams are required to enforce the cap when sending teams to the Gay Softball World Series. And the Seattle association has repeatedly used its vote at national board meetings to uphold the world series cap because, Card said, the experiences of gay softball teams in less tolerant cities—”like Tulsa and Oklahoma City”—make a cap on straight players at the world series “a lot more pertinent.”
When I told Melani and Leishman that the lawyer for the NCLR had called the cap on straight players “a legacy of an older time,” Leishman quickly shot back:
“Maybe it is in San Francisco.”
Melani immediately added:
“Not in Birmingham, Alabama, or Memphis, Tennessee.”
Both are places with gay softball teams that need a separate space for gay sports far more than, say, major coastal urban centers. Melani continued: “It would be wonderful to say that we live in a world with no discrimination, and that gay men and women are free to marry and be without discrimination in a job—it’s not the reality that we’re living in. And until that changes, that’s the basis of what we need. Especially in sports. You tell me one Major League Baseball player who is out and proud, and I’ll give you a million dollars.”
I asked: When I can tell you one Major League Baseball player who is out and proud, will you declare mission accomplished and shut down the Gay Softball World Series?
“Yes,” he said. 
@Stranger staff: how about a “super scientific” online poll asking us gays how we feel about “outsiders invading our sacred institutions” and safe spaces?
Scary, honey, I’m here!
But, back to Mr. G:
How the hell do you reach that conclusion? I hang out with inclusive fags, myself included, and we go to gay bars with our straight friends.
And guess what – I also go to straight bars.
I play gay softball, I’ve played in the Underdog league.
I am part of a generation that is quickly moving beyond segregation of gays and straights, and we are the better for it. We are the ones who are showing the straight community that we don’t bite. We are the ones showing that we are more than assless chaps and drag queens. When you hear people change their opinion of the fags because they finally actually interacted with one – that’s my generation. That’s the inclusive generation. Not your exclusionary, anti-straight (I’m curious how often you call straight folks “breeder”) type.
And that doesn’t make me a self-hater at all. In fact, as anyone who knows me can attest, it is quite the opposite, kiddo. I have no problems with who I am, and am not about to hide behind the doors of a gay establishment.
@michaelp, I get it. You don’t like having a gay community. Maybe it’s the way of the world. I think it’s sad to see it go. I also think it’s sad to see assless chaps, and the leather scene in general, disappear. You and your friends who crave the approval of straights, you’ll never know what ya missed. Oh well!
I apologize for not choosing my words more carefully, Mr. G, but you were the one making the aside about lesbians so I mistakenly assumed women annoyed you more.
Regardless, my original point stands. Whether we’re talking about straight men or women, you’re seeing an ‘outsider’ and automatically making some assumptions about it killing the mood. I understand what you’re talking about and I’ve seen it plenty of times. But why is it killing the mood? Just ask yourself that. I’m not sure myself – perhaps it’s internalized homophobia, maybe it’s past experience, maybe it’s friggin pheromones. I dunno. The bottom line is it’s bullshit and we need grow right alongside the straights. And as anybody who’s been to a gay bar in Seattle can attest, us homos can kill the mood just fine on our own. If you’re that desperate for an all-homo environment, just throw your own PRIVATE party.
That being said – I think that straights should bear all this in mind when going out with their gay friends. If you think you’re getting in the way of a potential hookup… if you think you’re killing the mood, you should probably leave. And if you find you’re always ‘killing the mood’ with the particular gays you’re hanging with, maybe it’s time to find some new ones. Ones who are a little more open minded.
Oh, and to Scary Tyler Moore… please leave the melodramatic whining to teh geyz. You’re doing it all wrong.
@Canuck, I don’t think you’ll get a fair sampling here. Think about it a second. To say what I’m saying requires someone to voice “intolerance.” And it conveys dissatisfaction. It’s not “cool,” which means people just aren’t going to say it.
Here’s how it really works: As the straight population in what were once gay bars rises, the gay people stop coming. It doesn’t happen all at once, but little by little. Pretty soon, what you thought was a gay bar is just another straight dance club.
Along the way, very few people actually SAY anything. They find alternatives.
This problem reads narrower than it really is. The question extends beyond the present moment and the gay community to a perrinial problem in American life: the competing interests of pluralism and integration. I don’t think anyone can argue against the necessity of having safe spaces in hostile cities and counties; there is a powerful interest in creating well-defined, and well defended, spaces for gay people in those places. I imagine that, for many gay people in the South, gay sporting organizations are one of the few places they can assert their identities and have their relationships be affirmed in public space. The issue is muddier in cities like Seattle, where the dignity of gay people is accepted as the rule rather than the exception (though obviously there are still homophobes, and being young and gay still involves no small amount of tribulation). As the country becomes increasingly accepting of gay people, as gay culture is increasingly bound into the larger fabric of American life, will there still be a role for gay sporting association, and what will that role be? Will gay softball go the way of negro baseball? More pointedly, do we want it do? No one wants a gay ghetto, as it were, but is there something to be said for having a gay neighborhood?
Right now, gay sports serve to empower an embattled communiy. The benefits of having visible gay athletes outweigh the hazards of potentially discriminating against heterosexuals. I agree with previous commentators who have suggested that sometimes being a good ally means staying off the field and cheering for the home team, at least for now. Ringers are nothing new in sports. The solution to that question seems easier solved through administrative oversight than through a reckoning with gay sports’ situation in the broader context of heteronromative culture and the struggle for civic equality.
I think that, in the long run, gay sports will reflect the paradigm of charitable sporting events, with participation reflecting a desire to address issues thbat are particular or particularly relevant to the gay community. Straight people will be involved to a much greater degree than they are currently.
assless chaps is a tautology.
heed the words of Bob Dylan, Mr. G.:
“Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’”
which would sound pretty good with a disco beat and RuPaul singing it.
@dak7e, as far as the “private parties” go, that in fact is what has happened with most of Seattle’s gay leather scene. I think that’s really bad news, because it becomes split up, and less accessible for newcomers.
Why do straight people kill the vibe? I don’t know, and I don’t care. I’m not a fuckin’ college professor. All I know is that it does kill the vibe, and that’s all I need to know. The gay bar scene in this town, and a lot of other ones, is pretty much on its deathbed anyway.
I think the Internet is a much bigger factor. This 100-post thread notwithstanding, I think the phenomenon of straights in gay bars, while an irritant, is pretty much a sideshow to something bigger. What was once “the gay community” is being assimilated out of existence. It’s not all bad by any stretch, but it’s not all good either. We’re losing something, and it’s sad to see it go.
It’s still there, Mr. G, just not in rundown club in the crap part of town.
And, yeah, I’m sure there was this wonderful sense of belonging in ye old gay clubs of yore. But that kinda had to do with what was going on outside of those clubs. The disowned children, the witch-hunts, the police beatings, etc. Gay clubs provided a balance, which I’m sure you remember very fondly.
Now we have the recognition and protection we deserve (well, almost). So of course these ‘safe spaces’ will need to evolve if they expect to stay relevant. Hopefully not disappear, but they will change.
(On a personal note – given a choice between skanky (yet still thoroughly soul-warming, I’m sure) hookup joints and the legal/social recognition we’re getting now… well, let’s just say I’m happy with the way things have worked out.)
Just don’t be a douche-crouton about it and it should work out just fine.
Just thought I’d say a couple thins by way of softening this
1. As long as there have been gay dance clubs, gay guys have been bringin’ their hags. This isn’t new and I shouldn’t have implied that it is.
2. The good ol’ days had plenty of their own issues.
3. Yeah, things change. It’s the way of the world, and I know that.
Straights, I don’t hate ya. If it seems like I do, I want to apologize for my tone. I meant it as a lament of sorts, not the attack it turned into. Mea culpa.
@111: I agree with you here. It’s not Canuck or my hot, charming straight friends (who are mostly more sex positive than I’ll ever be) that are causing gay bars to close. It’s Manhunt. It’s Grindr, It’s lazy assholes (pun accidental but happily serendipitous) who don’t care about maintaining a community that are killing gay bars. They’d rather get off in the most efficient way possible so they can hit multiple scenes in one night or scratch the itch and still make it home in time to watch some Netflix. More than any of that it’s gentrification’s effect on nightlife. Good gay bars, the ones that satisfy a social need or cater to a more diverse crowd including straights will stay strong and stay open, perhaps becoming less exclusively gay in the process.
As Michael P said above: Integrating into the mass culture is the best way to reach equality with straights, which I realize is not everyone’s goal. And I understand that we lose some of the things that make the queer community vibrant in the process. Change is inevitable and it hurts, but it’s better to adapt and try to guide it rather than fighting an unwinnable battle against the future.
At the risk of sounding sanctimonious, community is inside of us. It’s in a bar, it’s on the internet, it’s walking by a minivan with a pride sticker, it’s sharing a knowing nod with a gay or lesbian couple going for a walk with their child or winking at a queer revolutionary in assless chaps on the way home from a night at the bars. G-d is not in the church and community isn’t curled up in the wreckage of CC’s. It’s here in this argument and on the field in a gay softball team whether there’s 2 straight players or 12*.
Maybe I live in a fantasy world, but I see things getting better every day and I think the moment when we start forming gay teams as a way of bonding and not because we need them to feel safe is something to look forward to, not something to fear.
@115: tl;dr. sorry.
@dak7e, I’ve gotta tell ya, on a personal note, that I always had the most fun in the skanky bars where you didn’t know where the smell of stale beer left off and the smell of piss began. Remember Johnny’s Handlebar? They didn’t make ’em much better than that joint.
Those were the days, my friend
We thought they’d never end …
@116: I appreciate your explanations…and I agree: Slog Poll!
one more TIME: chaps ARE assless. they were designed to keep the inseam of your jeans from wearing away while riding horses and to prevent skin chafing. come on guys, work with me!
Good gay bars, the ones that satisfy a social need or cater to a more diverse crowd including straights will stay strong and stay open, perhaps becoming less exclusively gay in the process.
God save me from a “good” gay bar.
UNPAID COMMENTER@103, seriously? Jesus. I can understand some concern about straights infiltrating then. I’ve never had any real concerns with homophobic ladies wandering around a lesbian bar. It would definitely change the atmosphere if that was a possibility.
We know about chaps, but the average cowboy or motorcyclist wears jeans underneath. Duh.
@120: To be more clear, by “satisfy a social need “I meant something more like the Eagle that served a narrow clientele (i.e. leather, fetish, etc.) with a strong desire for a community experience. By “cater to a more diverse crowd” I meant someplace like the Bus Stop.
Anyway…
@13 It’s ironic for a member of a community that is petitioning for acceptance to offer so little. Is there really some kind of epidemic happening where gay bars are being overrun by str8’s ?
@122 – I knew you knew what I meant 🙂
@ 13/14: Mr. G says, “Straights, for every gay person who welcomes you in our spaces, there are several who your presence make them feel uncomfortable. We are not all one big happy family in all places, at all times.”
A little presumptuous to speak for us all, don’t you think? Unless you’ve taken a poll, do NOT assume you’re in the majority. I have no problem with straight people who are comfortable enough with their own sexuality that they sometimes join their gay friends for a drink at a gay bar. Get over it.
#124, actually, yes. Gay bars are droppin’ like flies, killed off much more by the Internet than anything else. It’s very much a mixed bag.
#126, I call ’em like I see ’em. But I think, over time, this all becomes a matter of self-selection. Way back when, they’d call some places “mixed.” They were allegedly gay-friendly, but they were boring and, in a cruising sense, unproductive.
But maybe it doesn’t matter, now that so much of the cruising has gone online. Things change. I get that. I was just lamenting the decline of the gay cruise bar. In doing so, I argued too hard. Gay guys are still cruising, but not so much in the bars these days, which means that what to me was the essential gay bar is, if not dead, then on life support.
1, T/F: Randomly pick a gay and a straight to race 100 yards, and the straight will probably win.
2, T/F: Assemble the best possible gay team and the best possible straight team to compete in a sport, and all other things being equal, the straight team will probably win.
Some people answer “true” to both questions. That’s tragic. I hope their perspectives evolve or fade away.
Some people answer “false” to both questions. This is an overcorrection to the first group, transitional and hopefully not where finish societally. Sure, the first is prejudice, but the second is a statistical likelihood*.
I am saddened anyone hesitates with the second, when I hope most people (eventually, regardless of orientation) will answer with “probably” followed by “but who cares?” Readers of The Stranger likely agree that the “True/True” crowd represents a dangerous prejudice. Moreover, the “False/False” position is a distraction and potentially compromises the progressives’ credibility with those still making up their minds.
Nice article. If my grandkids read this article in 2061, I hope they find it interesting but historical, the straight/gay/softball-quota debates as contemporaneous to their everyday lives as segregated water fountains are to ours.
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(*Why? Structure any competition in which one team draws from 10-20% of the population and the other team from 80-90%, the advantage is substantial. Consider this: At activity X, would you predict the win would likely go to the team made up of the best athletes from CA, OR and WA, or would you bet on the team that draws from the other 47 states? I pick these three as their populations total approx 15%.
Devil’s Advocate One: But activity X favors Pacific residents–surfing, snorkeling, open-sea sailing!
Devil’s Advocate Two: But what if the 10-20% isn’t truly *randomly* selected?
To DAO: And where’s the metaphor, that one orientation is better at sports? No way.
DAT: You bringing up nature/nurture/randomness with orientation? Really?)
So a couple summers ago I joined a Queer flag (yes, I said FLAG) football team. The recruitment promo read “to build community” and “strengthen or learn flag football skills”. It wasn’t long after we started the first practice that I realized there were a lot of straight guys playing too… The straight guys only communicated game plays with each other- ignoring or avoiding gay players. The straight men would choose each other first for teams and basically took over the games and marginalized the gay players. Not only were the gay participants prevented from creating “community”, they were prevented from learning or improving their game playing skills because of the marginalizing (and I would go so far as to say condescending) behavior of the straight men. Needless to say I stopped going after a few more practices because things didn’t change and what was supposed to be a queer team was turning into a mixed team controlled by a bunch of prejudiced straight guys. Not fun. Not creating community. And all around an unpleasant experience.
Perhaps some (or all) of negative elements I experienced are similar to the ones experienced by the Gheys at the GSWS.?
@129: Was it a “queer” team in a straight league or a queer league or… the picking teams thing doesn’t make sense to me. Was it scrimmages? I feel confused by the logistics of this.
It was a queer team that planned on scrimmaging with straight and gay teams. Practice scrimmage always involved picking teams.
@131: I’m imagining it fell apart before it went anywhere? My experience of structured gay leagues has been a lot different. Sounds like it sucked, regardless. My understanding of the GSWS issue though is that it really is mostly about ringers.
It seems sad that something that started about community got so focused on winning and losing, both on the parts of the teams that felt the need to “cheat” and the teams that needed to attack alleged cheaters.
@132 Judgementalist, maybe in the span of 100 comments you’ve changed your mind, but how can you say this at #132:
When you also said the following way back in #32:
How do you not see your own hypocrisy on this issue? Either you believe adding “straight ringers” is wrong and against the mission in gay sports, or you don’t. You can’t have it both ways.
@133: No. I think caring about winning or losing is stupid. Honestly, I just played for the drink ups.
But you’re completely right — I thought about this contradiction when I was posting and I could have said that in a much more nuanced way. My bigger point being: I think there’s a tension between “playing a sport for a sense of fun and community” and “playing a sport to dominate the other teams to prove you’re not some sissy fagg*t” or whatever reason people do hire ringers. For us it was a survival tactic since we were a gay team in a straight league and the straights that played with us were awesome people. I agree that this all becomes more complicated in an all gay / all amateur league.
It might be unfair to say this, but rugby also feels sort of like a special case as most Americans don’t grow up playing it, and we were mainly competing teams who’d played in college. Perhaps it would have been more “fair” to hire the straights exclusively as coaches when we were in gay tournaments? Although this does bring back the question of “is it a form of internalized homophobia to assume straight people are better athletes?”
Mister G may come off as a bit of an asshole, but he’s right. And I say this as a straight.
Those of us that come from privilege have a hard time accepting being told “no” about anything, but sometimes we should just shut the fuck up and accept that sometimes, feeling put out because people don’t want to have to deal with us. So many people here are whining about not having the right, not to go to a gay bar (because we can’t legally be kept out, AFAIK), but that the gay people are not happy that we’re there. I’m looking especially at you, Scary; you pretty much exemplify the idea that if people don’t make way for your happy privilege you’ll take your ball and go home. (Threatening to withdraw support for the community because you won’t be welcomed with open arms in a specific circumstance? Really? Grow up!)
Get this; we don’t have the right to waltz into places and expect everything to be happy and all about us. No one, not even Mister G, is saying that straights are assholes that they don’t want to ever associate with. All that is being asked is that straights just accept that it would be nice if we we friends, allies, and common human beings most of the time, and some of the time we just let gays have some space to call their own.
Privilege is so often blind to its own sense of entitlement; please just take a minute and realize that other people’s spaces aren’t always mean to be yours.
If you don’t want to follow the rules don’t play in these leagues that only exist because of their rules! Would the National Center for Lesbian Rights be representing such lawsuit if the ladies were still a part of NAGAAA? Plus at our level of athletics we know what it means to play the “bisexual card” and come on your team is from San Francisco! The gay athletes are out there, Phoenix has 2 “A” teams!
In sports – gay or straight – the primary issue is about winning and losing. If a team of mostly straight players lost early – no one would have cared about how many straight players were on the team.
In sports, gay or straight, it is often about winning or losing. In the case of the world series, the primary issue was that the team won, not that their were a few too many straight guys on the roster. If a team had mostly straight guys but finished in the middle, no one would have cared. I heard that many teams were protested out at the series in Seattle – some for running to quick or hitting to hard for their division. The motivation for all of the protests were not about protecting the goals of gay softball, but because the losing teams wanted to place higher. If gay softball was really about the community – there would not be so many protests and drama. These days It is more about softball than anything else – which is not a bad thing.
Eli,
It is the end of November, 2011 and this news item just surfaced on a News TV in Toronto. It is a pity that all this talk and these well thought out perspectives were not discussed BEFORE calling in the lawyers. Also, it is a pity no one will read my post as I would suggest giving each non-gay player a punch card and having him/ her/it submit it as proof of identifiable gay sexual activity during the softball season to be eligible to play during the World Games. Case closed!