Gay Sports Fans Are Changing The Playing Field

For some gay men it’s Madonna, Mariah, Judy or Barbra.

For others it’s shopping for shoes or clothes, maybe antiques or collectibles. For some it’s dancing, and for homebodies it’s often cooking, gardening or entertaining.

For me it’s baseball. More specifically, it’s the White Sox.

Between the radio and TV and going to the park when they’re at home, I almost never miss a game. When they have a day off during the season, it’s a weird feeling, like a day that doesn’t count somehow.

Last year, during the Sox’ historic championship run in October, I went to see the second playoff game at U.S. Cellular Field. Before they could play another game, I had a heart attack and was out cold for a day and a half. When I came to, I couldn’t talk because I had a tube down my throat, and a nurse handed me a pen and tablet to use to ask questions and communicate. The first thing I wrote, honest to God, was “Did the Sox win?”

If the Sox seem an unusual obsession for a gay man, they’re not, really. I go to 35-40 games a year and run into other gay guys fairly often, and those are just the guys I know and recognize. And in the gay bars where the games are on TV—North End, Bucks, Little Jim’s, Crew—I often see other Sox fans, some I know and some I don’t, watching every pitch.

This year, of course, after the Sox’ World Series victory last fall, I see more people than ever wearing Sox hats and shirts in North Side gay bars. Band-wagon jumpers, for sure, but that’s cool. After years of seeing few Sox caps in Boystown, it’s great to see the support.

The point is that one can be gay and still be a baseball fan. It isn’t just a straight thing. Aside from Sox fans, there are lots of fans of other teams as well. In Boystown, it’s not unusual to see guys sporting caps proclaiming loyalty to the Cardinals, Tigers, Twins and others. Some may wear them as fashion statements, but most actually follow the sport and their teams.

Then, of course, there are plenty of Cubs fans in Boystown, too, though as a Sox fan I’ll never really understand that. That’s OK—as a gay man I take a live-and-let-live attitude to such mysteries.

Last week a guy made a few catty remarks about several of us watching a Sox game in a gay bar on Halsted. Why would gay men watch baseball, he said. They’re all homophobes, they don’t want us, he went on.

Well, yes, there is homophobia in baseball, as in all pro sports. But there’s homophobia everywhere.

There’s homophobia in Congress, in the Catholic Church, in business, and we’re in all those places, too. Living gay doesn’t mean we walk away from things we like. In fact, being gay in this culture has for years meant just the opposite—being persistent enough in our presence to make the point that wherever there are people, there are gay people.

And our presence has brought change, even in baseball. This newspaper pioneered visible gay outings at Major League Baseball games, staging the country’s first-ever such event at Wrigley Field in 2001.

And it was the White Sox, when CFP sponsored Out at the Ballgame at U.S. Cellular Field in 2003, who invited a gay chorus to sing the National Anthem for the first time at a Major League game. Going even further, they had Bill Greaves, Mayor Richard M. Daley’s GLBT community liaison, throw out the first pitch at that game and they spread sections of the AIDS Memorial Quilt on the field before the game. It was a proud day for gay and lesbian Sox fans.

Baseball after all, at its core, is about hope. That’s the lure, a lure that few sports have in such abundance, and it’s a lure to which gays can relate. At the beginning of each year, everybody sees hope for their team. Remember, they think, the 1969 Mets won. The 1959 White Sox couldn’t hit their way out of a wet paper bag, but they won the pennant. The worst team in history, the woeful St. Louis Browns, went to the World Series once. Even Cubs fans, every spring, believe their team is going all the way.

And each game is filled with hope. Each inning is a fresh start, another chance. Each batter has the opportunity to ignite a rally. No game is lost until the last strike is thrown.

There were years when I wandered away from the game, years when I had to figure out who I was and how I would deal with myself and a sometimes hostile world. But after all those years, I’m glad to know I can come back home to the obsession I first caught when I was just a kid climbing into bed on a hot summer night, listening to the radio as White Sox play-by-play announcer Bob Elson called the game from Comiskey Park.

“And there he comes,” Elson would say hopefully. “The Sox are sending Smoky Burgess up to the plate to pinch-hit here in the bottom of the ninth.”

Yep—I really think we can still pull this one out.

Leave Comments