The Red Sox held their first Pride Night in 2013, back when the concept wasn’t commonplace. “The LGBTQIA+ community support and interest for Pride Night has been tremendous, and I’m look forward to an awesome celebration!” “It’s been so exciting welcoming our fans back to Fenway,” said Travis Pollio, the Red Sox’ senior manager of group sales and promotions. There is also a pre-game party (remember those?) featuring featuring DJ Rich DiMare. The first 1,000 fans in attendance will receive a t-shirt with the Progress Pride “B,” and as expected, the pregame ceremony will be dedicating to celebrating Pride. As always, it coincides with Pride Week in Boston, though it will be one of the few in-person celebrations for Boston Pride this year. It does not store any personal data.UPDATE: After a one-year hiatus, Red Sox Pride Night returns Thursday. The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance". This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
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Instead, I’d like to write about Rick, out there today at the front of the parade he created, brave, resplendent, spreading joy as he passed, his suit jacket glittering in the sunlight, even on this darkest of days. Which is why I’d rather leave it to those who do know to try to provide insight into Orlando, if it can be peered into at all. That is what is known as hetero (and perhaps Canadian) privilege. Can you imagine what it would be like to spend Friday night at a gay bar in the US, or to walk down the streets of a gay neighborhood, after today? I can’t, not really.
#Boston red sox gay pride hat free#
Being gay especially takes a lot of courage in the land of the free and the assault rifles, as the Orlando shootings have reminded us in the most gruesome, horrific, stomach-turning way possible. In fact, I’m not sure it’s correct to say that Nanaimo or any place else has really become “gay-friendly” homophobia hasn’t disappeared, it’s just become more furtive (though perhaps there’s some justice in the fact that now it’s the homophobes who have to be furtive). It takes a lot of courage to be a gay man, or any other member of the LGBTQ community, even today. And that’s why I wanted to write about him.īut of course in writing about him, I am writing about the shootings in Orlando. But when you lose many of your best people to places like Vancouver and Toronto, some things just take a bit longer to happen.Īnyway, Rick is an example of what happens when somebody sticks around in a community and decides to make it better. If you live in a larger centre, you may think that was a bit overdue, and a lot of people in Nanaimo would agree with you. Rick was one of the main forces behind both. But then he came back to Nanaimo, and helped turn it into the more progressive and gay-friendly place it is today.įor example, while Nanaimo’s had a Pride Week since 2002, that Pride parade today was its first, as is the rainbow-colored crosswalk you see Rick checking out, on the night it was painted below. A lot of gay people in small places respond to that sort of abuse by moving to a larger centre, where they can find more community (and safety), and Rick did live in Vancouver for a while. Rick grew up in Nanaimo, and experienced all the crap you’d expect a gay kid to experience in what was then a working-class town, like having “Rick Meyers is a fag” spray painted across the side of a bridge above a main thoroughfare.
That’s him to the left, walking in today’s Pride parade. He’s been a celebrity there for a long time, first as the city’s most prominent drag performer, and more recently as an actor with various of its theater companies, and President of the Pride Society. Rick lives just outside of Nanaimo, a city of about 80,000, across the water from the island I live on.
On this dreadful day, I don’t want to write about the shootings in Orlando.