UPDATE (5/23/2023): Since this article was published, the Dodgers have re-invited the Los Angeles Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to be honored with the Community Hero Award at this year’s Dodgers Pride Night. The Dodgers’ statement explains that this decision comes “after much thoughtful feedback… honest conversations… and generous discussions” with the Sisters and the LA queer community. The Los Angeles Sisters elaborated that they accepted this re-issued invitation in good faith that the apology was sincere.
The Los Angeles LGBT Center announced that they will also return to participate in the event, following the Sisters’ lead. GLAAD President Sarah Kate Ellis responded to the news: “Corporate allies, like all of us, don’t always get it right the first time. But any good ally knows that… it’s about listening.“ And the Dodgers listened.
As Ellis continued, the Sisters’ willingness to hear the Dodgers out and accept their apology has proved “the Sisters are more worthy of Pride Night’s honor than ever.”
“The morning started out with me tweeting congratulations to my Los Angeles sisters, who have been doing amazing work in the community down in Los Angeles and in the surrounding areas for 27 years,” Sister Roma tells me. Roma is one of the longest-tenured members of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a charity, protest, and street performance organization that uses humor, drag and religious imagery to call attention to sexual intolerance.
“I thought it was really wonderful to see them get their roses with this special award. It was going to be so exciting and they were going to be at Dodgers Stadium. It just really felt like an important moment. And within two short hours, everything changed.”
All it takes is a few fascist tweets to poo-poo what was meant to be a celebratory night bringing together swaths of LGBTQ+ sports fans and their allies. Pride Nights, commonplace throughout many major sports teams (though not mandated or controlled by any leagues), are nothing new, dating back decades. Some consider them important, even essential, while others categorize them as pinkwashing. Some view them through a more nuanced lens. “A ‘Pride Night’ is a great first step for an organization to put forward a clean message to all fans of the team that says, ‘Everyone is welcome in this building. This is what we stand for as a team. This is what we stand for as players.’ That, to me, is a baseline,” USA Today columnist Hemal Jhaveri opined on the Sports Kiki Podcast.
You need not a cursory Google to know that sports have never been the safest or most nurturing environment for queer folks both on and off the field, so while events like this might seem like lip service to some, to others they are a meaningful olive branch in fortifying an increasingly large faction of the fanbase and, let’s be honest, the players themselves. Take last year’s event, for instance, which honored Glenn Burke (the first major leaguer to have come out as gay in 1982) and had the Los Angeles Dodgers team wearing custom rainbow logo caps at what the club’s senior vice president of marketing called “one of the most anticipated nights of the season.”
That was then. This year, the Dodgers are set to host their 10th annual Pride Night on June 16 for a game against the San Francisco Giants. It may be a sparsely attended event due to the cowardice of the team’s organization.
The original plan was to honor the Los Angeles Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence with the Community Hero Award in a pregame ceremony. But after a handful of Catholic leaders pushed back against the Dodgers’ plan, the story gained traction with dumbfuck fascist Marco Rubio issuing a statement of his own, calling it an “outrage” and therefore legitimizing the controversy enough to have the team put out a flaccid statement on Wednesday, May 17. “Given the strong feelings of people who have been offended by the sisters’ inclusion in our evening, and in an effort not to distract from the great benefits that we have seen over the years of Pride Night, we are deciding to remove them from this year’s group of honorees,” the announcement reads.
“I'm sure their social media exploded with these hateful voices spouting the same rhetoric that we've heard for years about how the Sisters are sacrilegious and blasphemous, and we mock nuns and we're perverts and all the stuff that they've been saying for decades that we have managed to somehow quell over time,” remarks Sister Roma. “But this high profile moment, aided by Marco Rubio, obviously shook the Dodgers up. They were like, ‘Oops! What have we done?’ And it's really disappointing to see.”
“Cancel the whole fucking night,” declared actor Wilson Cruz. “This is so tired bitch,” aptly observed Drag Race: All Stars Season 3 winner Trixie Mattel, in what is easily my favorite response so far.
“Rainbow capitalism in a nutshell: Companies will ‘stand’ with us as long as they can make money off of our community, and as soon as the tide of public opinion turns they will immediately change their tune,” wrote activist Nicolas Kadir Jensen. “The Dodgers, which broke the color line in baseball in 1947 by signing Jackie Robinson, were champions of inclusion,” explained the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Southern California division. “Seventy-six years later, they take a giant step backward banning a long-standing drag charity. In unity with @SFSisters, we will not participate in Pride Night.”
“This is a pathetic capitulation to bigotry and an insult to [the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence’s] long fight against it,” emphasized writer Mark Harris, pointing out that the organization was an activist leader in the first years of the AIDS crisis.
The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence released a lengthy statement on their website on Wednesday, which read in part, “We are disappointed they have chosen to un-ally themselves with us in our ongoing service to the public, many of whom enjoy the Dodgers's heroic efforts in sports… We are both silly and serious. We use our flamboyance in service to our charity work and our message, which is, ‘There is room in our world for each person to be who they are, as they are, free from shame or guilt, and alive in love and joy for their own self.’”
Solidarity is essential in combating bigotry, and so beginning on Wednesday, participating organizations began to drop out. It started with the ACLU of Southern California. The next morning, the LGBT Center in Los Angeles followed suit. “We call on the Dodgers to reconsider their decision, honor the Sisters, and bring the true spirit of Pride back to Dodgers Stadium,” their statement read. “If the decision is not reversed, we strongly encourage the Dodgers to cancel Pride Night.” That evening, LA Pride announced that they will no longer be participating in the event either.
According to The New York Times, the Dodgers organization is currently working internally on potential compromise solutions.
Below, a brief chat with Sister Roma.
You are someone who has been doing this work for a long time and clearly does it purely with the intention of doing good. What is it for you that makes you want to continue to show up and make this your life’s work?
When I moved to San Francisco, I had graduated from a Catholic college. And the whole time I was in that Catholic college, I never honestly did anything civic-minded or spiritual. I didn't volunteer to serve food or anything like that. I honestly came to San Francisco a pretty self-absorbed, young gay guy who was just like a kid let loose in a candy store. There were wild, debaucherous years. And then I met Sister Luscious Lashes, my friend Norman, and he introduced me to the Sisters and it literally changed my life. My head kind of exploded, and I was like, “Oh my god, I care about civil rights! I'm looking around at people who are sick and dying in my community, and we need to help them!”
And the Sisters were such pioneers in HIV/AIDS care and education. We were the first group ever to produce a safer sex pamphlet called “Play Fair” that instructed the community how to remain safe during the AIDS epidemic. We raised a ton of money, and have always been on the front lines of all the right fights. We stand up for women and people of color in the trans community and LGBTQ+ youth and the queer arts. I have never lost my passion or my love for my community or the Sisters in 35 years of service. And I don't think it'll stop, because something like this will happen and we'll be like, “Oh my God. We have to get back involved. We have to keep fighting.”
There's been a lot of controversy around these Pride Nights from the outset. Many within our community feel that events like this are corporate and that they aren't really connected to the community; they're all for show. But the reality is that there are a lot of people that go to these events, especially queer people in sports, and for them these events are very meaningful. They actually build a bridge for queer people and queer fans to feel accepted in the world of sports, which is typically not exactly the safest space for our community.
You're absolutely right, and I completely support any person who still decides to go to Pride Night. Even though there's a corporatization of Pride (some people call it pinkwashing) and this move by the Dodgers may make it look like they're more interested in our money than they are about actually honoring our community, it's still important that we have these events. We need to make sure people see us celebrating, see us being joyful, see us being together. The community has got to step up and we have to fight hard to combat the awful things that they're saying about us on the other side, because they're using their religion, they're using these words, these terms to describe us as weapons, to dehumanize us and criminalize us and we can't allow that to happen. We have to be out, loud and proud — as we always have! That's what we do. We've overcome bigger monsters than this and I'm convinced that we will make it through this. We're going to be fine, but don't ever let anybody squash your pride.
Despite the bullshit, it’s been heartening seeing so many queer people, especially prominent people in our community, speaking out in support of you all. If you look at the Dodgers’ tweet right now and you look at the responses, there’s an overwhelming influx of LGBTQ+ folks saying some version of “what the fucking fuck?” How does that support feel?
It has been really beautiful to see. In fact, my posts have been getting so many replies and I've taken screenshots and I plan on sharing some of these amazing responses that I've gotten from people. It's people sharing their personal experiences with the Sisters about how they were homeless and living on the streets in Seattle and the Sisters there were the only group that took them in and fed them and cared for them, and they wouldn't be alive today without the Sisters.
Another person points out how the Catholic Church sat by and watched while they were being bullied to the point of wanting to kill themselves when they were in the Catholic education system, and how the Sisters have saved their lives. It's just really incredible because when you're doing this work, you kind of just think you're doing what you need to do. You keep your head down and you do it. So when people come out of the woodwork with these beautiful stories to share and support, it makes you know you're doing the right thing. And hopefully it makes the Dodgers realize that they're doing the wrong thing.
How does a situation like this get remedied in your eyes? Even if they were to, say, apologize and reinstate the Sisters’ invitation, I have to imagine it would be hard to move forward knowing how easily they bent to bigotry.
So that is kind of the million-dollar question. It’s very complicated because we’re in a time when people are passing this anti-trans, anti-queer, anti-drag legislation. They're barring drag queens from Prides, mostly through the South, from Florida all the way through Tennessee and Texas. There's also such hate that is being spewed towards our community and they're othering us. They're trying to criminalize us. So it's super important for an organization like the Dodgers, and here in California, to send a message that they will not succumb to that fascist hate that people are spewing. It feels like they were on the right track and it would be nice if they retracted it and they realized their mistake, and they invited the Los Angeles Sisters back. I definitely feel like they need to apologize and they need to do that. Whether or not the Sisters decide to accept the apology and return — if it's offered — remains to be seen.