While the Giants Were Being Homophobic, the Valkyries Were Hosting the Gayest Night in Sports History
Last Friday, June 26th, the Valkyries celebrated their 2nd annual Pride Night. Knowing this organization, we’d expect nothing less than a fabulous evening, but this year, in the midst of the SF Giants’ homophobia controversy, the Valkyries’ Pride night felt like a galvanizing, extra special crowning of queerness in Bay Area sports.
The perfect ending to this radically joyful and inclusive evening was when the Valkyries’ newest leader on the court, Gabby Williams, shouted gleefully into television cameras, “For the Gays!”. With Marine Johannes looking on from the crowd in her Gabby Slam T-shirt and Gabby's teammates laughing with her, this declaration was a nod to the recent comment by the Minnesota Lynx Head Coach, Cheryl Reeve, after their loss on their own Pride Night on June 21st, “We should have done it for the gays. We didn’t get it done.”
However, Valkyries Head Coach Natalie Nakase did get it done on Friday’s Pride game. In the post-Pride-game press conference, she shared her perspective on the importance of Pride Night, “Part of our culture is to allow everyone to be their authentic self … There's something special about being able to be your true self. Everyone has their quirks, being different. You know, for me, I was a little bit too short or I was Asian. I wasn't like everyone. I was 5'1. I was a female working in the NBA. I've been different my whole life. And the beauty of that is we don't even really have to talk about it, the care and the love and acceptance is already within.”
Though, there are professional sports venues where Pride nights don’t happen (the Oklahoma City Thunder is the only NBA team not to hold a Pride Night) or where Pride feels like a 24-hour rainbow sticker or even festers trolling and alleged boycotts, that’s absolutely not the case here. In San Francisco, a city known as a haven for queer life and a generator of queer culture, the remarkable thing isn’t that Pride is being celebrated at Chase Center; the remarkable thing is that for many queer people, the space and fandom that the Valkyries have spawned as “Ballhalla” is so consistently and ontologically queer, that Pride Night feels less like an introduction of something new and more like an amplification of what already exists.
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