Historically, Ranger devotion to off-color ritual only grows stronger when management tries to stop it.

Rangers fans still shout a derisive chant about Denis Potvin at home games, a reference that dates to 1979, when the Islanders’ Potvin hit the Rangers’ Ulf Nilsson and broke Nilsson’s ankle. The chant was always shouted after the organist played the song “Let’s Go Band.” But in the 1980s, in an attempt to crack down on the chant, the Rangers stopped playing the song. More than 20 years later, fans still whistle the song as a lead-in to the chant.

“It’s a hockey game,” said Ricardo Pereira, 25, a season-ticket holder from Huntington on Long Island. “Hockey players are tough. Deal with it.”

Hockey has a loyal fan base within New York’s gay community, including the members of the New York Gay Hockey Association, which oversees 5 teams and claims 150 members. Many gay Rangers fans grew up attending games with their families and say they make a distinction between raucous tradition and comments that single out a specific group.

Stankes said he turned down an invitation by the gay hockey group to attend a Rangers game en masse a few years ago. As he feared, the crowd booed when the name of the group flashed on the monitors. But Kagan said the fans’ reaction surprised and hurt him. “I never expected that at all,” he said.

One of the most visible examples of the fans’ antigay behavior is the chant directed at Goodman, which according to him began in 1998 or 1999, when the Rangers were doing poorly and some fans claimed Goodman’s dancing was jinxing the team.

“The fans were looking to vent their frustration on somebody and unfortunately it was me,” said Goodman, 38, who lives in northern New Jersey and said he was not gay. Goodman is a celebrity at Rangers games and appears frequently on television and in local newspapers, but was reluctant to comment on the chants and told a reporter he prefers to be called Dancin’ Larry.