On the 366th day since the Pulse shooting, Nationals Park attendees snaked to various gates. Some wore Nationals hats, some wore Braves hats, and some wore Make America Great Again hats. Any of them would have been able to hear the voices of the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington tucked away at the perimeter of Nationals park as they warmed their voices, like they did outside of the Supreme Court after the gay marriage ruling and like they did at Nationals Park days after the world lost 49 people at a gay nightclub.

This would be the 13th annual Nats Night OUT put on by Team DC, a charity that works for LGBTQ causes across sports. Hours before first pitch, fenced inside an area of the family picnic tables in right-centerfield, there were 49 (likely) LGBTQ people clad in soft orange shirts, simmering in ardor.

The 12th annual Night OUT occurred two days removed from the Pulse nightclub shooting. The urgency of togetherness was deeply understood. The celebration, queer Nats fan Jenn Rubenstein explained, was replaced with sadness and solemnity. It was tinged by the proximity to a jarring reminder of the community’s vulnerability.

Yet, a few flowers still grew out of the pain and sodality of queer baseball people, even if you had to look past ashes to see them.

On the first anniversary of the shooting, a day earlier, I scavenged for the words I had forced out of me on the second day since so that I would remember. If I hadn’t, I may never have recalled the way the grocery bags I was carrying dug harder into my wrists or feeling pieces of my hair matted to my face the way wet seaweed catches on sand as the words “gay” and “shooting” walked together in a sentence through a house by the beach to stun me. I might not have remembered that if the scene had unfolded that day on mute it might have been unclear as to why I looked like I had hit an invisible pile of bricks.

Maybe it was even unclear where so many bricks had come from. Sputtering platitudes at “50 people at a gay nightclub,” couldn’t communicate my shock. I had a key that might unlock friends’ understanding, but it clung like powdered sugar to the back of my throat.

What I had been contented to understand only weeks earlier is my own sexual identity. (I, uh, best describe it as porque no los dos.) My thrill turned to shock and a longing for the comfort of a community I had yet to publicly claim. My close queer friends, well, they went to a different school and you wouldn’t have known them. I abandoned my excitement scrolling quietly through my Twitter feed. Tears welled, maybe a blurring attempt to censor the devastating details.

Two days removed from the tragedy was Nationals Night OUT. That night the community I’m intertwined with attempted to embrace the one I coveted, the one it had a history of shunning. I wouldn’t tell anyone why I spent hours poring over accounts of the characteristic resilience of the LGBTQ community. I wouldn’t risk adding to whitewashing or distracting from the essence of a tragedy that targeted Latinx queer people.

So I watched from my couch in the aftermath of shock and put a part of myself to the side too. The queer community had almost reached my toes until I saw a shark in the water. But, remember, the sharks are always there. It was like peeking into a room cautiously only to have a grand piano smash in front of your face. Was anyone going to explain why a piano was smashing in the first place? That aside, you knew it wasn’t the first time it happened, and it wouldn’t be the last.

I wouldn’t have the community that I vied for. Instead, I had the sport that always sat with me. That would be fine. Sometimes baseball is a reprieve from harshness; sometimes it is the harshness; most of the time it’s neither. But this night, I looked at it for an acknowledgement of the harshness.

There were untimely reminders that night that baseball still isn’t where it should be. Laura, a bi grad student, was one of those people. “I really needed my community more than most times,” she said, “The game started on TV and crickets. No verbal mention…Even in the crowd shots there was nothing pride related on camera.”

After she raised hell in the MASN’s Twitter mentions, the Nationals rainbow shirt memorial inhabiting seats behind home was shown in the eighth inning. If too little and too late were a contest, MASN would have been the littlest and the latest. “We got significantly less attention than Screech’s birthday in the week of the worst large-scale tragedy in our community for at least a decade,” Laura finished.

But those who ventured to Nats Park that year were removed from the broadcast’s shortcomings, and experienced instead the personification of the “Love Not Hate” graphics displayed across every screen in the ballpark.

They watched a giant pride flag, one that the Nationals bought as they frantically added to the night to honor Pulse victims, unfurl on the pitchers mound while the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington sang “True Colors”. They experienced the healing of Leslie Jordan’s exuberant first pitch and forced selfie photoshoots.

A Hardball Times Update by Rachael McDaniel Goodbye for now.

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They might have noticed the seats the Nationals kept empty behind home plate, reserved only for the memories of the Pulse victims and rainbow curly-w shirts.

Ben Revere–sweet, small, definitely-didn’t-screw-up-his-2016-season-royally Revere–was one of the few who spoke to the Washington Post’s Dan Steinberg about the night. “You never know what player playing today in the big leagues or minor leagues is going through that struggle with their identity,” he empathized. Bryce Harper wore a vaguely rainbow bracelet. Billy Bean talked about his relationship with Daniel Murphy, who couldn’t muster a word of condemnation for the Westboro Baptist Church rallying in his honor during the 2015 World Series.

They saw the pride flag at half-mast under the DC flag in the outfield that Bean marveled at. “That’s a new image. That’s a powerful one for the community, and one that I want to make sure we are all appreciative of,” he said to Steinberg. It was. A flag that stood for life and ferocity of LGBTQ people at half-staff was the best summation of the evening.

A Nationals fan named Rachel was at Night OUT. She sat apart from the Team DC section with her girlfriend and the rainbow necklace she bought when the SCOTUS decision allowed her enough promise to acknowledge her identity. The rainbow necklace couldn’t remedy her seclusion from the “right people to mourn with.”

That night Rachel bought a rainbow curly-w hat and a rainbow keychain. She sat with her girlfriend as worry mounted that someone she knew might see her. But as worry mounted that someone she knew might see her, the hat, you should know, came off after a few innings. The keychain stayed hidden at work.

…

I had been very good about pushing the gay to the side in the previous couple hundred days. I hadn’t thought about the words I had written down, but circumventing the perimeter of Nats Park, they came swimming back. It was the first time I would be open about my queer in public. Would baseball love me back? Would my vulnerability get the best of me? It was a chick-flick where I had to bring home a significant other for my parents’ approval. Except the significant other was an identity and my parent was, uh, a sport that means more to me than it maybe should.

I walked in to see a proud pride flag heaved to full-staff, recovered on the 366th day. Covering the event was the first time in a few hundred days that I let myself look at that part of me. It was like seeing an old friend who you’d ignored for a year: I was sheepish and figuring out a way to navigate the conversation. That was how I started the search for what I missed a year earlier.

Baseball, as you may have heard, is built on failure. Pitch by pitch, minute by minute. There’s nowhere to hide. The end only reveals itself when pitchers can reveal the batters’ weaknesses, when batters are exposed. That’s what I knew. To make amends with that part of myself I needed to feel the exposure Harper does against Clayton Kershaw’s curveball. There was no shortage of it that night.

I made my way from the Team DC sections as Chris Mosier, a trans triathlete named to the men’s US national team in 2015, threw out the ceremonial first pitch to Brian Goodwin. Mosier called it a dream fulfilled later on Twitter. The pitch was evidence of increasing trans inclusion that pride nights tend to struggle so much with, but it was also a reminder that basic gestures were giant leaps forward. Besides those on the field for pre-game ceremonies, there was beginning to be little evidence of LGBTQ people. I ventured into a queer desert, and oh man, did my anxiety know it.

As the self-appointed queen of Extremely Good decisions, I scrolled through the Instagram comments on the Nationals’ picture of a pride flag. It was more like wading through a swamp full of, in my official unbiased opinion, the absolute dumbest comments of all time. The brain cells that went into all 384 comments could probably be counted on one hand.

Then again, the number of brain cells required for hatred doesn’t always change its impact. Those comments weren’t the first thing to ever make me feel less because of that part of me, but it was the first time I had to put a name to it. And the visceral awareness the comment writers could have been anywhere in the ballpark was new too.

I sat up and over home plate as Murphy, one of the Nationals bigger reminders that businesses are not your friend, dazzled a crowd with launched baseballs and above-average defensive plays (the kind of plays he usually abstains from). The batboys scrambled to do their jobs, a role that Spenser Clark once filled before and after he came out to his friends in the organization. I might have fallen asleep (exhaustion from a full workday and back-to-back all-nighters) if it weren’t for the pressing middle school anxiety. Was it obvious to the people around me why I was here? Do they think less of me if it was? Did any harbor the hate exemplified in those comments?

My childhood is, and therefore I am, marked by the soothing voices of broadcasters, the dispirited press conferences post Orioles (don’t @ me) losses, the MLB columns read aloud to me, and eventually, the coaches of my own barking orders daily. Many of these voices, for better or cheesier, shaped who I am. If I couldn’t exist at a ballpark without dread, where did I have to go?

Nowhere, for the moment. I stayed in my seat longer than planned, trying to beat those thoughts. Joe Ross allowing three runs in the sixth was enough to drag me out of anxiety. It was night baseball in the sixth inning, played for a much livelier crowd than the first few innings would have let onto.

The men in orange shirts hugging on the concourse that led back to the Team DC sections confirmed descent out of the queer desert and back into the queer epicenter. It really was a sight to behold. Even those who didn’t attend through Team DC gravitated toward the area. The overwhelming noise of happy queer people glowing in a baseball stadium shook the discomfort like a rug.

Kat was at the heart of the epicenter. She outwardly fearless, attending her first Night OUT as a statement of her existence. As a bisexual artist with a popular DC hockey site, the punches that hockey, and sometimes even her own readers, throw at her have diminished the drive to create with the blog. The sport she loves is too busy loving Ryan Getzlaf to love her back. Unrequited love is often more exhausting than it is rewarding.

Maybe that’s it. Queer people will take grief and wear it like the sting of a 96 mph fastball or a Versace coat. We’ll take desolation and create. The collective and generational grief of the LGBTQ community feeds the defiance of it all. But it didn’t feel defiant. It felt ordinary and extraordinary all at once, like Max Scherzer not allowing any hits past the fifth inning.

That was it. There it was. Pack it all up and call it quits, y’all, because it was there: The excitement. The intersection of LGBTQ and baseball made clear the strain on most other nights. Sharks or no sharks. Pianos or no pianos. The invisible draw of all the queers to the epicenter was powerful proof of the safety that had been built by necessity into the community. On day 366, baseball helped me welcome back a piece I was missing.

Part of why I felt exhilaration that night was owed to privilege, though. I owed my ability to take a year to get back to this place, and a lot more of my experience that night and in the community, to privilege.

On the same summer day in 1969 that trans women of color catalyzed a revolution at Stonewall, the Washington Senators beat the Boston Red Sox in extra innings. The pastimes of the two communities are vastly different. The queer community’s pastime is largely based on a need to intersect life and society. I’m thankful I can focus on connecting the intersections of baseball and queer instead of existing and queer.

Pride events are imperfect. Trans and people of color inclusion is inexcusably weak, not unlike it is in baseball. Pride nights will not make trans black women safer. Pride nights will not stop another man with a gun in a nightclub. Neither will a rainbow team logo allow trans people to freakin’ pee where they want to. The Nationals will make a profit off a basic desire for visibility and acceptance (and also cool as heck designs). But that’s just a product of capitalism itself. To paraphrase AK (who, by the way, is a big reason I stopped ignoring this part of myself), if we’re going to live with capitalism, we might as well get cool gay stuff out of it.

Pride events will suck a little bit until fundamental change occurs. But they do currently serve a purpose; they do have a place. Rachel doesn’t hide her rainbow keychain going to work anymore. When I asked her if she had started to develop a more tight-knit group of LGBTQ friends during her second Night OUT, she pointed to the group surrounding her. On the 366th day since Pulse, Rachel wore her rainbow curly-w hat for the whole game. The LGBTQ community weaves tapestries out of the grief it is handed. This night was a part of it. That reality outshone a Nationals win (even a 10-5 one).

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