"There is no San Francisco without the LGBTQ+ community."
The speech was, by most accounts, a polite one. Daniel Lurie had come to the Hyatt Regency on the Embarcadero for the Alice B. Toklas LGBTQ Democratic Club's annual fundraising breakfast, the kind of Pride Sunday ritual where the eggs are fine and the speeches are finer. Then, as Gazetteer SF reported, he said he wanted to "acknowledge something."
Saul Sugarman
"Two weeks ago, Pride Night at the ballpark became something it never should have been," Lurie told the crowd of about 550. The players, he said, are free to practice their faith as private citizens. "But when you put the uniform on one of our teams, you represent something bigger than yourself. You represent San Francisco. And there is no San Francisco without the LGBTQ+ community."
On June 12, the Giants held their annual Pride Night at Oracle Park, opening a weekend series against the Cubs. Most of the roster wore caps stitched with the team's interlocking SF logo rendered in rainbow. Three pitchers had other ideas. Landen Roupp, JT Brubaker, and Ryan Walker each scrawled a Bible reference, Gen 9:12-16, onto their Pride caps. A fourth, reliever Sam Hentges, declined to wear the rainbow hat at all and swapped in a standard one.
The verse is the passage where God sets a rainbow in the sky as the sign of his covenant with Noah after the flood. It is also, as opponents of LGBTQ rights have learned to deploy it, a tidy way to announce that the rainbow belongs to God and not to you. "There is no hate at all," Roupp told reporters, per KRON4. "Just what I stand for and what I stand in and I believe in God and that's me." He later called the rainbow "a symbol of God's covenant to us," which Gazetteer SF noted echoes decades of homophobic rhetoric.
State Senator Scott Wiener put it less gently. "Right-wing homophobes have hijacked this biblical passage," he told KRON4, to "take back the rainbow from LGBTQ people."
Lurie was neither the first nor the loudest. Supervisor Matt Dorsey added his condemnation, SFist reported, and a coalition of LGBTQ groups sent team leadership a letter that landed like a gut punch. Its argument was simple: queer kids and their parents fill those seats and spend that money all season long, screaming for their favorite players until they go hoarse, and all anyone asked in return was that the players sport a rainbow for three hours on one Friday night. Apparently that was too much.
Then it went national. Vice President JD Vance reposted a story about the protest and wrote, "Trump won we don't have to do this anymore." Senator Josh Hawley fired off a letter to MLB alleging a "pattern of discrimination" against Christian players. Commissioner Rob Manfred wrote back, and his reply, which NBC News obtained, tried to thread a needle. The league had issued only a routine oral warning under its longstanding uniform rule, Manfred said, the same rule it applies to messages as innocuous as a note to a player's mother. He also pinned much of the mess on the Giants, saying the club failed to make clear that any player could simply wear his normal uniform, exactly as Hentges did. Hawley promptly declared victory anyway.
On June 18, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who runs the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, wrote Manfred to announce a civil rights investigation and a referral to the EEOC, accusing the league of burdening players who objected to its "pro-Pride orthodoxy," as NBC Sports Bay Area reported. A rainbow hat on a Friday night in San Francisco is now, somehow, a federal matter.
Through all of it, the Giants have mostly studied their shoes. At a press conference, president of baseball operations Buster Posey would field only "baseball questions," per Gazetteer SF. President and CEO Larry Baer told KNBR the team prides itself on being an "industry leader" with the LGBTQ community, which is a peculiar thing to brag about in the middle of a fiasco of your own communication. The club issued an apology for the "pain and anger" caused, then watched it fail to land.
The damage may outlast the news cycle. Longtime baseball writer Susan Slusser was asked on KNBR whether the episode could hurt the team's ability to sign free agents; the writeup of her answer suggested the Giants should not lose much sleep over losing the bigoted ones. Not everyone in the Giants family went quiet, either. Broadcaster Mike Krukow, a franchise institution, delivered an on-air monologue defending Pride Night, a reminder that the building is bigger than its bullpen.
The Bay Area Reporter's editorial board reminded readers that the Giants have tripped here before. Back in 1996, during the team's Until There's a Cure AIDS awareness games, pitcher Mark Dewey turned his red ribbon sideways so it resembled a fish, a Christian symbol, as the Athletic reported.
Which brings us back to a hotel ballroom on Pride Sunday and a mayor who took two weeks to find the sentence. At the Alice B. Toklas breakfast he finally said it at volume. He even reached for the pink triangle ceremony atop Twin Peaks, the one that remembers the queer people the Nazis marked for the camps, as proof of why this month exists at all.
There is no San Francisco without us. A handful of pitchers spent three weeks proving how badly some people still need to hear it. The good news is that the room already knew.
Saul Sugarman is editor-in-chief and owner of The Bold Italic.
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