Jess Jess is not the queerest person I have ever taken to a baseball game, but she is probably the proudest, if you measure by rainbows per square inch. We’re not even on the BART train into SF before she gets the first compliment on her outfit; it will not be the last. The tally at the end of the day is nine, although one of them carries greater weight because it comes from a photographer who promises that she will be featured in a thing (photoshoot, spread, article, blog post? we do not exactly know) in the San Francisco Bay Times. JJ, the journalist, gives Jess Jess a business card. I have to get a business card. Jess might not have been the proudest (as measured by rainbows per square inch) person in the ballpark, but if she wasn’t, I didn’t see who was. Unfortunately, although the woman from the SF Bay Times took a lot of pictures of Jess Jess’s outfit, I did not, so you’re mostly going to have to imagine it until you read her piece.
To add to Jess Jess’s fabulousness, there’s a Pride-themed jersey giveaway at the gate. On top of the Latino heritage jersey from last week, it’s almost an embarrassment of riches. Special event giveaways over the last couple of years have been, if no less generous or frequent, not quite so inventive or creative as in previous years. Whither the Hunter Pence scooters, the Death Star baseballs, the Bochy-on-the-Iron-Thrones? The last couple of years – and I admit that the pandemic has been hard on all of us – have been mostly T-shirts with different colored versions of the Giants logo. The tide, though, may have turned with these jerseys. I can hope.
The jersey is the full-spectrum pride model, with eleven colors instead of the standard ROYGBIV rainbow, and it’s a handsome item; about twenty thousand people are wearing them, which makes for a good-looking crowd, except for one guy in a Dodger hat declaiming that you’re not going to catch him wearing one. To be fair to him – although I don’t want to – he does say “First of all, it’s a Giants jersey.” We pass out of hearing range before he can get to second of all, but I doubt it was going to redeem him. I mean, first of all, he was wearing a Dodger hat. As with last week’s jersey, the number on the back is 23, which confirms my suspicion that it refers to the year, and not to players who wore the number. A lot of great Latin players wore #23, but I can’t think of any queer 23s.
Ahead of the seventh-inning stretch, we step over to the little kids’ park, where my friend Mike, anchoring the San Francisco Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band with his tuba, will be playing Take Me Out to the Ballgame. I haven’t seen Mike in probably twenty-five years, I think – he used to shop at Comic Relief when I worked there in the mid-90s, but we have been Facebook friends for a long time; he invited me to carry a banner with them today if they needed banner-carriers, but it turns out they didn’t. Our time together is brief, as he has to get away immediately after the show, but with luck he’ll come to a game with me a little later in the season and I’ll have more to say about him then.
I took this bad picture deliberately, because I think his beat-up tuba is more interesting-looking than I am.
Another delight of the game is Brian, who lives in Southern California but comes north a lot; his cannabis-related business – we don’t get too deep into that, but he has my number now and I might hear more about it someday – lets him drive all over, he says, with his dog. He is, in fact, on his second dog and third car. He is having an absolute blast at the game, having been given, among other things, a pack of baseball cards, a pin, and access to a season-ticket holder’s discount. Brian, like many people in 152 today, is a Cubs fan, and he and some of the others – including a couple who work as ushers at Wrigley Field (and have worn their work uniforms) – agree with last night’s crowd that White Sox fans are the worst, adding to my fund of information that if you Google baseball fan fights all the top results will feature White Sox fans. I will canvass the crowd tomorrow, but I honestly can’t wait till next year when we get White Sox fans and I get to ask them what they think of Cubs people. I could also go to the Oakland Coliseum on July 1 or 2 and ask the White Sox fans there what they think. I can choose between Military Appreciation Day and Pit Viper Sunglasses Giveaway Day. I’ll keep you posted.
81 Dates 