In 10 minutes, Buster Posey shattered decades of trust with LGBTQ Giants fans

It’s absolutely shocking to see the damage the San Francisco Giants did to their relationship with LGBTQ fans with 10 days of silence after their own players demonstrated homophobia on Pride Night.

Yesterday, in just 10 minutes of talking, Giants President Buster Posey made it so much worse, completely shattering decades of trust the Giants had once built with the LGBTQ community.

The San Francisco Giants we once knew — the team of that first “Until There Is A Cure” day at the ballpark in 1994 — are no more.

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After several decades of the Giants elevating the LGBTQ community, supporting gay men during the AIDS crisis, and leading the sports world in support of same-sex marriage at the height of the debate, these Giants are a shadow of their former selves in more ways than one.

By refusing yesterday to answer any question about the Pride Night debacle — just answer a few questions — at a press conference the team called, Posey took a wrecking ball to the Giants’ relationship with the LGBTQ community.

The press conference is difficult to watch.

Players come and go, of course, and these homophobic players may go soon. Coaches, managers, general managers and other executives often have short careers with most teams too.

And yes, owners change. The current owners of the team are billionaires who donate to anti-gay politicians.

The current team executives and ownership now can’t simply apologize, take responsibility and answer questions about an anti-gay demonstration the team allowed on Pride Night.

Your Giants, gay fans, are no more.

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This Giants fan put the team in his wedding vows. He just sent them this scathing letter.
This San Francisco Giants fan included the team in his wedding vows. He sent this scathing letter to the team for its Pride Night debacle.

By focusing on ‘baseball,’ the Giants have failed baseball

This is, ultimately, still sports. They are supposed to be a lovely diversion from the struggles of life, a place to find smiles and community.

The Giants haven’t been able to do that very well this season on the field. The team is one of the worst in baseball, and that’s after four straight seasons at .500 or below.

So when team president Buster Posey called the media together to answer questions, pretty much everyone — except apparently Posey and his Giants handlers — assumed he’d address the Pride Night issue, take some responsibility and aim to make some steps to welcoming the LGBTQ community back to Oracle Park.

Reconnect with fans, re-center the community and build a bridge where the team just can’t do that in the win column.

Instead, Posey took a giant 10-gallon can of gasoline and tossed it onto the simmering fire.

When someone tells you they don’t like or respect you, believe them.

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A longtime San Francisco Giants fan, who is gay, sends a letter to the team expressing the pain and confusion a community feels.

Giants management has been a bigger problem than players

There’s a particularly important aspect to the flow of these last two weeks the Giants front office and Posey either don’t understand, or they are so over the LGBTQ community they just don’t care.

What those three Giants players did — defacing the Pride rainbow with a Bible verse — was only the spark of the problem.

The people in the Giants front office and management have been the fuel for the fire, first allowing the players to get on the field with those hats in the first place, then making it worse and worse.

In the days after the televised Pride Night debacle, the Giants front office released a statement taking no responsibility and offering no understanding of the issue.

Almost 10 days of silence — Posey and others declining every interview request about it — let the issue metastasize, as anti-gay politicians and media talking heads became empowered by the Giants’ seeming tacit approval.

Homophobic social-media users jumped on the opportunity to spread gay slurs and attack LGBTQ users.

Yesterday, Buster Posey gave a greenlight for homophobia and — make no mistake about this — gave a giant middle finger to gay Giants fans and told the LGBTQ community to “F*** off!”

There’s no way the Giants so many came to love would have handled it this way. This iteration of the Giants — and now Posey has made this clear — has zero cultural connection to that team.

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Homophobes like Clay Travis are rushing to defend the Giants and 3 players who gave a middle finger to the gay community on Pride Night.

Giants CEO Larry Baer said himself: players deliver ‘messages’

I interviewed Giants President and CEO Larry Baer about a decade ago. He talked about what he said was the importance to the club of embracing the LGBTQ community.

He didn’t know it at the time, but he was explaining then why this issue has so deeply damaged the Giants’ reputation.

“We can get messages across,” he told out athlete Grady Schroeder and me in 2013, as part of The Last Closet series. “And I think that players as role models for those messages and the deliverers of those messages, that’s hugely important.”

Bingo.

Baer also lingered in his comments on the past accomplishments of the Giants.

“What I’m most proud of is we’ve been on the pioneering edge of issues around AIDS, issues around bullying, issues arouND LGBT tolerance, openness, inclusiveness and being the first team to do it and then having other teams locally and throughout the country and throughoutt the world in sports follow us.”

The Giants’ initial statement in response to this deeply homophobic act by their three players leaned on the team’s reputation from years and decades ago.

That was then.

This new Giants team is not the one so many gay fans fell in love with. They would have never handled this rejection of the LGBTQ community’s voices in this way.

The current San Francisco Giants ownership and management has, again, told gay fans and the LGBTQ community to “F-Off.”

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