New York, you disappoint me.

In summary (if you don’t wanna read the whole thing) that’s an article on gay Rangers fans in New York who are feeling threatened by the gay-negative verbal abuse that gets yelled in the Garden. Frankly, I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t want to go to a game where someone was yelling “DAMMIT (PERSON) YOU (DO SOMETHING) LIKE A SHORT WHITE GIRL” and if it was as pervasive as it seems to be in NYC, I probably wouldn’t take my metaphoric children.

What really hurts is that members of the gay hockey community have even stepped up in attempt to help the Rangers educate people, and the Rangers brass have turned them down in favor of just ‘posting extra security.’ I wonder how they know that the extra security is gay-friendly? I wouldn’t want to go up to someone blindly and say “Hey, uh, I’m gay, and I don’t really appreciate this, can you do something?” without knowing that the security person was sympathetic. I’m reminded of the Flyers fans whacking me in the back of the head at the Pens/Flyers game. Sure, I could say something to security, but isn’t there a good chance in Philly that they’re gonna be Flyers fans too? Although they should be neutral and deal with a situation like that, something you SHOULD do and something you DO do are completely different beasts.

Overall, I think this goes back to that whole fan/player/fan respect issue that seems to be broken right now. How hard is it to applaud injured players off the ice and not scream lifestyle slurs that might offend large groups of people? I’m not even asking people to stop heckling, just to heckle with a heart.

(My favorite heckling call right now? “MY DEAD GRANDMOTHER COULD HAVE SEEN THAT, REF!” If I’m not offended calling my dead grandmother into it, why should you be? It’s got the same sort of shock value, but my guess is that there isn’t a group of dead grandmothers in the audience who’ll get offended. And besides, as I told him at the top of my lungs numerous times, Joe Motzko really did pass like my dead grandmother…. aka not at all.)