Notes
Pride and baseball
Hi gay! We’re now roughly halfway through Pride month; coincidentally, we’re approaching the halfway point of the 2026 Major League Baseball season. With all that in mind, MLB teams from coast to coast will host Pride-themed games1 this month, which purport to welcome LGBTQ+ fans with the idea that baseball is for everyone.
Everyone is Welcome Here
Thanks to an algorithm-induced rabbit hole I fell through on YouTube a few weeks ago, I’ve been following the saga surrounding a Boise, ID, teacher and a pair of posters she hung in her classroom. The posters, which hung in her classroom for years without issue, feature inclusive messages; “Everyone is welcome here,” one of them reads, with several raised hands of various skin tones underneath the heading. School officials ordered the posters removed on the grounds they “don’t allow people to express differing opinions.” Differing opinions? So… only certain types of people are welcome then? I am confusion.
AIDS/LifeCycle Support Dwindling
Via SF Standard: The most recent [AIDS/LifeCycle (ALC)], which departed from the Cow Palace early on the first Sunday in June, had about 1,400 cyclists, a dramatic dropoff from the approximately 2,500 who rode in 2022. Fewer riders has meant less money for the organizations that depend on the event. This year ALC raised $10,984,492, nearly $1 million less than in 2023. The 2022 effort raised $17,783,136; it was the first in-person event after COVID-19 forced the ride’s pivot to at-home events in 2020 (branded “My545”) and 2021 (branded “TOGETHERIDE”). I myself have participated in ALC in some capacity since 2015, either as a Roadie or Rider during the event, or as a volunteer leading up to it. Over all those years, my fundraising efforts
Billy Bean, 1964–2024
Billy Bean, the second Major League Baseball player to come out as gay, passed away today after a yearlong battle against acute myeloid leukemia.
Small Web
Much as I make use of them, I kinda resent the persistent presence of social media in our lives. To wit, a musing I posted to Facebook a couple of years ago… Remember when the Internet was fun? Pepperidge Farm remembers. Social media isn’t entirely fun, at least not to me. It’s very homogeneous, heavily moderated, and has a bad signal to noise ratio. It’s ruled by the almighty algorithm. And as these sites are often free, it’s awash in lots of advertising. (To be fair I get it, we gotta pay the bills — but come on!) It makes me long for the days when I floated around the web reading (and writing) blog posts, sharing fun stuff I’d stumble upon, and so on.