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Brent Minor is the head of Team D.C., the District’s gay sports umbrella organization, and he continues to be heavily involved with the Gay Games.
Team D.C., the umbrella organization for D.C.’s gay sports teams, is set to hold its third annual “Night OUT At The Nationals” on July 16.
The first “Night OUT” was suggested by a local gay rugby player and Team D.C. reserved 200 tickets for the event.
“We sold them all out at Pride in one and a half hours,” says Brent Minor, Team D.C.’s president. The group went on to sell 900 more tickets that first year, and last summer’s event expanded to 1,600 attendees.
This year’s “Night OUT,” sponsored in part by the Washington Blade, will feature the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington singing the national anthem and a community-chosen local gay figure throwing out the first pitch.
According to Minor, locals can nominate a gay community leader to toss the first pitch via Team D.C.’s website (www.teamdc.org) starting April 13. Tickets to the event are $10 and will be available on the site and at Lambda Rising starting the week of April 16.
“We want to demonstrate to the larger community that gay and lesbian people are as all-American as apple pie and love going to the baseball game at night,” says Minor. “You’re looking up in the stadium section after section after section, and it is just America. This is the complete melting pot.”
A spokesperson for the Nationals confirmed that the event was moving forward. The Baltimore Orioles’ press office stated that the team doesn’t have any plans in place for a similar event.
—ZACK ROSEN
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Gay
By ZACK ROSEN
Friday, April 13, 2007
 The coming out stories of sports figures like John Amaechi, Cheryl Swoopes and Esera Tualo helped put to rest the cliché that gay men can’t play sports and lesbians excel only at softball. The nation’s capital has broken similar stereotypes, quietly amassing a world-class roster of gay athletic leagues, a fact not lost on Brent Minor.
The head of Team D.C., an umbrella organization that promotes participation in local gay sports leagues, Minor has lofty goals, including bringing a yearly gay sports championship to the District and establishing a scholarship for a local gay or lesbian high school athlete.
“I need to clone myself to do all this work,” Minor says.
Though he recently appeared at a Team D.C. charity auction as his female alter ego, Barbara Bush, it would take a whole squad of Minors to keep track of Washington’s gay sports scene. Aside from keeping tabs on more than 15 teams’ weekly practices, there’s a lot going on in the wide world of gay sports. Below is a roundup of gay sports-related developments this season.
Nellie’s, the long-awaited gay sports bar, is finally set to open within the next two months according to the bar’s co-owner Doug Schantz. The bar, located at the corner of 9th and U Streets, NW, is in its final development stages and will feature two floors, an outdoor patio, food and special sports-related events.
The D.C. Aquatics Club (www.swimdcac.org) is currently preparing to send swimmers to the International Gay and Lesbian Aquatics tournament in Paris, France, and the D.C. Front Runners (dcfrontrunners.org) will soon be represented at the prestigious Boston Marathon.
All of this, however, is just the tip of the baton.
THE RAPID EXPANSION of the Federal Triangles (www.federaltriangles.org), the city’s gay and lesbian soccer club, is a perfect example of the growing interest in gay sports. Bolstered by surging demand, the Triangles have recently added a third women’s team and a second men’s team to their lineup. A team roster can hold upwards of 20 or 30 people.
“A lot of people in D.C. just needed a place to play,” says Charie Hunter, the Triangle’s division-two team manager. “It made sense to start another team.”
In addition to regular games and instructional sessions, the Triangles are poised to host their ninth annual Rehoboth Beach Classic, a co-ed tournament held over the Fourth of July weekend in Delaware’s gay getaway hotspot.
Another quickly expanding D.C. club is Flaming Football On the Mall (www.flamingfootball.org). Started last July by George Washington University grad student Ashton Giese, the club began with just six friends tossing a ball around and rapidly expanded to a base of more than 100 core members, 20 or 30 of whom show up on any given Sunday to play on the National Mall. Though anything football-related is sure to draw competitive athletes, Giese says the two-hand touch football games are open to players of all skill levels.
“Everyone scores at flaming football,” Giese says with a laugh.
For any sport, mainstream or not, there’s likely to be a local gay equivalent. The Rainbow Spinnakers (www.rainbowspinnakers.org) is the D.C. area’s gay sailing team; the Capital Tennis Association (www.capital-tennis.org) caters to Wimbledon aspirants; and the D.C. Strokes (www.dcstrokes.org), holders of the most salacious club name, has been in existence for gay rowers since 1991.
The Lambda Links (www.lambdalinks.org), the gay golfer’s club, is hosting a number of local tournaments this summer.
A SPORT FAMOUS for both its brutality and its deceptively big-hearted participants, rugby has established a stronghold in local gay athletics for men and women who like to ruck. The women alone have three clubs in the area: the Maryland Stingers Women’s Rugby Club (www.marylandstingers.org), the Northern Virginia Women’s Rugby Team (www.novawrfc.org) and the Washington Furies (www.dcfuries.com).
The Washington Renegades (www.dcrugby.com), the nation’s first rugby team to actively recruit gay male players, has been going strong in D.C. since 1998. The team is hosting “RenFest 2007: Scrum on the Potomac,” a so-called “harlot fest” where clubs from all around the region are divided up and cobbled together into new teams.
The Renegades have achieved a great level of success, having placed third in 2006 at the Bingham Cup, an international gay rugby competition named after Mark Bingham, the gay rugby player on September 11’s flight United 93, which crashed in a field in rural Pennsylvania. Players join for love of the game, not activism, but it hasn’t escaped the Renegades that gay rugby could easily seem antithetical to the uninformed.
“A lot of people watch too much TV or listen too much to their preachers or politicians about what gay people are,” says Renegades president Ned Kieloch. “The majority of clubs we play are straight teams, and they have come to learn that we’re about playing rugby. On a Saturday afternoon they can say ‘He dates guys, but he loves rugby, too.’ It’s good outreach.”
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