Pride Night at Dodgers Stadium

On Friday, the Los Angeles Dodgers hosted their tenth Pride Night at Dodgers Stadium. 

Their first two Pride Nights took place in 2013 and 2014, and if ever there were anything vaguely radical about it, it was then, before the Supreme Court ruled in 2015 in favor of gay marriage. Since then, Pride Night had mostly been a non-event, a celebration of that which most Angelenos, like most Americans, had already come to accept. In 2022, 52,505 people attended Pride Night, about 5,000 more than typically attend a Dodgers game.

This year was different.

This time, the Dodgers invited the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, drag queens from San Francisco who have outraged Catholics by dressing as nuns and taking part in fake crucifixions. The Sisters have been around since 1979, and they’ve long been at the forefront of HIV/AIDS activism. They were extras in the cavalcade of marginalized voices San Francisco had gathered into its bosom like a hippy, trippy mama bear.

And then the Dodgers invited them to Pride Night. They never said why. It didn’t make sense—make-believe nuns insulting the Dodgers’ mostly Catholic fans. (According to the marketing firm Portada, 2.1 million of the 3.9 million people who attended Dodger games in 2022 were Latino.) Maybe it was that, between 2022 and 2023, drag queens became a cause. Suddenly, right-minded people were supposed to care about them and believe that they should be celebrated, even by children at libraries.