Pride nights have split open hockey's closed culture — and that's a good thing

This column is an opinion by Colin Walmsley, a Canadian teaching in Paris. For more information about CBC's Opinion section, please see the FAQ.

On Monday, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said that NHL Pride nights would have to be re-evaluated in the offseason, the latest fallout from a controversy that has engulfed the NHL. 

As a rising number of players refuse to wear Pride jerseys, the last few months have been one of those rare and uncomfortable occasions when hockey's closed and insular culture is split open and revealed to the world. 

With their players' opinions under the spotlight, some teams seem intent on avoiding the conversation at all costs: the New York Rangers, Minnesota Wild and Chicago Blackhawks all nixed previously announced plans for their entire teams to wear Pride sweaters, choosing to comply with an anti-LGBTQ+ law passed in a dictatorship half a world away rather than stand with the queer community.

Unfortunately, that instinct to turtle up and hope for problems to disappear is just a manifestation of the fortress mentality present throughout hockey culture at all levels of the game.

What happens in the locker-room stays in the locker-room; the team is everything; the locker-room is our stronghold. In my experience growing up as a closeted minor hockey player, hockey culture cultivates an insular, us-against-the-world mentality far stronger than that of most other sports.

Sometimes, this attitude can have positive outcomes: the friendships built during hours together in carpools and bus rides; the teamwork forged in early morning or late-night practices; the shared hockey culture. The Humboldt Broncos tragedy showed us that at its best, this culture can unite an entire country.

Unfortunately, it's not often at its best.

I played a lot of sports alongside hockey as a kid, probably in part to hide my gayness in conservative rural Alberta. But I haven't played another sport where post-game handshakes had to be eliminated to avoid fights, or where homophobic, sexist, and racist slurs were thrown around with such thoughtless regularity. 

And as we've seen with the Hockey Canada sexual assault scandal and the recent revelations of racism brought to light by NHL players such as Akim Aliu and Matt Dumba, there's a rally-'round-the-team effect in hockey than can cause teams and organizations to shore up their defences, protecting their own brands and their players' reputations at the expense of the broader community.

This entrenchment is aggravated by the fact that so many of us are seen as being exterior to Fortress Hockey, rather than integral parts of it. Women. Visible minorities. Queer people. And on and on.

Like a fish that can't see the ocean, I took that culture as a given, internalizing it and overlooking the ways it harmed me and others. It was everywhere and everything — the language used around the locker-room; the internal team values; the way we thought about our opponents — and so became invisible to those of us who sustained it. 

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The NHL's Pride nights are so important to me because they acknowledge that LGBTQ+ people are part of the hockey community, and commit to breaking down the pervasive homophobic and heteronormative barriers to participation like the ones I perpetuated and faced growing up.