World Gay News

Houston bar uses World Cup as chance to advocate for gay rights – Houston Chronicle

No one left their seats during halftime of a World Cup watch party at Buddy’s gay bar Friday as drag queen Jacklyn Dior raffled away sex toys, moderated a game called “Jingle Balls” and hosted soccer trivia — all within a 10-minute span. But toward the end of the show, Jorge Molina — president of Space City Pride FC, the LGBTQ+ soccer club hosting the event — took the mic to offer more sober remarks.

It wasn’t an easy choice for the club, Molina explained, to buy into a World Cup being hosted by Qatar, a country where homosexuality is punishable under the law. But they’d seen how others had used the tournament as an opportunity to speak up about gay rights, and as lifelong soccer fans, they weren’t going to let someone else dictate their enjoyment of the world’s most beloved sporting event. 

“We are so grateful that you all decided to join us here today to come together as a community and use soccer as a tool for progress, and create a space where we can exist without fear of judgment, violence or persecution,” Molina said, addressing the dozens of people who had come to Buddy’s for Space City Pride’s official watch party of Friday’s match between the United States and England.

He also held a moment of silence for the victims of the Club Q shooting last weekend, when five people were killed and 18 more were injured after a man with an AR-15-style rifle opened fire in the gay bar in Colorado Springs, Colo. — a reminder that LGBTQ+ people were under attack at home, too. 

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“It’s fantastic to see straight, gay, lesbian, women (and) men come out here and just join together to enjoy what we love, which is soccer,” Molina said. 

FIFA, soccer’s international governing body, came under fire in 2010 for awarding the 2022 World Cup to Qatar amid accusations that the small Persian Gulf country had bribed its way to the winning bid. The reproach has only grown amid increased scrutiny of the country’s treatment of LGBTQ+ people, as well as the conditions that led human rights groups to believe that thousands of migrant workers have died getting Qatar ready to host the massive tournament. 

Many teams participating in the World Cup have vocally expressed their opposition to Qatar’s human rights record, including Germany, whose players were pictured with their hands over their mouths in protest of FIFA’s decision to ban players from wearing rainbow-colored armbands during the games.

For Zachary Stewart, one of Space City Pride FC’s founders, the idea that the international soccer community would speak up in support of gay rights on a world stage was unthinkable when he was growing up in rural Pennsylvania. Stewart, 38, grew up playing soccer but said he didn’t truly find himself, on the pitch or in life, until he joined the Philadelphia Falcons, an LGBTQ+ team in that city.

That’s why when he moved to Houston for work in 2013, one of his first orders of business was to set up a similar organization in the Bayou City.

“Even when I started, later in life, experimenting with men, I was still ashamed of who I was. … And then I found gay soccer and found it wasn’t all just the stereotypes. I made friends who I really loved and became like family members, and it helped me come out and it became like a way of finding myself,” Stewart said. 

Space City Pride FC has gone through various iterations in the years since Stewart moved to Houston, but it began to pick up traction about 2018, organizers say. They recently changed their name from the Houston Haycocks to Space City Pride in an effort to fulfill their mission of being “Houston’s inclusive soccer club for the LGBTQ+ community.”

The club now boasts dozens of members who play weekly pickup games in Montrose and travel across the country to play in tournaments against other LGBTQ+ clubs, even making it to the semifinals of the most recent competition in San Francisco. Next on their list of priorities is to get more women involved with the club — only a handful participate currently — and grow their overall membership to a point where they can run a local recreational LGBTQ+ league. 

One man, who asked not to be named because he has not publicly come out as gay, sipped a beer at Buddy’s as he watched the second half of the U.S.-England match, which ended in a 0-0 draw. While not an active member of Space City Pride FC, the man, 38, said his experience playing in a tournament with the club last year was a revelation; soccer was his passion growing up in Mexico but not necessarily a place he felt welcome.

“I didn’t want to out myself, I didn’t want to be bullied. I would always try to be someone else,” the man said. With Space City Pride, “I could be myself.”

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Though human rights issues were a point of concern for the people gathered at Buddy’s on Friday, the game grabbed the lion’s share of attention once the referee blew the opening whistle. There were gasps as American forward Christian Pulisic banged a shot off the crossbar and groans as English goalkeeper Jordan Pickford intercepted a cross. 

“So close! Damn his hands!” shouted Jacklyn Dior, the drag queen emceeing the watch party. 

The Space City Pride FC organizers say their watch party should serve as an example of what’s possible when the World Cup comes to Houston in 2026, compared with its current iteration in Qatar. 

“This is foreshadowing what is going to come when the World Cup comes here. What changes are going to happen and how accepting we’re going to be,” Molina said.