It was a cold and rainy walk to the Seattle waterfront, where my girlfriend and I attended the vigil for Queer wife and mother Renee Nicole Good, who was killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis on January 7. I have rarely in my life felt as angry as I have these past few days. Every day, new footage turns up, new angles of the same awful moment that make it ever more abundantly clear that Renee was murdered in cold blood. Instead of a call against politicizing violence or respect for the dead, as was done after the death of Charlie Kirk, our country’s officials smear Renee’s name and call her a domestic terrorist; her killer is deemed innocent without even the veneer of a formal investigation. The heads of the Democratic Party, meanwhile, respond with feckless cowardice and make no promises to dismantle or defund the blatantly evil organization that took her life.

We left the vigil early to attend the Seattle Kraken game, which was perhaps selfish, but in a way also seemed important. It was Pride Night, and we were playing the Minnesota Wild, whose home arena is less than 10 miles from where Renee was shot. It was the first Kraken game of my life where I was quietly in support of the away team. At any sporting event, who you sit near is a bit of a gamble, and next to us was a man who was increasingly disparaging the whole night toward any Pride-themed happenings, taking photos of every rainbow logo and Queer guest, to mock them on Snapchat.

Trash talk at a hockey game is expected — and even something I enjoy — but in every arena, there is a sort of unwritten rule for what is acceptable and what is taking things too far. When the Kraken lost during overtime, he loudly and mirthfully shouted to everyone around him that he felt Seattle was, to summarize, too Gay for hockey — expressed in a number of words and actions that don’t bear repeating on account of being vehemently homophobic. 

So I and those around me told him to get the fuck out of our city. I have never in my life been so close to getting in a physical fight at a sports game, and to some extent I regret that I didn’t throw a punch, even though this guy could’ve beaten me up easily. Because the truth is, he will face no consequences for his actions. He, like the people in charge of our country, like the masked goons who terrorize our immigrant neighbors, can be as mean as he likes with a smile and sleep safely and soundly.

I’m struck not just by the apparent joy he found in kicking down the Queer people around him on our special night, but by the catastrophic lack of understanding of his own actions. Being a white cis-het man, he has not been and never will be called a slur. He has never had a long night of looking in the mirror and wishing he was someone else or had a different body because of who he loved or who he was inside. 

But as much as I despise the way he treated us, I also pity him.

He will never experience the siblinghood, the courage, or the sense of being that Queer people hold. When he attends an NHL game, he looks down at the rink and sees himself in every player in a way — which is somehow more hollow than me seeing myself in none of them. He will never have a cultural moment like Heated Rivalry. He will never be able to celebrate the first time someone like himself takes to the ice. 

I do my own work as a way to contribute to a better world in some small form, like many in the Queer community do, especially as my whiteness and status as a citizen puts me in a position of privilege to do so. And all of us do it with a resolve that he will never hold. Because what that man and those like him — including those in our government — hold in cruelty, they will never make up for in spirit.

Despite his best efforts, I look back on the game with happiness. Regardless of to what degree events such as Pride Night are earnest attempts by the Kraken to build community or come from a place of rainbow capitalism or something in between is a debate I’m not interested in contributing to, because I got people in my life to come watch a team that I have rooted for since its inception in an arena that they had never before set foot in. I got to see other openly Queer and Transgender people up on the big screen and the whole stadium bathed in the light of the beautiful artwork of Vegas Vecchio and enjoying the music of DJ Orion. 

Despite it being a loss for our team, I feel so thankful to have the memory of looking out over the crowd and seeing others adorned with so many flags and colors, smiling and cheering. For every joyous Queer person is a mark of the abject failure of those who seek to bury us.

Maggie Murphy is a Transgender woman, Kraken fan, and graduate student in the epidemiology program at the University of Washington. Her work focuses on HIV prevention and Transgender health.