As SF Giants’ Pride Night Fallout Continues, Fans Recall Historic 1994 AIDS Benefit

The game, which marked the first time a major professional sports organization hosted a benefit for HIV and AIDS, has resurfaced in collective memory over the past few weeks, as the fallout continues from a protest by four pitchers during the team’s Pride Month celebration.

As lawmakers, Major League Baseball, and fans have entered the fray, KQED looked back on the sports history episode to understand how it got started — and how much has changed.

‘A swell of connection’

There were a couple of key figures behind the 1994 “Until There’s a Cure Day.”

According to OutSports, one reason is that new owner Peter Magowan wanted to ask the city for a new stadium. In campaigning for the new structure, Magowan made moves to connect with people across the Bay Area through community outreach — and San Francisco was deep in HIV/AIDS advocacy.

At the time, San Franciscans were reeling from the devastation of the AIDS epidemic, with around 20,000 city residents dying during the crisis. Because so many were gay men or part of the LGBTQ+ community, bias and homophobia allowed their suffering to go unacknowledged by governments and medical authorities for years.

“This special day will give our fans an opportunity to learn more about the disease, which affects all of us,” Magowan said at the time, according to the Bay Area Reporter. “This is not a baseball event, it’s a humanitarian event.”

According to the Giants’ promotional flyer for the 1994 event, the team vowed to donate $1 from every ticket sold to AIDS research and education. Players would also wear a red ribbon on their uniforms, “which I thought was very cool,” Struiksma said.

“It did feel like, ‘Hmm, this is something a little different,’” recalled Struiksma, who now lives in Los Angeles, where he works in the film industry. “‘Something we’re not used to.’”

Another major reason was a supportive manager, Dusty Baker, and the fact that HIV/AIDS advocacy was already being pursued by star Giants player Rob Beck, after being deeply moved by a 1993 documentary about Ryan White, a young boy living with AIDS.

But the lead-up to the event wasn’t without some protest and pushback, according to the Washington Post. Giants vice president for business operations Pat Gallagher noted “some negative phone calls.”

The ongoing stigma around HIV and AIDs was apparent. Calling it “a controversial cause,” Magowan told the LA Times in 1994 that “A lot of people associate it with a certain lifestyle — I think incorrectly … AIDS can affect anybody, whatever lifestyle, whatever sex, whatever age.”

“I’ve worked here for 18 years, and nothing else we’ve ever done has been universally accepted by everyone in the organization,” Gallagher said. “Because we live in San Francisco, everyone’s been touched in some way by HIV and AIDS.”

“I don’t care how you get it,” said another player, Todd Benzinger. “No one deserves it.”

But once the game started, the commemoration felt like a natural fit, Struiksma said, “maybe because it’s San Francisco.”

Among thousands of fans decked in orange and black, Struiksma sat high up in the stands of Candlestick Park, the Giants’ previous home before Oracle Park. From his vantage point, he got a perfect view of the field where Giants players organized themselves into the shape of a giant ribbon.

Then, members of the opposing team that day, the Rockies, were brought onto the field where they, too, joined the formation. Outlets at the time reported that Giants star player Barry Bonds had waved to the Rockies to bring them in.

“You felt a swell of connection to the team. A connection to community,” Struiksma said. “It really was just one of those games where it’s like, ‘This is amazing, what’s happening right now.’” And over three decades later, “I’m almost getting choked up talking about it now,” he said.

At the event, Beck listed the names of children who died of AIDS. Quilts — a longtime way of memorializing those lost to AIDS — were laid out on the field.

“This might be the single most significant day since we’ve all heard of this disease,” Beck told the Washington Post after the event in 1994, which ultimately raised over $100,000.

Of course, it was business as usual during the actual game. Struiksma said that he remembered a fight that broke out on the field. “There was a real, like, dichotomy of emotions during the game,” he said.

‘A slap in the face’

Many SF Giants fans have referenced the historic nature of 1994’s “Until There’s a Cure Day” event in recent weeks, after four SF Giants players staged an apparent protest against the team’s Pride Night on June 12.

Three players wrote controversial Bible verses often cited by anti-gay conservative Christians on the team’s rainbow-themed Pride Month caps. The team was not required to wear them, according to NBC Bay Area. One player opted to wear the standard black-and-orange cap instead.

The reaction was swift and strong, with LGBTQ+ fans and allies alike protesting the team with Pride and trans flags at Oracle Park.

“I didn’t see them attempting to come out with this pro-Bible rhetoric any other night of the week, so it did feel like a very specific slap in the face for their queer-coded fans,” said Sarah, a one queer Giants fan who called into KQED Forum earlier this week.

“Across the board, just think it was a giant ‘L’ for the Giants, who don’t need any more help with ‘L’s,’ because their record is doing that for them,” the caller said.

Ann Killion, a San Francisco Chronicle sports columnist, told Forum that Giants fans “feel like on a night that was meant to celebrate the joy of inclusiveness, that these players kind of co-opted the whole event and hijacked it — and turned around and basically flipped the metaphorical bird to them.”

Killian said fans also felt let down by the response from the Giants’ management, who issued a “kind of both-sides-ing type of statement, full of platitudes, ‘We’re sorry if you’re hurt,’ and then went radio silent,” she said. “They kind of let this thing build and build and build.”

Major League Baseball issued a warning to the players for writing on their uniforms, which is against uniform regulations. However, the situation quickly escalated, with the Department of Justice under President Donald Trump announcing its intent to launch an investigation into the MLB’s response to the Pride Night protest.

Baseball is “probably the most conservative of the big professional team sports in America,” with many players coming from suburbs and smaller towns, Killion said. But a protest like this in San Francisco stung extra hard.

“This is where the Giants are honestly hurt by their own good work in the past, because they have been so upfront,” SFGate sports editor Alex Simon said on Forum.

An HIV and AIDS awareness night has been a tradition for the Giants since that first event in 1994, and while the Los Angeles Dodgers hosted the first Pride Night in 2013, the Giants were the very first team to bring the Pride flag onto the field in 2021. In 2023, when the league adopted a policy that would stop teams from wearing special uniforms on celebration days, with some exceptions, the Giants and the Dodgers requested to be exempted for Pride.

“The fan base is very much more upset at the team and the organization, really beyond what the players themselves have done,” Simon said.

Remembering how far we’ve come

Tiffany Babb, a Southern California writer who runs The Fan Files, is a queer baseball fan who has been following the SF Giants case closely. Babb has felt a decline in enthusiasm for Pride Nights in sports teams in recent years — something she attributes to the U.S. becoming more conservative in many ways.

“I remember like three, four years ago, they kept those [Pride] logos up all month,” she said.

And the SF Giants debacle has presented an opportunity for the Trump administration to jump on board with the pushback. On X, Vice President J.D. Vance wrote: “Trump won, we don’t have to do this anymore.”

“Whether or not the players intended to do this, it is a very popular narrative that ‘Christians are under attack in the United States,’” Babb said. “And it is a very useful narrative for the president.”

It’s why, she said, remembering the 1994 “Until There’s A Cure Day” is still important for fans 32 years later.

“Not just because of San Francisco’s long history with the queer community, but also because a lot of people like to treat activism in baseball as a brand new thing that was just invented in 2012,” she said. “There’s a long history of this — pretty much since the beginning of baseball.”

The Giants’ first event in 1994 “was such a good, earlier example of this kind of conversation, but in a positive way.”

For Babbs, it’s about reminding people what — and who — has come before. For example, Dodgers icon Glenn Burke, who died at age 42 in 1995, was among the first major league players to come out as gay.

“Glenn Burke — if he hadn’t died of AIDS — he would still be around,” she said. “That generation was not that long ago.”

“It’s important for us to keep their memories alive … Because once you start to forget about history, people can twist it into whatever they want.”

KQED’s Katie DeBenedetti and Alexis Madrigal contributed to this report.