S.F. Giants clashes with gay pride plans

The San Francisco Giants baseball team has ruffled feathers in the Bay Area with a proposal to move the popular "Until There's a Cure Day" game to June 29 this year, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. That's the same day the city's annual gay pride celebration roars through town. The team--which in 1994 became the first professional sports team in the nation to host an AIDS-related community outreach event--has usually held the fund-raiser in August and attracted many gay fans. But gay leaders said the proposed date change is sure to anger gay Giants fans and force AIDS organizations participating in the game's red-ribbon ceremony to make a choice between two major events occurring at the same time. "There will definitely be some outcry," said Tom Nolan, executive director of Project Open Hand, which marches in the city's pride parade and was one of the main beneficiaries of last year's "Until There's a Cure Day" game. "It presents a conflict for me. Project Open Hand always has a marching contingent in the parade, and that's where I need to be." Shana Daum, director of community relations for the Giants, said the team changed the date to drum up publicity for the 10th anniversary of the fund-raiser and to make it more of a Bay Area event, since the Giants will be playing the Oakland A's on June 29. Daum said the team was unfamiliar with the pride parade date and didn't realize the scheduling conflict until two weeks ago, when parade organizers called it to their attention. "We have been discussing it," Daum said. "It is very likely that [the date conflict] is not going to occur, because we want to do what's right for the communities that we're trying to reach out to."