Christy Maggio is known online as Hockey Babbler. They “scribble live” hockey games on social media by drawing sketches of the action and posting them in real time.

To find out if I could love hockey so much, I went to Christy’s parents to watch a game. When I got there the Kraken were losing badly to the Philadelphia Flyers and players were starting to hit each other, which apparently happens sometimes when a game is out of balance.

Why do umpires let strikes take so long?

“Mainly tradition,” said Maggio. Also, the attraction of “tough guys who want to fight on the ice and who have the honor of defending themselves physically. But at the end of the day, it’s a relic of toxic masculinity, to be honest, because it doesn’t solve anything and it just hurts people.

Christy also finds toxic masculinity in the stands and on the team benches: fans and players shouting anti-gay slurs and calling out player names for female reproductive parts which, when you think about it, are pretty strong.

“Have you ever seen a woman give birth? It’s crazy. It’s much stronger than a face that takes a punch.

Maggio believes that this misogynistic and homophobic atmosphere is a big reason why there aren’t more queer National Hockey League fans and openly queer players. (Only one player who has signed a contract with the NHL is openly gay: Luke Prokop of the Nashville Predators.)

Maggio is happy to see the NHL’s inclusion campaign “Hockey is for everyone”, but they also want the league to work to rid stadiums of these slurs.

“Gay people and hockey go hand in hand like peanut butter and jelly,” they said. “We love this sport. It’s just that sometimes the sport doesn’t necessarily love us back.

Meanwhile, in women’s hockey, “gay people are everywhere – out there, proud and happy!” ”

Maggio told me about Julie Chu, the star of the US women’s hockey team who married a player on the Canadian women’s team – “almost a Romeo and Juliet situation and now they have kids together.” , that’s wonderful “.

Maggio is part of the Women’s Pro Hockey Seattle movement, which is trying to bring a professional female ice hockey team to our city. Maggio designed and produced stickers and enamel pins with a “pride glove”, a hockey glove in the colors of the rainbow of the pride flag.

Maggio gave newbie fans like me a piece of advice: “Don’t look at the puck. ”

I struggled to follow the ‘cookie’ as it soared around the ice and Maggio said if you want to understand the action you better watch the players. I asked them why the NHL doesn’t just make the hockey puck bigger, so it’s easier to see.

“A bigger puck would be harder to score with, I think,” they said.

Me: “Well, what about a bigger puck and a bigger goal?” “

Them: “So… like football?

Me: “Yeah, what if you put in some grass and the players can only use their feet?”

Them: “Yeah, what if you put grass on it so you weren’t slipping too much and instead of having knives on your shoes, you just wore crampons?”