The Philadelphia Falcons will be creating a Philly queer guide for the World Cup
“It’s as much a celebration as it is a refuge from hostility,” said Keph Senett, trustee for Pride House International.
Members of Philly’s queer community are preparing for the World Cup’s arrival to the city in 2026.
The Philadelphia Falcons, an LGBTQ+ soccer club that has been operating since 1989, recently announced that it will be creating a guide of safe spaces for queer people to enjoy the World Cup in two years. The initiative is in collaboration with Pride House International (PHI), a global nonprofit organization inspired by the Olympic hospitality house tradition that welcomes queer people at large-scale sporting events.
The need for such an initiative is twofold, organizers say: to create a refuge from homophobia, but also to create a space filled with joy.
“More people are being introduced to [soccer],” said Martin Alfaro, president of the Falcons. “We want to make sure that we offer a space that’s safe for individuals that are coming in, to find a group of folks where they feel connected and understood, and a place where people feel included.”
PHI will be establishing Pride Houses across all 16 World Cup host cities in Canada, the United States, and Mexico. The organization reached out to the Falcons to establish a partnership for Philadelphia, where the Falcons and other volunteers will be finding hubs for queer people and allies to congregate during the games.
“There’s a place for us to love the sport, to engage with the sport, to play the sport.”
Establishing these safe spaces is a way to counter queer people getting shut out, explicitly or not, from sports, said PHI trustee Keph Senett.
“There’s a real need to remedy this idea of sports being the domain of the hypermasculine, and LGBTQIA+ folks not fitting into that,” Senett said. “Men’s football is still really homophobic and sexist, unfortunately. But even so, there’s a place for us to love the sport, to engage with the sport, to play the sport.”
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Senett added that the recent discussions around trans inclusion in sports “goes to the heart of that issue of sports being this place where people’s gender and bodies are policed.”
So Pride Houses are a way to welcome queer folks into a realm that they may not feel as welcome in, and be able to fully enjoy the sport.
“It’s as much a celebration as it is a refuge from hostility,” Senett said.
Establishing venues for the queer community to enjoy the games is particularly important as queer- and especially lesbian-dedicated spaces dwindle. Across the country, lesbian bars have dropped from 200 to less than 25, according to the Lesbian Bar Project. In Philadelphia, that number has been zero since Toasted Walnut, its last lesbian bar and a popular place to watch sports, closed in 2021.
“That disappears, and it provides, hopefully, an opportunity,” Alfaro said. “I hope that people start to see the excitement early on and help us find other spaces.”
As the Falcons begin preparing for the World Cup, they will be creating an interactive map for folks to identify diverse spaces to enjoy across Philadelphia. They may also include events for panel discussions on various topics, outside of watching the games.
But first, the Falcons will be launching fundraising efforts and callouts for volunteers and partners to help coordinate their Pride Houses and spread the word.
“The city is pretty inclusive, and we have a lot of supports of the Philly Falcons, like restaurants and bars,” Alfaro said. “It would be nice to receive support and resources from other organizations that have not done this in the past.”