A drag queen, a rainbow festival and a game beyond FIFA's control

SEATTLE — FIFA has not endorsed the Seattle host-city committee’s "Pride Match" designation, which will not be part of the official branding when Iran and Egypt meet tonight at Lumen Field.

“I think they’ve always been aware of what we’re doing,” said Louise Chernin, who as chair of the organizing committee’s Pride Match Impact Council began planning for the day nearly a year and a half ago.

Chernin began her match day at Rough & Tumble, a women’s sports bar in Ballard, a historically Scandinavian neighborhood where a crowd had gathered to cheer on Norway against France. The bar was notably free of FIFA’s commercial imprint: The World Cup posters on the walls and the merchandise for sale were all drawn by local artists without any official logos.

It all reflected the extent to which the “Pride Match” has become a gentle challenge not only to FIFA’s record of clamping down on some expressions of LGBTQ+ rights but also the corporate monoculture it creates in host cities through its restrictive sponsorship rules.

“If there’s going to be revenue spent, let us bring it to LGBTQ-owned businesses,” said Chernin, a longtime head of the Greater Seattle Business Association, an LGBTQ+ chamber of commerce.

Just down the street, fans had gathered at a “regnbue” street festival — the word is Danish and Norwegian for “rainbow” — organized by a local Ballard business association. The Norway-France match was being shown on an oversized screen, but when halftime hit attendees did not listen to any of the ads on the Fox broadcast.

Instead DJ SummerSoft took the stage as Sativa the Queen, a local drag performer, vamped through the break.