Story here. This is truly disgraceful. Other Gay Men’s Choruses have sung at other sports venues, and have rarely had a problem.
The Padres have apologized, fired the contractor, and disciplined their employee.
The group has sung at Padres games before without incident, and will be invited to do so again.
In all fairness, the fired employee contacted the director of the choir and apologized for making a mistake, a mistake he owned and apologized for. The choir has accepted that it was a mistake, and not an intentional act, and even asked that the person to be returned to his job.
Is this what the media and the county have come to now? Every time something happens to a LGBT member it’s obviously overt homophobia. Fucking mistakes happen.
If it was a simple mistake, why couldn’t they stop the playback, say “Oops! Wrong button there!” and let the chorus perform?
Some variability in timing is expected with baseball games, another 15-30 seconds wouldn’t ruin the day.
1000 times this.
From what I’ve read, it was an unintended mistake:
As for why they didn’t ‘start over’:
And no one comments that the chorus, there standing in place on the field, with microphones in place, was not going to actually sing? It was SUPPOSED to be a recording? What’s up with that? Why even have them there at all if it is “fake”?
Why have microphones if they aren’t going to sing? Why even have singers? My mind boggles.
I assume it was canned accompaniment, not that they were going to lip sync.
That is bullshit excuse-making. If it did happen that way, the game production techs involved should have been fired for exceptional incompetence, rather than malice.
The article said they couldn’t just plug in the singers because the mics were not live. So it seems yes, it was supposed lip synching. In a situation where you can’t even see lips from the stands to tell if they are synched or not.
Ah, so the Chorus was intended to lip-synch to their recorded performance, which was actually a good decision if the performers were unaccustomed to singing in such a huge venue. That echo delay will seriously mess with your head.
The on-field mics were props and not connected, and the correct recording was on an unlabeled CD, an obscurely named file, or whatever that made it impossible to cue it up within two ohfuckseconds.
I’m gay, and I’ve been involved with live TV broadcasts. Normally, things go as planned, but now and then someone trips on a cable, someone presses ‘take’ instead of ‘cue,’ the wrong tape is hurriedly jammed into the deck, etc. You recover and move on.
If anyone misbehaved on Saturday, it was the fans.
Yup. Lip Sync apparently is standard. The incorrect recording played was the ‘singer’ from the previous day.
Are you under the impression that no one was fired? Because that is not correct. The guy who screwed up was fired.
I still don’t believe it.
If you check the MLB thread you’ll see that I mentioned this, before this thread was started.
My point is, having a little knowledge about how game production works, that I find it hard to believe that such a major aspect could happen both accidentally and unrecoverably. Of course I don’t believe Padres management wanted to mock the gay fans and friends who have been buying blocks of tickets for the annual theme game. But it is also incredible that there could have been no malice by any individual involved. I think there was, the Padres know or suspect it, and fired him for that reason.
But if that’s somehow not the case–this really was a completely innocent mistake, and further not-malicious errors of preparation and judgement made it unrecoverable–then that should have been a firing offense anyway.
Nevertheless, they wouldn’t be lip-syncing, they’d be singing along to the pre-recorded track, which is not the same thing (even if you can’t hear them).
It’s stories like these that make it so much less likely for me to believe stories of discrimination. It seems like half of the ones that make the national news are people seeing discrimination when it’s so clearly not there or they just are flat out lying.
Your guess is no better or worse than mine, but for what it is worth, the author of the articles I linked said that he has seen the exact same thing happen at games (not professional) in the past where it was clearly an accident and no malice at all.
When the incidents of homophobia decrease enough that we can reasonably speculate its not, then the assumption won’t be made. Until then, its a good rule of thumb to assume it is because there’s so god damn much of it
Why are they allowed to discriminate against straights?
Do you think they would allow the San Diego, All Straight white Men’s Choir" to sing?
No seriously. Kansas city has a gay mens choir also and its always struck me funny how they can brag about being all gay yet thats NOT discriminating?
If they just said all men thats different.
But this was specifically an LGBT event, and not the first one, nor the first performance by the group at a Padres game. Malice in the control room just doesn’t make any sense.
As someone with live event AV experience, this was a case of complacency breeding disaster at the worst possible time.
The heckle of “you sing like a girl” that so upset the chorus director seems pretty harmless considering a female singing was played.