Sports
Serving up Charm
Baltimore volleyball league attracts diverse players
From left are Adam Bocek, Kent Hansen and Carl Svagerko. (Photos by Kevin Majoros)
It’s not uncommon for the players in sports teams to come from different walks of life. Their motivation to play and the path they take to get there are all part of the process of making a team. The different personalities on the team are what make it a community.
This week in the continuing Blade series on the players who make up the LGBT-based sports teams in the area, we take a look at three teammates, two gay and one straight, from Charm City Volleyball.
Charm City Volleyball hosts social play in downtown Baltimore on Wednesday nights and competitive play and scrimmages on Sundays in Elkridge, Md. On April 29-30, they will host the 32nd annual Charm City Invitational which already has 42 teams registered to play.
For 13 years, Adam Bocek drove back and forth, twice a week, from his hometown in Railroad, Pa., to Baltimore just to play with Charm City Volleyball.
“Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, there just wasn’t much to do if you were gay,” Bocek says. “I began meeting a lot of great guys in an atmosphere where I could be myself.”
As a youth, his primary sport was soccer and along the way he picked up baseball and volleyball. The volleyball continued in college and would be the impetus for his treks to Baltimore.
Bocek has traveled the country with his teammates playing in tournaments and picked up a silver medal with them at the 2014 Gay Games in Cleveland. Just last month he moved to Baltimore after landing a job as a recruiter for HIV research at Johns Hopkins.
“I look at this move as a rite of passage and my opportunity to be around the people who have supported me all along.” Bocek says. “I just love playing this sport and the community that comes along with it.”
After following some friends to move to Baltimore, Kent Hansen was at the Baltimore Pride parade in 2005 and saw Charm City Volleyball marching and hitting a ball around.
“I actually signed up to play that same day,” Hansen says. “One of the people I met on the team is now my husband.”
Hansen, who works as a recruiting manager for a government contracting firm, grew up in Bradner, Ohio and played multiple sports including cross country, track and field, basketball and wrestling. During college at Bowling Green State University he was a varsity cheerleader and also started playing club volleyball.
For six years, he has served as the tournament director of the Charm City Invitational and he is in his fourth year of serving on the national board of the North American Gay Volleyball Association.
He is also traveling the country with his teammates for volleyball tournaments along with traveling for tournaments with the Charm City Kings and Queens bowling league. Hansen and his husband Mike Snyder were also part of the silver medal-winning team at the 2014 Gay Games in Cleveland.
“I have met some amazing people and some of my best friends in the volleyball community,” Hansen says. “Every city we travel to we see so many people that we have known for years. I love the competition and the camaraderie.”
Carl Svagerko was happily playing his sports of football, basketball and baseball along with swimming on a summer team while growing up in Westerville, Ohio. That all changed when he joined his high school swim team because his sister needed a ride to the same practices. He fell in love with swimming and went on to win a state championship in high school and spent four years swimming for the University of Tennessee.
After moving to Baltimore to work as a structural engineer in 2014, Svagerko started playing beach volleyball at Rash Field in Baltimore Inner Harbor. He enjoyed it so much that he moved indoors to the Volleyball House. He eventually ended up on a Charm City Volleyball team as they were playing at the same facility.
“Volleyball was a new sport for me and it was filling the void of not swimming,” says Svagerko, who is straight. “I kind of just started showing up to play with them, then waded in and went full immersion.”
Svagerko has since played in his first association tournament which was hosted by the D.C. Capital Pride Volleyball League. In May, he will travel with his teammates to Columbus for the North American Gay Volleyball Association Championships XXXV.
“I was new to the area and new to the community and everyone with Charm City Volleyball was friendly, inclusive and offered me help with my volleyball form,” Svagerko says. “There is so much respect that I don’t see the sexual orientation. And you know what? They continually ask me to keep playing.”
Sports
Attitude! French ice dancers nail ‘Vogue’ routine
Cizeron and Fournier Beaudry strike a pose in memorable Olympics performance
Madonna’s presence is being felt at the Olympic Games in Italy.
Guillaume Cizeron and his rhythm ice dancing partner Laurence Fournier Beaudry of France performed a flawless skate to Madonna’s “Vogue” and “Rescue Me” on Monday.
The duo scored an impressive 90.18 for their effort, the best score of the night.
“We’ve been working hard the whole season to get over 90, so it was nice to see the score on the screen,” Fournier Beaudry told Olympics.com. “But first of all, just coming out off the ice, we were very happy about what we delivered and the pleasure we had out there. With the energy of the crowd, it was really amazing.”
Watch the routine on YouTube here.
Italy
Olympics Pride House ‘really important for the community’
Italy lags behind other European countries in terms of LGBTQ rights
The four Italian advocacy groups behind the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics’ Pride House hope to use the games to highlight the lack of LGBTQ rights in their country.
Arcigay, CIG Arcigay Milano, Milano Pride, and Pride Sport Milano organized the Pride House that is located in Milan’s MEET Digital Culture Center. The Washington Blade on Feb. 5 interviewed Pride House Project Manager Joseph Naklé.
Naklé in 2020 founded Peacox Basket Milano, Italy’s only LGBTQ basketball team. He also carried the Olympic torch through Milan shortly before he spoke with the Blade. (“Heated Rivalry” stars Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie last month participated in the torch relay in Feltre, a town in Italy’s Veneto region.)
Naklé said the promotion of LGBTQ rights in Italy is “actually our main objective.”
ILGA-Europe in its Rainbow Map 2025 notes same-sex couples lack full marriage rights in Italy, and the country’s hate crimes law does not include sexual orientation or gender identity. Italy does ban discrimination based on sexual orientation in employment, but the country’s nondiscrimination laws do not include gender identity.
ILGA-Europe has made the following recommendations “in order to improve the legal and policy situation of LGBTI people in Italy.”
• Marriage equality for same-sex couples
• Depathologization of trans identities
• Automatic co-parent recognition available for all couples
“We are not really known to be the most openly LGBT-friendly country,” Naklé told the Blade. “That’s why it (Pride House) was really important for the community.”
“We want to use the Olympic games — because there is a big media attention — and we want to use this media attention to raise the voice,” he added.
Naklé noted Pride House will host “talks and roundtables every night” during the games that will focus on a variety of topics that include transgender and nonbinary people in sports and AI. Another will focus on what Naklé described to the Blade as “the importance of political movements now to fight for our rights, especially in places such as Italy or the U.S. where we are going backwards, and not forwards.”
Seven LGBTQ Olympians — Italian swimmer Alex Di Giorgio, Canadian ice dancers Paul Poirier and Kaitlyn Weaver, Canadian figure skater Eric Radford, Spanish figure skater Javier Raya, Scottish ice dancer Lewis Gibson, and Irish field hockey and cricket player Nikki Symmons — are scheduled to participate in Pride House’s Out and Proud event on Feb. 14.
Pride House Los Angeles – West Hollywood representatives are expected to speak at Pride House on Feb. 21.
The event will include a screening of Mariano Furlani’s documentary about Pride House and LGBTQ inclusion in sports. The MiX International LGBTQ+ Film and Queer Culture Festival will screen later this year in Milan. Pride House Los Angeles – West Hollywood is also planning to show the film during the 2028 Summer Olympics.
Naklé also noted Pride House has launched an initiative that allows LGBTQ sports teams to partner with teams whose members are either migrants from African and Islamic countries or people with disabilities.
“The objective is to show that sports is the bridge between these communities,” he said.
Bisexual US skier wins gold
Naklé spoke with the Blade a day before the games opened. The Milan Cortina Winter Olympics will close on Feb. 22.
More than 40 openly LGBTQ athletes are competing in the games.
Breezy Johnson, an American alpine skier who identifies as bisexual, on Sunday won a gold medal in the women’s downhill. Amber Glenn, who identifies as bisexual and pansexual, on the same day helped the U.S. win a gold medal in team figure skating.
Glenn said she received threats on social media after she told reporters during a pre-Olympics press conference that LGBTQ Americans are having a “hard time” with the Trump-Vance administration in the White House. The Associated Press notes Glenn wore a Pride pin on her jacket during Sunday’s medal ceremony.
“I was disappointed because I’ve never had so many people wish me harm before, just for being me and speaking about being decent — human rights and decency,” said Glenn, according to the AP. “So that was really disappointing, and I do think it kind of lowered that excitement for this.”
Puerto Rico
Bad Bunny shares Super Bowl stage with Ricky Martin, Lady Gaga
Puerto Rican activist celebrates half time show
Bad Bunny on Sunday shared the stage with Ricky Martin and Lady Gaga at the Super Bowl halftime show in Santa Clara, Calif.
Martin came out as gay in 2010. Gaga, who headlined the 2017 Super Bowl halftime show, is bisexual. Bad Bunny has championed LGBTQ rights in his native Puerto Rico and elsewhere.
“Not only was a sophisticated political statement, but it was a celebration of who we are as Puerto Ricans,” Pedro Julio Serrano, president of the LGBTQ+ Federation of Puerto Rico, told the Washington Blade on Monday. “That includes us as LGBTQ+ people by including a ground-breaking superstar and legend, Ricky Martin singing an anti-colonial anthem and showcasing Young Miko, an up-and-coming star at La Casita. And, of course, having queer icon Lady Gaga sing salsa was the cherry on the top.”
La Casita is a house that Bad Bunny included in his residency in San Juan, the Puerto Rican capital, last year. He recreated it during the halftime show.
“His performance brought us together as Puerto Ricans, as Latin Americans, as Americans (from the Americas) and as human beings,” said Serrano. “He embraced his own words by showcasing, through his performance, that the ‘only thing more powerful than hate is love.’”
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