THIS FACEOFF WAS A REAL GAME-CHANGER
Brad Parr and boyfriend Andy Evans were about to smooch for the Los Angeles Kings’ “kiss cam” when Parr — a 39-year-old Canadian litigation lawyer living in L.A. — felt an unexpected twinge of dread.
At that moment, the in-house cameraman was in their Staples Center aisle, aiming his lens at the couple during a Jan. 7 game between the Kings and the visiting Toronto Maple Leafs.
“What happens if the entire stadium boos?” Parr recalled thinking. “Or throws something at us?”
Parr had arranged the close-up after playfully tweaking the NHL club over time about diversity — the lawyer is a season ticket holder who shares a pair of seats with a colleague.
“I’d been going to Kings games for years (and) there were five to seven occasions when after the kiss camera (segment), I would tweet to the Kings: ‘Hey, it would be great to have a same-sex couple on there,’ ” said Parr, who was raised in Ajax before moving to California in his 20s.
Parr described himself as “chronically single” until he met Evans, a 33-year-old actor, at a party 15 months ago. When his co-worker couldn’t make a game earlier in the season, Parr took Evans and tweeted at the Kings just before the kiss cam was about to roll to say the boyfriends were available for a bigscreen buss.
“This was the first time I’m not single at a hockey game and it was more than just a date,” Parr recalled, noting he told the club they were in section 215, row 8, seats 16 and 17. “The Kings got back to me really quickly and said it’s too short notice to do it now but let us know next time.”
Parr did: Jan. 7, when the Leafs were in town. The Kings confirmed the men were in that lip-lock lineup: third commercial break, second period.
Parr said he and Evans spent the first intermission with a gay Kings fan group, getting wishes of good luck from friends. The Canadian said the kiss-cam close-up didn’t seem real until he was in his seat, staring at a lens.
“I assumed (the Kings) would use one of their remote, long-range super-awesome cameras but nope; suddenly there was this cameraman in the aisle and I’m like, ‘Oh God, OK, I guess we are doing this,’ ” Parr said.
The crowd reaction to the full lip lock? “When people realized it wasn’t a joke — we didn’t just do some bro-like peck on the cheek — the cheering built and built and built,” Parr said. “It was really, really loud and kind of amazing.”
Parr said though the kiss he and Evans shared — which he called “10 seconds of gay Internet fame” — may not have been an NHL first (he’s since been told it may have happened elsewhere), he reckons this was the most widely seen on social media.