Finding hope for better future on the road
Visiting more than 100 minor teams leaves McGillis feeling optimistic
So Brock McGillis is holding out his hand, waiting. He’s just outside Ottawa, visiting one of 100 minor hockey teams in 100 days, and on this stop the parents of five or six boys called and said they didn’t want their sons to attend. And the hockey club — the Canadian International Hockey Academy in Rockland, with players from all over the world — said: sorry, all the kids are going.
As it happened, the boys in question were Russian or Ukrainian, and McGillis is rather famously gay. He had worked his way from west to east, visiting each NHL market and branching out from each city. In Rockland, McGillis asked the captain to come up front, and it turned out one of the Russian boys was the captain. And the kid wasn’t ready to shake hands.
McGillis held his hand out and looked the kid in the eye. Not threateningly, just honestly. A few seconds passed. The kid shook his hand. A few minutes later, McGillis told a story he’s told a thousand times, and one of the Russian kids in the crowd laughed.
“And when that happened I said (to myself): OK, now I got them,” says McGillis, 40. “Now they’re engaged. Now I’m not the evil villain gay guy. I’m a human being, sharing stories.”
Some of the Russian kids started answering his questions to the group. At the end of the session, three of the Eastern European boys were among the first to come over to say thank you. All three shook his hand.
“I say this pretty bluntly: I can’t control it if you’re anti-LGBTQ+. Frankly, it’s none of my business,” says McGillis. “People are going to
follow their own moral compass. I can show you the impact you’re going to have based off my lived experience, and the people who have come to me with theirs.
“But ultimately, you’re going to follow your moral compass. And I think when we try and force things on people, versus guiding people, that’s when we have this disconnect. It’s about meeting people where they’re at.”
This was a long time in the making. McGillis came out in 2016, after a career as a goaltender in the Ontario Hockey League and United Hockey League. He was good friends with Brendan Burke (son of hockey executive Brian Burke) who died in a car accident in 2010, after coming out as gay in 2009. In the last exchange they ever had, Brendan told McGillis, “I can’t wait for the day that you’re out to your family the way I am to mine.”
“And I ignored his message,” McGillis says now. “And then he died
two days later.”
Once McGillis was out, he tried to move the culture of hockey away from what has long been an insular, conformist, cultural cul-de-sac. And as he became a public speaker, minor hockey teams — and the pros — were reluctant to bring him in. He spoke to high schools more than anything, though in the last two years those gigs have receded as the assault on teaching LGBTQ+ equality in schools has ramped up.
After several fits and starts, this tour really took shape when he got in touch with Canadian Tire’s Jumpstart program; they’re the headline sponsor. There were regional partners and community partners as well.
In the hockey world, Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment and the Maple Leafs themselves got on board — team president Brendan Shanahan has long been a supporter, as was departed general manager Kyle Dubas — and the NHL also attached itself as a lower-level but symbolically important sponsor. The tour began in mid-November: the Culture Shift Tour. It was recorded by Dom Granato (Tony Granato’s son and Cammi Granato’s nephew). He is out, too, and a former college hockey player.
And McGillis wasn’t sure how it would go, not quite. He has been giving this talk for years, and minor hockey is a place where the juniors of tomorrow are baked. McGillis starts with two simple questions. Who here knows someone who identifies as LGBTQ+? Almost every hand usually shoots up. Then he asks: Who here has used homophobic language? The hands largely stay down, until he puts up his own hand. He makes it clear, this is not about judging them. But when he asks them why they didn’t raise their hands, they often say because they know it’s wrong. And that is important.
Because the tour isn’t just about LGBTQ+ issues at all. It’s about how you think about other people and yourself, and how actions can ripple and impact people, both good and bad. McGillis is vulnerable with them, talking about growing up in Sudbury, conforming to hockey and bro culture, hearing homophobic language from teammates and wanting to kill himself. He understands how it feels to not be able to be yourself.
“It’s just, recognize the impact that you’re having,” says McGillis. “And if you’re a good person, or believe you’re a good person ... you just don’t want other people to feel bad. You don’t want to be the cause of it. You may not care if they feel good — you may not care about them at all, and that’s fine — but just don’t be the person who’s oppressing other people.
“I just think that’s half the battle, because I think most people are good.”
He didn’t just speak with the 100 minor teams, including 23 women’s teams. He added every team in the BCHL and the Manitoba Junior Hockey League, Carleton’s entire athletic department and the Leafs. He had just done an MLSE staff session, and Leafs director of culture and inclusion Mark Fraser called and said: come talk to the team.
There was a kid out west who was bullied for being Jewish. After the talk, he told McGillis, in tears, that he was inspired to tell his teammates how it made him feel. McGillis gave the boy his number, helped him figure out what he wanted to say and attended the team’s next practice, to help explain to the kids the impact of their actions: the hurt, the damage. He talks a lot about how actions can have far-reaching ripple effects, both good and bad.
“I equate silence to, let’s say you drive your friend to the bank and they robbed the bank,” says McGillis. “And you say: I didn’t rob the bank, I’m a good person. Well, you’re still an accessory.”
At a stop in Ottawa, there were three lonely protesters. He engaged them in front of the Carleton athletic department, and the athletes rolled their eyes at the protesters. In Calgary, after his usual session on what kids like outside the confines of hockey, two different players in Calgary who enjoy baking baked him cookies. Across the country, McGillis found receptive audiences.
The power of McGillis’s work isn’t that he hectors; it’s that he reaches people. At one stop in Surrey, he was warned the kids were unlikely to engage. They were a quiet crew. By the end of the session, the kids kept talking so long they told their parents to wait in their cars.
Tom Lynn is the director of student services for the CIH Academy outside Ottawa. He was the one who warned McGillis about the reticence of some of the Eastern European kids. McGillis said: no problem. And then the talk started.
“We were about 15, 20 minutes into it and I was like, this is unbelievable,” says Lynn. Once McGillis got to empathy, a Ukrainian boy who had been vocally reticent to attend opened up about his own struggles: his family at home, the war, everything. As the session unfolded, the Russian-born captain volunteered again.
“It’s just the conversations that his message gets to open up,” says Lynn.
“We all live lives in silence sometimes.”
Tom’s 13-year-old son had attended one of McGillis’s other Ottawa stops. And afterward, Lynn and his son sat in the car, and his son talked about thinking about the impact of his words — whether playing Fortnite with his best friend, or how he himself feels on his bad days — for 25 minutes in the rink parking lot, and another 25 in the driveway at home.
“I’ve never had better conversations with my own kid than I did after that presentation,” says Lynn. “It was really great for him to understand that his words have meaning.”
“Give them tools. We expect people to do all this stuff in this world today, but we don’t give them tools,” says McGillis. “Like, I don’t care if NHL players don’t wear rainbows, because that’s not what it should be about. I care that they’re fostering a locker-room environment where a gay teammate can exist, where a Black kid can exist, where a woman working the men’s side of the sport, any sport, or playing on the boys’ side feels safe.”
This was a start. The day the tour was announced, another 100 teams reached out. On the women’s teams, a kid came out to him at nearly every stop. During the tour, Saskatchewan minor hockey called and wants to be included on the next one. Alberta wants to send him across the province. Atlantic Canada will be on the itinerary, too, and the United States. It might be 200 teams next year.
And while it was a true grind, an exhausting journey, McGillis can’t wait to do it again.
“I have so much more hope and optimism for humanity and society than what I did before,” McGillis says.
“I really do. And that’s through the positive and the negative stories. It taught me that I’m on the right path.”
McGillis will rest now, as the ripples from this tour spread person by person, out into the world. And next year, McGillis will try again to reach out, to nudge and engage and shift more people toward empathy. He’ll meet them where they’re at.