Song about gay ice hockey players causes outrage in Finland

Considering that May 17 is the International Day Against Homophobia, Trans-phobia and Bi-phobia, I thought it would be a good time to talk about the recent, rather depressing developments in Finland: the response to a song about gay people in ice hockey.

Some background for this controversy: In early May, Tuure Boelius, a 17-year-old Finnish youtuber, actor and singer (which I didn't know until this whole situation), released his single "Lätkäjätkä-Ville". The title roughly translates to "Hockey Guy Ville". The song itself is nothing special. It's pretty much the usual stuff you would expect to hear from somebody his age: a simple beat and, in my opinion, rather cheesy lyrics. To his credit, he seems to have a decent voice, but it's not my type of music. The music video for the song has over million views, which is about 1/5 of Finland's population. It also has 36 000 dislikes, compared to only 16 000 likes. However, this situation is not just about the negative reactions to the video, as it led to Boelius getting death threats and attacks towards the LGBT community in general. The story has even spread outside of Finland, with Swedish media outlets covering this story. So, what led to this reaction?

Before going to what caused this controversy, let's take a closer look at the man behind it. As I said, Boelius is a youtuber who currently has 142 893 subscribers and nearly 28 million views, which is a lot considering he makes videos in Finnish. He really became known in 2016, when he publicly came out as gay on a video, which also led to him being chosen as "Gay person of the year", in a LGBT award show that has since been discontinued. The nomination did cause some controversy because of the fact that Boelius was 15 at the time. One of the more over-the-top reactions was Jari Ronkainen, a MP for the Finns Party contacting the Ombudsman for Children, because he wanted to know, if the nomination had broken the law. Ronkainen also demanded groups campaigning for the rights of children to give statements on the decision. As far as I know, that led to nothing.

So, what about the song? As I said, musically, it's not any different from the usual stuff teen artists make. So what caused the reaction? Well, as you can probably guess from the title of this post, it seems to be because of the fact that it tells about gay hockey players.

Again, the song itself is nothing special. It's just that the topic of the lyrics combined with the music video is really what caused the controversy. The lyrics talk about a guy named Ville, who plays hockey. He's described as every girls dream, a guy wanted by all women. There's just the fact that he's gay and happens to be into Boelius' character in the video. The video, among other things, sees the two young men kissing in a locker room, wearing Finnish national teams jerseys. And this actually seem to be the main thing people object to: two men kissing while wearing the national teams symbols.

Call me naive, but I thought we were better than this. But it seems that while Finland generally is accepting of the LGBT community, there are still some situations people have problems with it. I mean, a song about gay hockey players caused controversy, enough to be noticed outside the country. On the other hand, despite coming so far, this shows that we as a society still have more things to do regarding this topic.

Because of the video, Boelius has been receiving a lot of hate, including death threats, calls to commit suicide, people accusing him of disgracing the national teams jersey for wearing it on the video and even accusations of cultural appropriation (seriously!) for wearing the jersey (there has been a lot of discussion about the topic recently. long story). However, despite all the hate, this case has shown the very best of humanity. Multiple celebrities have expressed their support for Boelius, one of the more notable ones being Teemu Selänne, who's arguably the most successful Finnish hockey player of all time. The Finnish Ice Hockey Association also gave a statement, which, though vaguely worded, in support of Boelius. Ultimately, I think the effects of this discussion will lead to positive change.

Before we finish, I'd like to send a message who have a problem with the song: you're gonna have a bad time. Let's just look at this objectively. I've seen different numbers on this, but it's been estimated that the LGBT community makes up around 10% of the population. In Finland, there are over 60 000 registered hockey players. So, if we assume that the LGBT ratio within hockey players is the same as it is within the general public, there should be around 6000 hockey players identifying as LGBT in Finland alone.Then you remember that the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) has 76 member states. So, even if there aren't any openly gay people currently playing in the highest levels, it's a matter of time when that will change. So, if you have a problem with the idea of LGBT people playing hockey, I have bad news for you.

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