The Tampa Bay Rays game is sold out tonight.

Really.

The second-worst drawing team in baseball (somehow, the first place Cleveland Indians average fewer fans) will play in front of a crowd so large that the Rays have removed tarps that normally cover upper-deck seats. Tropicana Field will be as full as it’s ever been and the atmosphere will be as emotionally charged as any in sports this season.

The game is sold out because the Rays have dedicated the night to the victims of Sunday’s massacre at an Orlando nightclub.

It’s Pride Night and earlier this week the Rays put every available ticket on sale for $5, unleashing a deluge of sales that quickly filled the building to capacity. All proceeds from the $5 tickets will benefit the Pulse Victims Fund and the team will give away t-shirts that say “We Are Orlando”, scroll the names of the victims across the video board, observe a moment of silence, host a blood drive and do even more to embrace the area’s shaken LGBT community.

It’s the kind of harmony between sports and gay men and women that would have been unfathomable just a decade ago.

And that’s great.

But it’s also the kind of tolerance, love and inclusion that’s nowhere to be found in at least one spot at Tropicana Field.

And that’s too bad.

Because, statistically speaking, there’s at least one gay man in the Rays or San Francisco Giants clubhouse who will take the whole thing in, silent and alone. Numbers are hard to pin down, but polling and research suggests that conservatively about two percent of the U.S. male population identifies as gay. That means 1 in 50 Americans, or one of 50 active baseball players in every MLB game.

So Sunday’s horrific shooting aside, that one gay man in Tampa has seen the American public become more and more accepting of LGBT people every day. He’s seen gay marriage proponents win monumental, historic political victories. He’s seen the freaking White House light up with rainbow colors.

But he has not seen a baseball clubhouse, or any locker room in the four major sports, become a safe place for him to be his true self. There is not, nor has there ever been, an openly gay player in MLB.

Sports leagues have increasingly warmed up to the idea of an active gay player, with Major League Baseball going so far as to appoint openly gay former big leaguer Billy Bean as the league’s ambassador for inclusion. Whether that philosophical shift stems from image consciousness or altruism is up for debate, but on the surface it looks like sports are gradually progressing along with the rest of the country.

Then there’s the part of sports the public doesn’t get to see.

Locker rooms are not what we would call politically correct, and I’m not here to say they necessarily need to be. Clubhouses and the players in them turn into little families, and anyone’s who’s sat around playing cards after Thanksgiving dinner can tell you that families aren’t exactly P.C. places either.

I was talking to a former player recently who called the camaraderie among teammates “a brotherhood” and “second to none”, and you won’t find many players who disagree. It’s an incredible spot to bond and build lasting friendships, but generally clubhouses are also filled with young men whose range in conversation goes all the way from jokes about their privates to those about farts and maybe to a hormone-driven discussion of the opposite sex, all with a vocabulary that would make George Carlin squirm.

Tyler Dunnington, a former minor league pitcher who retired upon coming out as gay in 2015, told the website Outsports.com earlier this year “I experienced both coaches and players make remarks on killing gay people during my time in baseball, and each comment felt like a knife to my heart.”

In the same piece on Outsports.com, he told of a time he heard a coach say “we kill gay people in Wyoming” in reference to the 1998 hate crime murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie.

Dunnington’s teammates did not know he was gay during his playing days, and Dunnington acknowledged in the piece that he thought many of his teammates would have embraced him had he come out. He acknowledged, too, that the anti-gay sentiments could have simply been part of the “jock’ language used in a clubhouse.

But therein lies the problem. In places where hateful, homophobic language is tolerated as just ‘boys being boys’ and jokes are made about murdering people for their sexuality, how on earth could a gay player possibly feel safe to be himself? Would you?

So on a day when a baseball stadium will be packed with fans and a team is making a stand and reaching outward into the community, perhaps it’s time to look inward, too. I long for the day a clubhouse will police its own language, be it from a manager or veteran player, and I long for the day when active efforts are made, down to the high school and college levels, to remind athletes that common decency, kindness and thoughtfulness don’t end when the locker room doors close.

I long for the day when having an openly gay athlete in the locker room isn’t a aberration but an expectation, because the odds are there’s at least one gay man, intimidated into silence, in thousands of locker rooms around the country.

Locker rooms and clubhouses can be a loving, inclusive place for all people. It won’t mean the end of the fart jokes. It won’t mean the conversation gets a G-rating. And it won’t make sports any less manly.

It will simply make them better.

Andy Viano is a sports reporter and columnist. He can be reached at 758-4446 or [email protected].