Play On, Sports Queens

On a recent Friday night in March, a Minneapolis sports bar is booming with chants for The Minnesota Frost (Professional Women’s Hockey League), The Minnesota Golden Gophers (University of Minnesota women’s ice hockey), Unrivaled Basketball League, and the Iowa Hawkeyes (University of Iowa women’s basketball).

Competing chants are as loud as the colorful jerseys the fans wear as they rubberneck every television in the packed joint. A Bar of Their Own is providing these fans with a buffet of all-you-can-eat women’s sports, and the fans show up to feast.

“To see this place packed with fans for so many different teams is an absolute dream and just goes to show that the passion for women’s sports is there—we just haven’t previously done a good job at acknowledging it,” says Jillian Hiscock, owner.

“In the past, we’ve made it really hard to be a women’s sports fan due to lack of media coverage, and places like A Bar of Their Own are not only great places for diehard fans to catch their favorite team, but also for casual fans to get caught up in the excitement of watching sports in community.”

The bar is a beautiful mix of people, sexual identities, ethnicities, and ages. Kids eating chicken nuggets, lesbians having a beer with their burger, and men cheering at the tops of their lungs while sipping sodas. It’s a true microcosm of society. Then, we see Jan Jensen, an openly gay Iowa basketball coach, interviewed on a few of the TVs, and it falls quiet as people listen to what this sports queen has to say.

Watching sports queens on television hasn’t always been available to us, and watching openly queer women athletes is even more new, but it’s growing!

As part of Lesbian Visibility Week, we are celebrating the first Queer Women in Sports Day on April 26th, and it got me wondering, who were my sporty, lesbian role models growing up? Did I have any, and if so, what was the story I was told about them? There was the Little League softball coach who was rumored to be gay. She was super cool, but socially, it felt clear to me that it wasn’t cool to say I thought she was cool. Then, there was the high school gym teacher who was rumored to have a checking account with another woman after a friend checked her out at the grocery store. No, not that kind of checking out. Like my favorite song in Fun Home, the Broadway musical, “Ring of Keys,” being in their presence made me feel like there was something familiar about us, the old “I know you.”

As Jenny Nguyen, Founder and CEO of wildly successful The Sports Bra franchise, said, “I don’t recall actually knowing any out lesbian role models in sports when I think back on it. I was a HUGE basketball fan, and I am not sure I fully understood my gayness in relation to anything other than how I was feeling about my own identity.” She went on to say, “But I do recall one of my biggest role models was Ani DiFranco when I was a sophomore in high school and how I felt like, for the first time, I wasn’t alone.”

Growing up gender non-conforming most of my life in northern Minnesota, there were no “out” lesbians in my life. None on TV I could look to. I hadn’t heard of Martina Navratilova or Billie Jean King yet. There was no representation on the ball fields and none in the classrooms. Oh, there were lesbian coaches and teachers I knew of, but they weren’t out. And when I did hear about Martina being queer, the message wasn’t positive.

In the early ’90s, as I was recruited for collegiate basketball, I experienced anti-gay practices from coaches trying to get me to commit to them by creating fear in me and my parents. They’d say about another coach, “Oh, you don’t want to play for her. She’s a dyke and only has gay players on her team.” As a questioning, young, closeted queer, it scared me away from teams I may have thrived on. I wasn’t ready to be out, and their tactics worked on me.

My queer coaches didn’t come out to me, and nearly half my collegiate basketball team was gay, but we weren’t out to each other—leaving us feeling isolated and lonely. As a high school coach myself, I did my best to stay closeted out of fear of being accused of anything remotely inappropriate—or losing my job completely.

Sadly, it wasn’t until my early 20s that I remember learning about the most famous lesbian sports queen, Billie Jean King. Instantly, she became my role model and still is to this day. Fast forward to the early 2000s, I was working in the WNBA and found myself to be the only 100% openly gay person. There were others who were queer for sure, but for the sake of business, growing the fan base of “families” and dads and daughters, they kept their personal lives more hidden than not, and at times, I was encouraged to do the same.

But lesbians/queer women have been and continue to be the foundational participant and fan base of women’s sports. We play. We coach. We lead. We cheer. We invest. We always have. Back in the day, visibility on the courts and fields, rinks, and locker rooms was minimal. Rugby Hall of Famer and NBC Broadcaster Phaidra Knight said in an Out Sport interview, “Because of the nature of rugby, it’s the most inclusive sport I’ve ever been a part of. Ever since day one, I’ve enjoyed the luxury of not having to deal with the discrimination that can come. Of course, I take tremendous pride in all the characteristics I represent, being an African-American, being a woman, being a lesbian.”

Like Phaidra, Jenny Nguyen said sports provided a sanctuary to be herself. “Honestly, ‘basketball’ was the easiest part of coming out. Those folks who I played with knew me better than anyone else, so it really didn’t matter to them. I was their teammate and we had a special bond that didn’t change just because of my sexuality.”

The boom of women’s sports is reaching the highest of heights. Money is beginning to be invested in greater proportions; viewership is up. It’s a direct correlation to the increase in the availability to watch. Thus, not only is ‘everyone watching women’s sports,’ which is the famous slogan of Togethxr, but indeed, everyone is watching lesbians in sports.

And, we have so many out lesbian athletes, coaches, administrators, and broadcasters bravely giving voice and visibility to all of us as queers and athletes and athletics lovers.

Unrivaled co-founder, Olympic Gold Medalist, and WNBA All-Star Breanna Stewart and her Spanish professional and national team hooper wife Marta Xargay Casademont took their fertility process public, destigmatizing it along the way. Britney Griner and her wife Cherelle’s relationship became front and center worldwide as Cherelle fought day and night for the safe return of our beloved baller from her Russian prison cell. Then, there is the blockbuster power couple of Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird, courage and leadership on full display. And the engagement announcement of footballer stars (soccer to us Yanks) Kristie Mewes of USWNT and Sam Kerr of the Australian National Team made major social media highlights in late 2023. Role models in action.

Being an openly queer woman in sports comes with its challenges for sure. In this climate of our nation and world, in particular, it is ever so important that those of us who can be out make ourselves visible. As paralympian Katie-George Dunlevy said to ESPN, “I don’t talk about it often because it’s [usually] not relevant, [but] as time goes on, I’m going, ‘Actually, if it does give hope to someone out there, then I should.’ Also, I’m disabled and female, so I have three things: Women in sport, I’m disabled because I’m partially sighted, and I’m out too. I’m happy to talk about it. I’m not shouting from the rooftops, but I’m not hiding it like I did for so long.”

We make ourselves visible for those who can’t or aren’t ready. We make ourselves visible because we ARE here and always have been. We welcome the newcomers, young and late in life, to our teams. We stand with each other on the sidelines, on the playing fields, the boardrooms and offices, the schools, small businesses and neighborhoods, role modeling the potential for others.

Several years ago, I began publishing a children’s book series about a tough, little, gender-non-conforming girl who loves to learn new sports. It came out of a clear need for representation because I found that less than 2% of children’s books have a female character who is physically active. Just moving her body, let alone playing sports and not being hypersexualized or boy crazy. Now, Shelly Bean the Sports Queen is a role model for ALL children, not just girls.

“If she can see it, she can be it,” was famously quoted by the great Billie Jean King. And when all children and young adults have strong, female, queer role models to look up to, our world can be a better place. And we need that now more than ever.

The newest women’s sports bar is the soon-to-open San Francisco Rikki’s, named for a role model we all should have known and now get to learn more about, Rikki Streicher. Owners Danielle Thoe and Sara Yergovich chose to name the Castro neighborhood’s new fun spot after the queer pioneer who was one of the founders of the Federation of Gay Games and who created safe entertainment spaces for lesbians in the Bay Area. These pioneering queer owners met on the soccer pitch themselves, and just blocks away from their new establishment is a park with ball fields named after Rikki. Now, her story will be told for many years to come through the insightful leadership of Thoe and Yergovich. And many years from now, we will tell the inspirational story of Rikki’s rise in supporting women’s sports and queer women in sports.

So here’s to all you queer sports queens. You helped create the games. You play the games, you buy the tickets, you watch, and claim your part of the viewership ratings. Play on sports queens. Play on.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Shelly Breen is the creator of Shelly Bean the Sports Queen, a children’s book series whose main character is a tough little girl who loves to learn new sports. She has spoken to over 110,000 children and 10,000 adults across the U.S. sharing a message of perseverance and helping all kids see themselves in books. Breen also founded the Let Me Play grants to help Minnesota girls who can’t afford to play sports. An entrepreneur and Master Certified Life Coach, Breen’s career has spanned physical education, high school and collegiate coaching, WNBA sales management, leadership development, executive and life coaching, and more, all with an emphasis on self-discovery, relationship building, teamwork and advocacy. A native of Minnesota, Breen now resides in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. www.shellybreen.com

For more information about Curve’s Lesbian Visibility Week Sports Bar event, go here.

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