Pride & Basketball — the Boston Gay Basketball League
December, 2021
Kevin Quincy’s sent out emails. No luck. He’s leaned on local connections. No luck. He’s also made more than 75 phone calls looking for a venue. Still, no luck.
The answer every time: Sorry, we’re not open to large groups.
The scheduled start of the 27th season of the Boston GLBTQ (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer) Basketball League (BGBL) was only a month away, and they still had no courts. With every unreturned phone call, email, and text, the chances that the 2021–22 season would happen seemed increasingly dire.
Quincy, the league commissioner, was beyond frustrated.
Finding basketball courts for the 2021 season shouldn’t even have been a worry for Quincy. If anything, he should have only been worried about the players and the pandemic. But when a water leak buckled the floors at the South End Fitness Center — the league’s home since 1994 — it left them stranded.
But Quincy was motivated. Organized.
He knew that if anyone could lead the league through this tumultuous time, it was him. It had to be. The league, initially founded for gay basketball players, had been his home since 1999 when he joined as a sophomore at Northeastern University. And now, it was his turn as Commissioner to ensure that other gay ball players had a home too.
But with the last season canceled due to COVID-19, and the pandemic’s lingering effects hindering the next, doubts about the league’s future had crept in.
Quincy wondered, How is he going to tell the members? What exactly is he going to say? What are they going to do during — when suddenly, one call paid off — kind of.
The Hyde Park YMCA might be able to house them but it was a HUGE maybe. Quincy has submitted all the permits and insurance forms required but the approval was taking much longer than it should.
And that was it.
No more options or backup plans. If the Hyde Park YMCA didn’t come through, the season was in jeopardy.
Worried, Quincy said, “… I just hope we get our gym. That’s my biggest thing. The players, the players need it. They deserve it. It is necessary to continue this — this league.”
***
MARC DAVINO WALKED into the dimly-lit backroom at Ramrod — the now-shuttered gay bar and nightclub — at 1254 Boylston Street. It was 1994. He entered the bar with a friend and carried a notebook on which he’d scrawled,
“Sat, 10/22, 7 p.m.
draft party
(register and pay $25)
@Ramrod”
He had seen an ad in ‘In Newsweekly’ — an old LGBT Boston publication that’s now no longer in circulation. A new gay basketball league was in the works. Davino didn’t hesitate, he called the number listed on the ad. The voice on the other end gave him directions to Ramrod’s. Davino quickly scrawled them down on a notebook lying nearby. Now, here he was in the packed back room.
Buck Bachman was there, too, somewhere in the room that night. He was the founder. The new league’s Commissioner. The man who’d placed the ad Davino had seen in the paper. The voice on the other end of the call.
And this wasn’t Bachman’s first rodeo. He was in his element and was a prominent name in American gay sports leagues in the 1990s, both as a player and a founder. Since 1986, he’d played softball and basketball in Chicago, before co-founding the Twin Cities Basketball League in Minneapolis in 1989.
In 1994, Bachman moved to Boston. Noticing the absence of a gay basketball league in the city, he did what he did best in an era before Facebook and cell phones; he brought people together through sport.
And all he needed: a couple of flyers, a ‘home’ to play in, and an ad in the local paper.
Back at Ramrod’s, players nervously stood around, as the league’s first six coaches walked around the room. Each had a list of player names pinned to clipboards in their hands and scrawled notes after quick conversations.
To Davino, 56, it felt like a “little bit of a dating game.”
Questions were asked. Some fun and social. Others, purely about competitive drive, basketball experience, and ability. Davino was here to have fun playing ball, and he was picked by Coach Gary Staples for the team called the ‘Fritz Bears.’
Their competition — “the Fidelity Falcons, Fritz Bulls, NU-Way Knicks, Ramrod Brats, and Randolph Country Club Rebels.”
Six teams, 10 games and, as Davino recalled, an “old-fashioned flip scoreboard, and a tiny table clock” kicked off the first season of the Boston GLBTQ Basketball League (BGBL).
***
“…THAT’S A FLYER from our first tournament that we ever had here in 1997.”
It’s 11 a.m. on a Thursday, and sitting outside a café in Brookline, Bachman is looking through some photos on his phone. “And then this turned out blurry but this is…”
Bachman is easy to spot in a grey, well-worn Bruins sweatshirt, and a Patriots cap, holding a plastic bag with bits and bobs. Inside it are a few mementos from the good old days — a booklet from the Chicago Hoops Classic Awards Banquet on March 18, 2000, a hefty ring inscribed with ‘NGBA Basketball — Hall of Fame,’ a rainbow strapped BGBL gold medal, and pins from Gay softball leagues neatly kept in a silver Wrigley’s spearmint chewing gum box.
Bachman is 57 now, and they’re pieces of his past. He’s no longer the young man at Ramrod’s in 1994. “It was a different world,” he says. The world in which he started the BGBL. “Thirty years ago, there weren’t a lot of gay organizations. I mean, it was more closeted…It wasn’t as open or as free as it is now. It’s changed a lot.”
He chuckles. “…yeah, really changed a lot.” And pauses. “…yeah, different world.”
The one constant — sports.
Bachman started playing in basketball and softball leagues in 1986, against a mosaic of grief, anxiety, and hopelessness as a young gay man. The late 1980s and early 1990s were the height of the AIDS epidemic in America. And Bachman could do nothing but watch as more people — friends, colleagues– died around him.
In 1985, he tested HIV positive. “I kind of wrote myself off like, well, everybody was dying around me so, I think I’m just going to die,” Bachman recalled. Over the next few years, he tried all the original medication. Nothing seemed to work. Bachman gave himself 10 years to live, more or less. In the meantime, he’d at least like to keep healthy — maybe play a little basketball and softball. And maybe, just maybe, even create, he said, “…a safe place for people to go; that feel like they can be around other people like them without worry of repercussions.”
***
As he focused on pulling together a season in 2021, current commissioner Kevin Quincy said, “Basketball is life.”
In 1994, when Bachman started BGBL, that was literally the case.
Over its 27 years, the BGBL grew and evolved as other leagues faltered and shut down. Bachman credits his successors — Commissioners like Davino and Quincy — who took the league and made it their own. Although he’s taken a step back from the league, Bachman said, “I’m proud of the whole [league] — I’m mostly proud of the bonding and the friendships created, and you can’t replace that.”
From the six teams and 48 players at Ramrod’s for the inaugural draft, the league now stands 148 players strong. Their website is newly revamped and chronicles the league’s history from 1994.
A lot is different, but has sports become more inclusive? Has it shed its hostility towards queer men, queer women, and others who don’t fit the traditional image of an ‘athlete’?
***
Quadry Allen, 28, is the BGBL’s Director of Sponsorship.
“Basketball was something I started doing basically before I could walk,” said Allen.
Allen grew up in Black religious household in White Castle, Louisiana, a town with four traffic lights, two gas stations, one Daigle’s supermarket and Dollar Tree store. And he knew that basketball was his way out. It would show him the world, and, as he said, “who exactly Quadry was.”
And in a way, it did. It brought him to Boston in September 2011.
Allen loves the city and its people. It’s his home now and the home of his favorite pro sports team, the Red Sox. It’s also the place where he visited his first gay club and began exploring his sexuality. But when he first moved to the city as a freshman at UMass-Boston, Allen felt torn.
He saw two versions of himself — “Basketball Quadry” and the “real Quadry.”
“I think I was battling back and forth with who I wanted to be,” recalled Allen. “And I think a little part of me still wanted to be that Quadry from my hometown that everyone remembered — the straight guy — but I knew, in my heart, this isn’t who I am anymore.”
For Allen, the two identities never seemed to intersect. That is, until he found the BGBL in 2018.
“The league helped me out a lot, you know because I wanted to continue to play basketball and sports,” said Allen. “But I wanted to be around people who were like me.”
Within the BGBL, Allen discovered a vibrant gay community. A place where the “real Quadry” could make friends and, as a ball player, aim to have a championship-winning season.
And this is exactly what Quincy and Bachman and Davino and Allen are fighting for now. To have a space within the sport where they can be their true authentic selves and enjoy a good game. Maybe, even a few drinks after. For something that is way bigger than Bachman envisioned in 1994.
“I like to say it’s more than basketball. It’s a community,” Quincy said.
***
MON, NOV 8, 4:24 PM — the latest BGBL newsletter slid into inboxes. “BGBL Regular Season News!!!,” the subject line read.
And beneath it followed the words: BREAKING NEWS.
The approval for a place to play had finally come through.
There would be a 27th season. The BGBL tradition would continue in all its glory. And Davino, Allen, Quincy and Bachman would all be a part of it.
