Amazon Prime’s series A League of Their Own busted me open at the seams.
There’s a picture of me from the early 90s where I am standing next to my second grade teacher. My pink plastic glasses are fringed with the blunt bangs my mom trimmed every couple of weeks to keep them out of my eyes. My teal tee shirt says, “Clackamas Little League” across the front. It was my favorite color and I felt proud wearing it around, showing the world that I was a ball player. It was a physical reminder of something I was proud of.
I loved playing ball — the feeling of swinging my bat as hard as I could and running around the bases, the way the ball thumped into my glove, the feeling that if I tried hard and practiced, my body would learn all the skills I needed to make a play or score a run, to be the hero of my small world for a moment.
When I was eight or nine, my middle school aged brother sometimes let me tag along with him on the city bus to the comic book store in the downtown area of our Portland suburb. He was interested in the comic books, but I was interested in the baseball cards. I’d spend my allowance on packets of cards labeled Top or Fleer.
At home I would flip through them, hoping I’d gotten some of my favorite players — Ken Griffey Junior, Jose Conseco, Cal Ripken Junior. I remember reading all their stats wishing so badly to be one of those kids who could recite all the stats of their favorite players. I imagined rattling off numbers as I watched a game and showing all the boys and men in the room that I could keep up with them, that I was as important as they were.
I was never that kid though. I was the one who was in it for the sensations, for the poetry of the game. I wanted to hear, smell, and breathe the game. Numbers didn’t help me with any of that.
I was incensed when I was too old for tee ball, which was co-ed, and found out girls weren’t allowed to play baseball. I wanted to pitch the way Randy Johnson pitched and hit the way Ken Griffey Junior hit.
The softball seemed big and clunky. I was insulted to be relegated to what felt like a slower game with a big ball that reminded me of those fat crayons they used to give preschoolers. It didn’t seem to fit in my hand or my glove quite as naturally as a baseball.
Now, girls are allowed to play Little League baseball, and I know that fast pitch softball is a demonstrably faster game, but in the eighties and nineties I didn’t know that. All I knew was that what was or was not between my legs was inexplicably linked to what sports I was and was not allowed to play by league rules.
I was seven years old in 1992 when A League of Their Own (the original movie) came out. I have no memory of whether I saw it in the theater or on TV, or if we rented the video tape from Blockbuster, but I was instantly in love.
These women were doing what I loved to do, and they had been born way before me! I didn’t understand why tears burned at the backs of my eyes while I watched, but I held them in (I had to be tough to be taken seriously).
This was a baseball movie about tough women doing tough things! These were tomboys, like me! They liked sports and they weren’t good at doing dainty, lady-like things (except Gena Davis as Dottie, who was beautiful and classy and always knew the right thing to say or do).
They were women who weren’t always feminine, and some of them were never feminine, but they were good at playing baseball. They were little more than a punchline to most people, except when they were on the baseball field. For a brief moment, in a limited way, the parts of themselves they were always ashamed of became their greatest assets.
I felt a flicker of possibility for a future where I could be valued as the unladylike, assertive girl that I was.
I didn’t have words for it yet, but for the first time, I saw women who were queer like me.
Watching Prime’s reboot blew up my emotional world in ways I never expected. I went in knowing almost nothing about it. Automatically wary of reboots, my primary interest in it stemmed from a still photo someone posted on Twitter portraying two women in the show kissing. Gay stuff! I started the series with enthusiasm.
The characters were colorful and real, and Carson (Abbi Jacobson), who, though insecure, is smart, tough, and competent, had a grip on me from the very beginning. Then there was Greta in her shiny baseball pants & crop top, and Jo in her shorts right out on a public street in the 1940s. I was immediately endeared to Max and Clance as well, between Clance’s feminist interpretations of comic books and Max’s absolute cannon of an arm. I was a five year old kid sitting in front of a smorgasbord to rival the feast of the lost boys in the movie Hook.
As the story progressed, I cheered for our heroes and I lamented the ways that misogyny, homophobia and transphobia harmed them and held them back from being who they are.
In my real life, I was gripped by anxiety. In the context of a divorce, my first sapphic relationship, and having recently been immersed in podcasts and documentaries about intimate partner violence and domestic abusers who murdered or attempted to murder their wives, the show was obviously not the singular cause of this anxiety.
But it tapped against something in me that reverberated through my everyday life. I was worried I’d be seen with my new female partner. I was worried someone would hurt us. I was worried that the open windows would expose us, that there were cameras planted around my house. I was worried about something I couldn’t see and that didn’t exist in a way that I could specifically name.
On the screen, all the things I was afraid of were being acted out on these characters. Seeing them navigate the closet, always looking out for who was safe to bring close and who had to be kept at arm’s length, was affecting me. I related to the feeling of allowing myself to sink into the perception that I was safe, letting my guard down, then having it shattered in an instant.
There is a scene near the end of the season when Max and Carson have a moment together in an otherwise empty locker room. They’ve become friends despite the fact that team managers prevented Max from even trying out for the team. Max and Carson’s connection isn’t romantic, but as baseball players, as sapphics, as women who don’t fit the binary, they’ve connected.
Max and Carson express the weight of living in a world where you can never be what other people expect you to be. “Everyone wants me to be some way,” Max says. When Carson recounts what it was like to visit an illegal queer bar where she saw femmes, butches, and trans men and women, she says she doesn’t feel like she quite fits inside those masculine or feminine lines. “I just don’t know exactly where I belong.”
The scene ends with Max perfectly encapsulating what it feels like to live in a world as a person who doesn’t fit: “I feel like I am just tying myself into knots all the time, and I don’t know how to untie ’em. And it doesn’t matter whether or not I’m playing ball or not because there’s just no version of myself that makes sense for the world.”
I paused the show. I needed a minute to process, to let myself feel the weight of what she was saying before I was ready to move on (also I was racked with sobs at this point).
I couldn’t believe they were saying all these things out loud. They were showing the whole world what it means to be a closeted queer woman/AFAB person, right here on a mainstream platform. Not in some niche show that only queers will watch or talk about, but in front of everyone who has hated us and still hates us.
I felt seen in a way that the original movie only ever hinted at. It was like my insides were splayed open and the whole world could see them. There were Abbi Jacobson and Chantè Adams, right there in my living room, naming everything. They didn’t have the language and the labels in the time period of he show that we have today, but this show pinpoints the acute experience of being a closeted queer woman in a community where queer women are not supposed to exist — an experience that isn’t bounded by one specific period in time — and it was almost too much for me to take.
The show is distinctly comedic and the writing is sharp and witty, but never at the expense of women or their pain. Never in a way that makes women the objects of men. Never in a way that excuses people for their patriarchal abuse.
Throughout the eight episodes I found myself crying over and over and over. I’m watching the series for a third time, and I still can’t stop sobbing about it.
Maybe it is because I’m not used to seeing my queer trauma laid bare. Maybe it is because I have only been out for a few years, and only in a queer relationship for a very short time, and a lot of my own queer trauma is still bubbling into my consciousness. Maybe it is because a show that is only eight episodes long somehow managed to capture so many of the nuances in the spectrum of queerness — along gender lines, along sexual orientation lines, and in all the ways that women and AFAB people refuse to be subjects of the heteropatriarchy (even a straight/cis character like Clance has a queer platonic friendship with Max) is so rare and precious.
Or maybe it is because Carson’s situation echoes my own. Though I connected easily with both Max and Carson’s characters, Carson’s story parallels mine in some specific ways.
One of the first things we learn about Carson is that she loves Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. She uses the story to help convince herself that it’s okay that her relationship with her husband, Charlie, who is serving in the war, has never given her the stereotypical butterflies. She is trying to make herself believe that her love story fits with the love stories she sees in the world around her.
As the show progresses, it become increasingly clear that her love story does not fit. That she does not fit. But it is dangerous not to fit. It is dangerous to love Greta, dangerous not to want marriage and kids.
Carson eventually realizes finding some way to live a more authentic version of herself is the only way to be really safe, though. Max’s Uncle Bert (a trans man) confronts his sister, Toni, who has tried her whole life to protect Bert, to keep him safe from the harm the world enacts against queer folks (mostly by tying to convince him to conform). He tells her, “for some of us, safe isn’t safe.”
Maybe that is the reality that every queer person has to face at some point. I wasn’t safe living the life of a straight woman. I wasn’t safe even when my partner came out as nonbinary and our relationship stopped being as straight-passing as it once was, because the whole thing was based on heteronormative values, on patriarchal power dynamics.
Now I am reckoning with my newfound safety/unsafety.
I’ve moved from a world where I was insulated from physical harm in my heteronormative bubble, but unsafe as a person who couldn’t reconcile who she is with who the hetero-patriarchy dictates she should be. Now I am much safer internally, being the sapphic, soft butch of my heart. My outsides more closely match my insides, and that is safer for me.
But I am newly unsafe as I become more and more exposed to the world as someone who does not conform to social binaries. I am unsafe as a woman who is blatantly uninterested in fucking cis men, or at least unwilling to find one who is genuinely safe enough to fuck.
Queer people, and queer women & gender nonconforming people in particular have to choose which kind of danger we can live with.
At the end of the show, as the season ends and the women are leaving to return to their lives outside of baseball, Carson has to make a final, permanent choice about whether she will keep trying to pretend, or find a way to have the life she wants in a deeply queer-phobic time and place.
I can’t wait to see what happens with Carson in the next season now that she has made a choice. I can’t wait to see what happens with me, either.
