Athletics and Queer Discourse
As a kid on the beach with my brother’s friends and on the football field at recess in elementary school, I was always the girl playing sports with the boys. Playing baseball and soccer was much more exciting to me than playing house with the girls, but I never thought much about the fact that I was always with the boys. Having an older brother, a group of boys playing sports constantly surrounded me, and my brother was always very welcoming and let me play. From a young age, I could throw a football better than almost any boy on the field, and my brother’s friends knew it. However, I remember having to constantly prove myself any time a new boy came to play. I knew that if I made one mistake, I could lose my precious QB1 spot. Being a part of this world as a child brought me so much joy, and I never found myself thinking of the “girly” world that I was excluding myself from. However, I watched this childhood innocence slowly fade away as I entered middle school and high school, where gender roles and biases started to take shape. While I had a rose-colored view of my childhood playing sports with the boys, I learned that I had been given the label “dyke”.
Queerness in sports is talked about from early childhood. While that may sound surprising, when you start to think about schoolyard insults regarding athletic performance, you realize that queerness and athletics go hand in hand from the beginning. If a boy prefers not to play football at recess with the other boys, he will quickly earn the nickname “gay”. Even if a boy is interested in sports but isn’t as talented, he will be told that he “throws like a girl” or be called the same queer nicknames. On the other hand, if a girl is too athletic, or spends too much time playing sports, she will also be considered gay, just as I was. Even though these terms are all a part of queerness, in this sense, they are used negatively and are not actually representative of the person’s identity. But why do these stereotypes continue to persist?
While there are many openly gay female professional athletes, there are very few openly gay male professional athletes. This is not because gay men are less athletic, but rather, that sports culture is incredibly unwelcoming to gay men. As a result, gay men, even those that are talented, often pursue other routes to avoid the harsh homophobia and “locker room culture”. Cody Beals, a twelve-time IRONMAN, and 70.3 Champion, is an openly gay professional triathlete. In a self-reflection, he said,
“I’ve always been immersed in sports, but I used to feel like an imposter in most athletic spaces…I was drawn to individual sports as much as I felt driven to them. Team locker room talk was jarring and the subset of masculinity on display wasn’t me…From the athletes around me to the stars I looked up to, it seemed like sports were for straight men.” (Beals, Cody)
Even though Cody knew he was athletically gifted from a young age, he turned towards individual sports that would allow him to avoid locker room culture. As gay men continue to avoid “macho” sports for the sake of their own safety and well-being, the stereotype that gay men are unathletic, and therefore unathletic men are gay, persists.
Looking back at my time in high school athletics, I realize that I put myself in a lot of the stereotypical “lesbian” roles, like my time as a soccer goalie and my eventual career as a track and field javelin thrower. However, whether this was a coincidence or my own subconscious, I existed in high school as a straight person. I was more athletic than most girls, but my friend group was generally athletic and I continued to play sports with the boys, passing the football around on the lawn in between classes. Whether it was the perceptions of high school boys evolving or me becoming more self-conscious, I started to feel uncomfortable wanting to play sports with the boys. When other girls would do it, they would purposefully downplay their athletic abilities to impress the boys. I was arguably self-conscious for a reason. I found out many years after graduation that the boys in my friend group would say that I was gay, just as they likely called the boys who didn’t like sports on the playground.
Unlike gay men, lesbians are heavily represented in collegiate and professional sports. More than them simply existing, the romances of gay female athletes are heavily discussed by fans. Since there are few openly gay male athletes, women’s sports are often the only place where ex-partners will compete against each other in a match, adding to the conversation. In a way, these relationship dynamics have aided the progression of women’s sports popularity by adding a compelling accompanying storyline. It also affects the movement of athletes, as USWNT player Kristie Mewis recently changed clubs to West Ham United to be closer to her fiance, Chelsea FC superstar Sam Kerr. In a perspective in The Washington Post, Frankie de la Cretaz offered an interesting perspective regarding these relationships and lesbian culture. She said,
“These visible relationships serve to normalize queerness on a large, public scale. And they also introduce mainstream culture to a different way of thinking about relationship and community, one where exes frequently coexist and interact with one another — something familiar to any person who has ever walked into a lesbian bar and seen their friend making out with their ex while another ex is sipping a drink at the next table.” (de la Cretaz, Frankie)
Normalizing queerness also allows queer people to feel safer in more scenarios. In this case, women’s sports have become a safe haven for most queer women. More importantly than their romances, many lesbians find their chosen homes in women’s athletics. The “chosen home” is a popular term among the queer community that refers to finding a family of queer and ally friends to escape a possibly unaccepting situation in their biological family. Although coming out is always difficult and convoluted, coming out for female athletes is much more welcoming for this reason. However, just because a sport like women’s soccer is known for having mostly gay athletes, the acceptance of these women still depends heavily on the location and culture. Unsurprisingly, former collegiate athletes at Texas A&M and St. Mary’s spoke on the dynamics against queer people on their teams, referring to it as feeling “isolated” and “like a witch hunt”(Maniscalco, Benedetto). Although popular media makes it seem like lesbian athletes are widely accepted, that is not always the case.
If I hadn’t been an athlete in college, my personal journey likely would have progressed quite differently. Emphasized by being in Los Angeles, I started to see queerness everywhere, especially in athletics. I met girls, both gay and straight, who excelled in sports as a kid. But most importantly, I finally was exposed to queer women that were fully comfortable in their identities, something that I had never seen in my small hometown. These women were all empowered by their sports and their queer communities within their teams. I’ve now found my own niche community within USC athletics, one of all the other girls who played sports with all the boys growing up.
WORKS CITED
Beals, Cody. “Queer Representation in Sports Matters: My Story.” Cody Beals: PRO TRIATHLETE, RADICALLY TRANSPARENT, 5 July 2023, www.codybeals.com/2023/06/queer-representation-in-sports-matters/.
de la Cretaz, Frankie. “Behind the Lesbian Culture in Women’s Sports — and Why It Matters …” The Washington Post, 10 June 2022, www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/06/10/lesbian-culture-womens-sports/.
Maniscalco, Benedetto. “Queerness in Sports.” The Echo Newspaper, 3 Nov. 2022, wwecho.news/news/queers-in-sports.
