A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN
by Yvonne Zipter



During the middle years of the last century—1943—54, to be exact—women played professional baseball. Still the country's longestrunning women's pro sports league of all time, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League began as part of a larger homosocial environment that emerged as men went off to war and women were encouraged to take on traditionally male roles in service to their country.

Recruited by Philip K. Wrigley from park district and industrial softball leagues across the country and Canada, the women of the AAGPBL were not simply patriots: They were supremely conditioned athletes who played hard and took the sport seriously, despite regulations meant to avow their fundamental femininity, such as uniforms with flared skirts, mandates against short haircuts, and compulsory charm school attendance. At its height, the AAGPBL boasted 10 teams in the Midwest, and attendance figures as high as nearly a million in a single season. Even when the league ended, it provided inspiration to the next generation of women, including lesbians, who populated sandlot teams around the country until the league was all but erased from our collective memories.

When Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 was passed, more athletic opportunities became available to women. But the women of the AAGPBL were not given their due until 1988, when the league was commemorated with a permanent exhibit at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y.; not until 1992, with the release of the movie, A League of Their Own, did the league become widely known again.

Given that lesbianism was a taboo topic during the league's heyday, it is difficult to know exactly how many players and fans were, in fact, lesbians. But the many players who “never married” ( including one outed by a niece after her death [ see www.thediamondangle.com/archive/aug03/deegan.html ] and another survived by “one dear friend” [ see www.paducahsun.com/articles/stories/public/200801/19/8bbX_obituari.html ] ) would indicate that more than a few of the league's members were lesbian. ( Tellingly, the newspaper obituary as posted at aagpbl.org moves the “dear friend” from the top of the list of survivors to the end. )

Female athletes have long been revered by lesbians for their independence, strength and success; the women of the AAGPBL have been treasured role models, regardless of their actual sexual orientations—witness the number of lesbian jocks who tried out for roles on the teams in A League of Their Own ( filmed in Evansville, Ind., and at Chicago's Wrigley Field ) and the number of lesbian actresses in the film, including Rosie O'Donnell, Megan Cavanagh ( as Marla Hooch, now starring in Exes & Ohs on the Logo cable network ) , and Kelli Simpkins ( who played “tall girl Beverly” Dixon and is an Emmy-nominated co-writer of the HBO cable network film of The Laramie Project and an actress in the latter film and the off-Broadway play ) .

From Out and Proud in Chicago: An Overview of the City's Gay Community, edited by Tracy Baim, Surrey Books, 2008.

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