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The speaker is excited about recording a podcast on the queer history of women's baseball and softball. They introduce their guest, Frankie De La Creta, a sports journalist and writer who has written about the queer history behind "A League of Their Own." The episode will discuss the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League and the intersection of femininity and performative heterosexuality. The historical context of World War II and societal shifts in gender roles will also be explored. The episode will end with a discussion on the queer identities of the players. Hello. I'm excited about stuff. Cool. I'm recording as well. Neat. Okay. Yay. I'm excited. And basically, you know, this outline is like, don't feel like you have to read it verbatim. Like it's not a script. It's basically just, you know, and a lot of it is like, you know, I wrote how I was just thinking about things. So feel free, you know, put your own spin on stuff. We're having a conversation and presenting the info. Cool. Yeah. Okay. Cool. So we'll do like a 3-2-1 class. We'll do a sound floor. And then I will go into introductions. And it's Frankie de la Creca, right? Yep. Cool. That's what I thought. All right. Ready? We'll do 3-2-1, then class. All right. 3-2-1. Hello, and welcome to History of Gay, a podcast that examines the underappreciated and overlooked queer ladies, gents, and gentle enbies that have always been there in the unexplored corridors of history, because history has never been as straight as you think. This is generally where I will put in the opening music, and it's a great time for us to do a little sound floor. Hello, everyone. This is Leigh Seffer, your host of History of Gay, and your podcast feed with a new wonderful episode that, honestly, I've been planning to do since we started this show back in 2018. Oh, God, I've been doing this for a while now. I am joined by a wonderful guest host that I think I messaged them back in 2018 when I read an article of theirs, and now we have finally both gotten our stuff together to bring you a wonderful episode all about the queer history of women's baseball and softball, and particularly the queer history of the All-American Girls for the National Baseball League, since my brain has gone completely into a big-of-their-own brain rot. So I'm very excited to bring to the podcast Frankie De La Creta. They are a sports journalist and writer. They have a wonderful book about the history of women playing softball in the 70s, and they are the author of an article from 2018 on queer... on... I do this constantly. I know how to do this. This is what I do for my side job. It's narratively, right? Yeah, it's narratively. All right. I'm going to take that again. I'm going to figure out where I should start from again. Boo-boo-boo-boo-boo brain. This is why I give myself a little bit of time in the morning before actually starting recording. It's a good way to clear your brain up. Okay. So I'm very, very excited to bring on my wonderful guest host to the podcast, World of History is Gay. I am joined today by Frankie De La Creta, who is a sports journalist and a writer with a wonderful book, and who is basically the reason why I'm doing this episode at all, because they brought me into the wonderful queer world of The League of Their Own. Hi, Frankie. How are you? Hi, Leigh. I'm doing well. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much. I think I reached out to you on Twitter. In 2018, you wrote an article for Narratively about the queer history behind The League of Their Own, and you basically went into a whole bunch of research and interviews that you had done about queer players in the real-life All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. I think it was at that time that I was like, I want to do an episode on this! I think I have in our brainstorm document, like, reach out to this person to do this episode. And then many years passed by, and then the new Amazon show came out, and I went totally into The League of Their Own craziness, and it was like, it's time! Let's do it! So I'm so happy that you said yes after, like, three years of me procrastinating. Yes, and the show has had people finding my article, which has been really nice, and the showrunners have actually cited this article that we're going to talk about a lot as research and inspiration for the series. So it's definitely relevant. Hell yes. Yeah, I mean, could you tell those who are listening just a little bit about you, what you do, where you are, how you got into this work, and, you know, what makes you tick? What makes you want to write about sports and queerness? Yeah, I'm a freelance journalist, and my D mostly sits at the intersection of sports and gender and queerness. I write about this because I'm a huge sports fan, and I'm a huge history nerd, and I felt like I wasn't seeing sports writing that reflected what I wanted to read, and it's, I think, one of those situations where you have to make serious decisions to make the art or create the content that you want to be consuming, and so that is really how I ended up doing this. But I'm also the co-author of a book called Hail Mary, The Rise and Fall of the National Women's Football League, and that is basically a league of their own, but football and openly gay and racially integrated in the 70s. It's about the National Women's Football League, which is the first professional women's football league in U.S. history. Yeah, so stay tuned for episode two with Ricky, because we're definitely going to need to talk about that. Also, just, like, the beautiful image of buff ladies in padding and all that gear. I'm a homosexual. It's great. Yeah, so that's what we're talking about today. We are talking about the queer history of women playing baseball and softball, going a little bit outside of the league to talk about, you know, some other folks, but we'll be primarily talking about, you know, this All-American Girls Professional Baseball League and why certain things were created and established the way they were in terms of, like, how we remember the league as, as some people have called it a lipstick league, and how that intersects with femininity and, you know, performative heterosexuality and all that fun stuff. Content warnings for this episode will include, obviously, periotypical homophobia, racism, I need to burp. As well as, I think, a brief mention of some violence near the end when we talk about one of the players, but otherwise this should be a pretty tame episode, but as usual we will put in our show notes any content warnings, time signatures, so you can avoid any of them that you may need to. For format for this episode, it's going to be a mix. We're going to talk about the league, we're going to talk about the various leagues and kind of the history of queerness in women in softball and baseball and we'll talk about some individual players and, as usual, we will end the podcast with how gay were they, our personal ranking about how likely it is that they weren't straight. I cracked my knuckles during that. Oh. It's rough. And then we'll end the podcast, as usual, with how gay were they, our personal ranking about how likely it is that they weren't straight. So, let's get into it. We're going to start with some just kind of general historical context of the time and where we're coming at this story from. Before we start, Frankie, is there anything that you want to say up at the top of things? I don't think so. Let's just get into it. All right, cool. So, we are going to be dropping up into this story mid-World War II. The first professional women's baseball leagues, which were softball and or softball combination of baseball, we'll talk about that in a second, lands us in the middle of slash nearing the end of World War II. And what's important to know about that is that during this time, societal expectations in the U.S. and roles for men and women were shifting immensely. Women and people of color found more opportunities for employment and access than they had had before. You have these images of Rosie the Riveter and women going to work to make up for the deficits of the men who had gone into the service. By the 1940s, a lot of women were wearing pants, kind of as casual wear, and it stuck around more so than it did back in World War I, which is kind of the first time we really saw that as a trend. And it was inspired in part by a lot of the marketing and imagery around women going to work. Queer people at this time had begun forging communities and places of gathering, so you had the proliferation of queer bars really popping up, and even the military provided opportunities for queer people to find each other that weren't available in other ways before. Even the Army Special Services Branch would set up shows for GI entertainment, which included drag shows, female impersonation. Fun fact, one of the most popular of these drag shows was called This is the Army, and it was even performed for President FDR at the White House. So tell me again that drag is a threat. If the President of the United States in the 1940s was like, hell yeah, I want to watch this, tell me drag is a threat again. I'm kidding. World War II also opened up the military establishment to women with the Women's Army Corps, which for many was their first opportunity to be independent and work in areas that were previously barred to them. And for some women, especially a lot of queer women, it gave them the opportunity to dress more masculinely than they would domestically, and the opportunity to live outside societal expectations. However, as we know from some of our other previous episodes, post-war, a lot of that just goes whoop, bye-bye, as the end of the war comes in and there's a whole bunch of conservatism and backlash that just explodes and we get the Lavender Scare, which we talked about in our episode on the homophile movement. Butch and femme dynamics were really important, and bar culture actually contributed to this a lot in the lesbian community. Gay and lesbian bars first emerged in some form or another in the 1880s. Speakeasies during and following Prohibition were really common places for gathering. We've talked about that in separate episodes. We talked about the Harlem Renaissance and a lot of these places that were flourishing because speakeasies were already kind of poo-poo and taboo, so the queer element wasn't as much of a danger. By the 1940s, lesbian bars and gay bars were vital spaces for queer people, and lesbian bars were a crucial factor in developing this butch-femme dynamic and culture, basically a style of dress and a code of conduct. It really emphasized butches defending femmes and the bars that they all gathered in and shared. So keep that in mind as we're talking about the ways that people are interacting at this time. And then you want to talk a little bit about kind of how softball and women playing ball kind of started? Yeah. How do you want me to introduce it? Just start talking about, or just say? Do you want me to segue in any way? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I was thinking I could give... Or do you just want to ask me to talk about that and then I can start? How do you want to do that? Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah, that's what I was doing, sorry. Great. Okay, cool. So here, I'll take that again. So yeah, keep that in mind while we're talking about all the folks that we're talking about in this episode. Frankie, do you want to give us a little bit of a deep dive? Frankie, do you want to give us a little dive into the history of how softball came up and then how women got involved in playing ball? Yeah, so softball originated in Chicago in 1887, and it was a way for people to play baseball indoors in the winter, which is why it has a larger, softer ball, smaller bat. It's why the playing field is smaller than we see in baseball, and the game is much more fast-paced because of that smaller playing field. It took off in popularity. It wasn't long before women's teams were being organized. Women had been playing it from the beginning, and it was equally popular among men and women, but leagues were formed all over the Midwest and the rest of the country. The first known women's baseball team played at Vassar College in 1866. They were called the Resolutes. They played in ankle-length dresses with these incredible belts. I have a picture of them in my living room. Women had to play baseball in Victorian dress at that time, in these ankle-length skirts. There were these loosely organized touring teams of what were known as Bloomer Girls by the mid-1880s. Sometimes they played against and with men. Some of the men played in drag. This was regarded as kind of a novelty, kind of a form of entertainment. It wasn't really taken that seriously. You had sleazy sports promoters and questionable characters. Some of the men who were playing in drag would have two-day-old stubble, so everybody was in on the quote-unquote joke. It's very much in theme with women's sports being seen as kind of a joke or a gimmick and existing. For the entertainment of men, we see this here, too. Women's softball started out as slow pitch because of sexism. People thought that soft pitch would break a woman's bone. Again, we see this a lot in the history of women's sports. If they got hit in the breast, it would cause breast cancer, that their uterus would fall out from running too fast. I'm just imagining a baseball hitting someone's chest and just exploding. Just a tinny explosion. Slow pitch, it did eventually evolve to fast pitch. The players were on par with professional baseball players at the time. By the 1920s and 1930s, we saw hundreds of women and men playing in softball and recreational tournaments and leagues. It was especially popular in Chicago, in the Midwest, in California, and Arizona. By 1943, there were at least 40,000 women's softball teams. Most of these women's softball teams wore shorts or pants. They were modified versions of men's uniforms. You actually see in the beginning of A League of Their Own, when all of the women show up to the big tryout at Wrigley Field, they're not wearing skirts. They're wearing mostly pants and shorts. Just from pictures that I've seen, some of them are even, if they wanted to lean in a little bit to the glamour of girls playing softball, they were wearing pants or shorts, but it was these satiny kind of outfits. You still had a little bit of that glitz and glamour, but you didn't have to wear a six-inch skirt. They were shiny. They were shiny. Yeah, so let's kind of transition into talking about the league that everybody knows, that everybody's familiar with from the various iterations of A League of Their Own, which is the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which is a mouthful. We probably, at some point, will just shorten it through this episode to All-American, or The League. The acronym is not helpful either. It's quite long. No. Every single time I write it out in this outline, I keep having to check that I put the letters in the correct order. It was started by Philip K. Wrigley, the dude who started the chewing gum company, and he was also, at the time, the owner of the Chicago Cubs. Basically, thousands of minor league and over 500 major league baseball players had been drafted for World War II, and so Wrigley saw the opportunity to keep baseball going. He was like, well, people aren't going to be as interested in the minor leagues that haven't been as crazy decimated all over as people who are tuning into this very small pool of MLB, so why not try the novelty of women playing baseball and want to keep people in stadiums? The league lasted from 1943 to 1954, so it has a 12-year run, and it started out with four teams made of 60 players total. The original teams were the Racine Bells, the Rockford Peaches, Kenosha Comets, and South Bend Blue Sox, and this was all centered around the Midwest. All of the initial tryouts were held at Wrigley Field in Chicago. You'll note that there are no actual, throughout this, you know, the first couple years of the league, there's no team in Chicago proper, and we'll talk about that later why. But by its end in 1954, it had expanded to ten teams and I think nearly 600 players by the end, and there were a lot of teams that moved around. Some only lasted one season or one year, or they moved to a different city, etc. There's the Milwaukee Chicks, who then became the Grand Rapids Chicks, Minneapolis Minarets, who were only around for a season, Fort Wayne Davies, Muskegon Lassies, Peoria Red Wings, Chicago Colleens and Springfield Sallies, both only in 1948, Kalamazoo Lassies, and the Battle Creek Devils, who then moved to Muskegon. So they were just going all over. We'll discover this entire league was just full of tweaking, like, all the time. Yeah, and I mean, this is actually, I think people don't realize when you see all of these teams kind of pop up in bold that it seems like it's a lot of failure, but this is actually very, very typical in the beginning of sports leagues. Men's leagues, too. Like, 90% of NFL teams that started in the first ten years of the league folded. So this is a very, very common experience. Yeah, and they were constantly... If you want to know, like, the nitty-gritty of, like, the league and the teams and how everything was created and why certain teams were in certain cities and then had to move to others, et cetera, one of the books that we used as a source for this episode is Girls of Summer by Lois Brown. It's a really great just kind of timeline and details, you know, with interviews from players. That'll give you all the juicy details. So another thing that I think is really interesting is that, and something that I didn't know until I started researching this, is that the All-American was, you know, it's called the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, but it started out with... and also was never, like, fully just baseball, you know, by the end even, but it started out as underhand pitch softball with, like, tweaks. The league and game rules would change constantly throughout its tenure. They basically created, like, a unique mix of softball and baseball, and they changed rules annually, sometimes even midseason, basically just, like, edging closer and closer to baseball as they went on. They, you know, changed to sidearm pitching and then overhand pitching by the end of the league, which actually ended up burning out a lot of their longtime players. They were like, I didn't sign up to pitch like this and destroy my body in this way. I'm out. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you're used to playing in a specific way, and that is what you have trained yourself to do. Changing the mechanics can really be hard on your body. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a reason why, you know, you just blow through pitchers because, you know, your arm and your elbow can only take that much... can only take so much of that. So by the second year of the league, Wrigley, the founder, wasn't all that concerned with the future of, you know, Major League Baseball now that the war was, you know, the tides were turning and the war... he basically lost interest and he sold the league to his business partner, Arthur Meyerhoff, who ran it pretty much, you know, through its end in 1954. The peak of the league was 1948. It drew, I think, like a million people or close to a million people. And it was at that point that, you know, it kind of... the success kind of declined until its end in 1964. Still successful, but it never quite reached that level of attendance and interest. Eleven players from the league were eventually inducted into the National Women's Baseball Hall of Fame. And in 1988, a permanent exhibit on women's baseball opened at the National Baseball Hall of Fame. So that's kind of, you know, some of the legacies that we have here. All right. Let's see, how do we want to transition into this? Do you want to just kind of dive in with this? Yeah. Okay, cool. Okay. The look, rules, and organization of this league really emphasized cis, heteronormative femininity and beauty, wholesomeness, and this was a means to capitalize on women athletes, but also prevent them from being assumed to be mannish lesbian ballplayers, which as we'll see, many of them were. Surprise! Spoiler alert! Yeah. There's lesbians here! Yeah. Do you want me to read this quote from the scholar as I line up, like, directly? Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah, with the quotes, I usually will, yeah, we'll, you know, just say, like, there's, you know, there's a scholar, Barbara Gregorich, or, like, there was, you know, there was a writer in our goal had, you know, said this, we wanted to put this quote in, or something like that. Great. Scholar Barbara Gregorich writes that players had to counterbalance their participation in a, quote, masculine endeavor by intensifying the kind of deportment that society considered feminine. Because many of the best baseball players were lesbians, for lesbians, it was impossible for the league to exclude them, but they put policies in place explicitly in order to avoid the public perception of them being gay, and to differentiate them from these, like, rough and masculine perceived softball teams. In 1943, a magazine article warned that the league would turn women's baseball into a, quote, uncouth Amazon spectacle. I'd say to do that, honestly. Truly, I'm in. Right, yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah, as we say, in a letter to financial backers, when he was pitching the league, Wrigley said that they will select the kind of players that people want to see in action, then will groom them to make sure they are acceptable. It won't be like the bad old days of peep shows and Bloomer Girls. Would you mind taking that again, just because there were a couple of boots. Yeah, was that on my end? I think so. Okay. I don't know, was that like a notification from... All right, we'll try again. Yeah, just the quote. Just the quote, it was only during that, I think. In a letter to financial backers when he was pitching the league, Wrigley said that they would select the kind of players that people want to see in action. Okay, what is... Where is that coming from? What is that? It's me, right? Yeah. Okay, I don't have anything blinking, so I can't figure out where it's coming from. Let's see. Are you getting messages? I'm trying to think of what that... It sounds like an iMessage, maybe. No, I have my iMessage. I haven't heard it again. Watch, I'm going to start talking and it's going to start again. Right. All right, let's try again. All right. In a letter to financial backers when he was pitching the league, Wrigley said that they would select the kind of players that people will want to see in action. Then we will groom them to make sure they're acceptable. It won't be like the bad old days of peep shows and Bloomer Girls. That really gives you an idea of how people were viewing these touring softball teams that were around. They're putting peep shows and Bloomer Girls in the same sentence. Yeah, and they're really worried that people won't come see these players if they are banished or unattractive to men. Time Magazine reported that when they were recruiting players for the league, scouts explicitly turned down several really great players because they were either too uncouth, too hard-boiled, or too masculine. They really like uncouth. Uncouth. Yeah. And the Saturday Evening Post wrote that some hopefuls from New Orleans gave them a cut of tobacco and these female softball players would look just like their big league brothers. God forbid. Right. Max Carey, one of the original managers of the league, who became the eventual president, specifically emphasized that femininity is the keynote of our league. No pants-wearing, tough-talking female softballer will play on any of our four teams. Spoiler alert. Yeah, and I mean, there are headlines, right? Like, Tomboy Tactics Out of Bounds in All-American Softball League. They wanted players to play like a man and look like a lady. One player said they wanted them to look like Betty Grable and play like Joe DiMaggio. Yeah. Because those two couldn't be more far removed. Yes. Right. And one of the ways, I mean, one of the primary ways, other than marketing, that they emphasized this ideal, this image of the league, was through their incredibly extensive rules and code of conduct. We'll link it in our sources, but it's very thorough. It is. Each team was to be monitored by female chaperones, so you'll see them in pictures if you've seen the movie or the TV show, because they're usually in somewhat military-ish lady outfits. And these chaperones approved all outings and dates and living arrangements. Unlike the show, most of the players didn't all live in a cool boarding house together. It was like they were put up by sponsored families in hotels and different places. Players weren't even allowed to drive their own cars past city limits without special permissions. I mean, they really were locking these women down. They were under really strict curfews, which is why you see in fictional depictions, but also in all of these wonderful oral history interviews, all these great stories of anywhere from 15 to in their 20s, women playing pranks on these poor chaperones, and they sneaking out late at night to go do stuff. Yeah, these are adult women who are being treated like teenagers, really. Yeah. They weren't allowed to smoke or drink in public places, and it was like no hard liquor at all. And they specifically were like, no cursing! And I put in the outline, like, SpongeBob meme. Talk like a lady! You know, it's what that makes me think of. Like, women don't curse or, you know, use slang. Literally in the guide for, like, the beauty guide that they get, there's literally an entire section about, like, not using casual language or slang because it's unladylike. Everything is unladylike. Right? I'm not interested in being a lady. Ever. At all. Players were actually required to attend charm school courses. So that is, you know, straight up, absolutely screwed. And they hired Helena Goldstein and her Gold Coast Salon to do these charm school lessons. And sometimes they would have to do it just, like, after being in the field and practicing for, like, ten hours. They'd have to, you know, go do these things and learn about makeup and posture, etiquette. Players who didn't agree to do this charm school were cut before the end of spring training. It was a, hey, you're doing it this way, or no go. Some players in oral history interviews have, you know, kind of insisted that the charm school classes help them survive in a new social class. But, you know, many of these players were so hungry to play that, as Sue Kidd, one of the players, put it, they wouldn't have done anything, they would have done most anything that wasn't sinful just for the opportunity to play ball. I think, I can't remember which player it was who said that, like, she'd, you know, she'd rather play ball than eat. So, yeah. Let's see. Why don't we have you do this part? Cool. I've been talking a lot. The players really were willing to do pretty much anything, right? They had to play in these uncomfortable dresses, and they were, like, one-piece uniforms that had a skirt on the bottom. And the rules of conduct said that the uniform skirts shall not be shorter than six inches above the kneecap. And if you think about this, players are sliding. They're still expected to play baseball, to slide, you know, to dive for balls. And so they're constantly injuring themselves, scraping their thighs and, like, butts raw. They have these massive bruises from doing this. And I think a lot about the lingerie football league when we talk about this because it really is, right, women are so desperate to be able to play the sports that they want to play that they are willing to do this. They're willing to play in a skirt or go to charm school or play in their underwear, right, just to get a chance. And so this is, right, a really good example of this happening in this league. But the rules about – They call them strawberries, right? Yeah. I was watching a video, and I think Maybel Blair said that she still has, like, a chunk out of her rear end from sliding. She's, like, in her 90s. Permanent injuries. In the film, A League of Their Own, there's that scene where the player is, like, on the bench with that big bruise. That was a real bruise that she got during one of the sliding scenes. That is not makeup. So you can imagine this is what these players' legs look like just literally all the time. Right. And the rules about the feminine dress code extended off the field as well. They had to always be wearing feminine attire even when they were not actively engaged in practice or playing ball. The code of conduct said at no time may a player appear in the stands in her uniform or wear slacks or shorts in public. And that is in all caps. Like, literally, that entire sentence is in all caps in the code of conduct and really, really want you to do that. No, they really did not. One of the players, one of the original Rockford teachers named Lil Jackson, actually said that even at hotels when they were touring for games, if you were wearing slacks, you had to use the servant's elevator. You couldn't use the main elevator. You basically had to go in the back. Or, you know, being on the bus, on the road overnight, trips to travel to games, having to change into skirts at, like, 2 o'clock in the morning just to get off the bus and go into a gas station bathroom. Yeah. Like, really, really intense and strict. They also forbade masculine quote-unquote haircuts. So there's a line in the code of conduct that it says, boyish bobs are not permissible, and in general your hair should be well-groomed at all times, with longer hair preferable to short haircuts. Lipstick should always be on. We will talk about this very specific note later. Players were also not allowed to hang out with members of other teams. They had a very strict anti-fraternization policy, and supposedly in the code of conduct it was for upholding rivalry. We'll talk about it later. But the actual, you know, the actual line in the code of conduct says, in order to sustain the complete spirit of rivalry between clubs, members of different clubs must not fraternize at any time during the season. And it also goes on to say, like, friendly conversations in the lobbies of hotels is fine. Yeah, and I think it's really easy for us to chalk a lot of this up to, like, being of the time, right? But I think people do not realize how intentional all of this was. It was intentionally homophobic. It existed to prevent these women from being seen as lesbians. And so, yes, some of it can be chalked up to that, but really it existed for this specific reason. And not only was it homophobic, it was also deeply racist and deeply classist. So Wrigley's wife, Helen Blanch Atwater Wrigley, was actually somebody who played a large part in shaping this image of the women in the league. She focused very specifically on, quote, refashioning rural and working-class girls, many of whom, you know, there's the joke in the show that, like, Carson keeps getting called farm girl, she's not from a farm. A lot of these girls were, you know, from rural Midwest towns, and a lot of times were from farms. And they wanted to refashion them into these, like, paragons of middle-class femininity. There's an article that we read that has a really wonderful quote that says, for a population emerging from the Depression, with sponsors barely eking out an existence, any women's team with uniquely designed uniforms, salaries, and travel and food allowances would be considered classy by comparison. So really kind of trying to differentiate themselves from those, you know, more working-class softball leagues that were happening. And, of course, the league was only white women. There were some Cuban players in later years of the league, but the league never integrated, even once the major leagues integrated. I believe Jackie Robinson started, I think his first season was 1947 in the major leagues, right? And so basically the rules and standards for femininity and beauty in this code of conduct really very specifically upheld white middle-class standards of beauty that colluded very deliberately against black players who wouldn't have been deemed a quote-unquote fit for the league anyway. So even though they never had in their, like, official, you know, rules or anywhere written down, like, no black players, just the rules of the standards of femininity upholding, you know, like white supremacy barred many of the black women who wanted to try out for this just by virtue of that. So that's also really important to think about here. All right. So, why are we talking about this? Why do we think women's ballplayers are gay? Why is this league so terrified of people thinking that these women will be gay? We're all familiar with this stereotype of female athletes, especially softball players being lesbians. But where does this stereotype come from, right? How intertwined are these worlds of sport and queer women? That's what we're going to be talking about in a big, big chunk. Yeah, I mean, it is. It is a stereotype that women softball players, women athletes are gay. And this stereotype essentially comes from the kind of social mores around the masculine nature of sport and the fear of female sexuality and the fear that women will not be able to, like, live up to their reproductive potential. This comes in the early 20th century in the Victorian era when we really see sport begin to be popularized and when there's this, like, crisis of masculinity. And so sport becomes a place for men to be able to, like, perform this kind of masculinity. The initial criticism of women in sport weren't necessarily tied to homosexuality, but, like, a different kind of sexual obedience. Like, this idea that women athletes would be too empowered sexually because sport was tied to an inherent maleness and masculine qualities like aggression and competition because of these very strict Victorian gender dichotomies and gender roles. So female athletes... We keep coming back every so often in this podcast. It's just like, man, fuck the Victorians. The Victorians. We love them so much. Victorians. I'm so done with them. Yeah, but that's where this comes from. And so female athletes became symbols of the broader march of womanhood out of the Victorian domestic sphere into once-prohibited male realms, representing both the appealing and threatening aspects of modern womanhood. And that comes from an article that we read. Sorry, yeah, that comes from Susan Kahn. Is that Susan Kahn? That's what I thought. Yeah. Yeah, and that comes from a scholar, Susan K. Kahn, in an article that she did, but she's also the author of a full book on women playing sport and the intersections of queerness. Was it Coming on Strong? Coming on Strong. Yeah. And the controversy really fell into two main buckets. There was this fear about the effect on a woman's reproductive capacity. They thought sports would interfere with menstruation or cause women's uteruses to dry up or, like we mentioned before, like fall out. Fall out. Yeah, because of the physical demands of sport, they thought that that was a possibility. And they also thought they were afraid of the unleashing of heterosexual passion, which is hilarious to me. You know, the women's locker rooms really bastions of heterosexuality. But basically they were worried that sport would make women too horny or hysterical. Yeah, there's this quote from Kahn that I had to put in here because it just paints such a beautiful picture. She writes, They feared the excitement of sport would cause women to lose control, conjuring up images of frenzied, distraught coeds on the verge of moral, physical, and emotional breakdown. Experts vehemently debated whether competition unleashed non-procreative, erotic desires identified with male sexuality and unrespectable women. I tried to figure out a good way to summarize that in my own words, but I was like, nope, this is just too good. I really love the image of frenzied, distraught coeds. It just paints such a beautiful picture. Yeah. On the flip side, though, there were many that supported female athleticism and were like, yes, this heterosexual attractiveness of these women playing ball. And they actually put forth the idea of athletes as beauty queens. And some games even included beauty pageants. That was a whole part of it. On both sides of the debate, though, all that controversy around female sexuality and sport were operating in this starting point of presuming heterosexual deviant womanhood, which I think was one of the most interesting things for me to come up against in the beginning of this. They weren't concerned with athletics inducing same-sex attraction in these women, but rather linked the physical release of sport with a loss of heterosexual control, not of inclination, as Khan says. Which leads us to Word of the Week. I have a jingle that I'll put in. So, Word of the Week, this episode, we are talking about a phrase called muscle mall. One of the most frequently used derogatory terms for women athletes by sports writers at this time was this term, muscle mall. It had explicitly heterosexual connotations, but it always pointed towards some sort of deviant or disreputable womanhood. Which, as we'll learn in a little bit, gets kind of implicitly tied to manishness, which then evolves into lesbianism. It actually comes from just mall or gun mall, which initially referred to girlfriends of gangsters, like mob gangsters in the 1920s. It was also used as a euphemism for sex workers. In the US, it was more common to use it for the gangsters side of things, so you usually saw gun mall. And then in Australia and New Zealand, it kind of evolved with that sex worker connotation. Mall comes from molly, which was used as a euphemism for sex workers as early as the 1600s. So, we're building on this long trajectory of the wrong way to be a woman, quote unquote. Which, of course, then evolves into, well, being gay is the wrong way to be a woman and perform womanhood. Some examples that I pulled of sports writers using it, in 1939, there was a Washington Times article called Farewell to Sport, which talked about the inclusion of women in sports, and they referred to this person who was a track star, and then left the limelight and came back as a golfer in the 50s. Her name is Babe Didrickson, and this quote has, She was the muscle mall to end all muscle malls, the complete girl athlete. She was a tomboy who never wore makeup, who shingled her hair until it was as short as a boy's and never bothered to comb it, who didn't care about clothes. She had a boy's body and looked her best in a track suit. She hated women and loved to beat them. She was not, at that time, pretty. I always thought she became the greatest all-around athlete in the country, simply because she was not, or could not, compete with women at their own and best game, man-snatching. Incredible. So, yeah, that gives you a good, you know, good vibe of what we're dealing with. Yeah, Babe sounds great. Yeah, I, yeah, she sounds amazing. You know, in 1956, in the Evening Star, Canada's pretty Jackie McDonald could be an Olympic champ, but she'd rather be a lady than a muscle mall. So this dichotomy really being upheld. And then you have the Smyrna Times from 1941. In tennis circles, Alice Marble is unique. The well-known adage of sportswriters that the muscle malls were made to be abused in sports columns is shattered by this statuesque California blonde. And what's really interesting is that if you do a search on the Library of Congress's, like, newspaper archives, if you just do a search for muscle mall, 80% of those articles that have the term muscle mall in it come back to talking about specifically Babe Didrikson, which is really interesting. Like, I was looking through every single one of them, and it really just came down to her. And, you know, it evolves, right? So, like, mall became mole, M-O-L-E, which just kind of generally became slang for unpleasant or unlikable women. In the 70s through the 1990s, it basically just kind of supplants, like, bitch in Australia. So, yeah, that's a little bit of language history. That's the end of that segment. Great. How are you doing? Great. Do you need any sort of break? No, I'm good. All right. All right, so let's skip forward a little bit to, like, 1920s, 1930s. By the late 1920s and early 1930s, these mannish accusations from journalists really shifted from too sexual to unattractive, failed heterosexuals, as Susan Kahn puts it. The medicalization of homosexuality and the anti-feminist backlash had created this growing awareness of lesbianism and its connection with, you know, sexual deviance, as it was termed. So the evolution of the taboo and suspicion of the female athlete, that's where you start to see these associations pop up in the media. Yeah. And then by the 1940s, 1950s, you have, like, World War II's impacts on, you know, ideas around gender and sexuality and the emerging moral panic, purging of queer people from public life in the form of the Lavender Scare, when we get the Cold War. That basically just leads to everything solidifying, right? It leads to these accusations of mannishness leading to lesbianism growing and becoming more explicit. You know, everything had collapsed in terms of the gender binary and gender roles, and so you have this big backlash. Kahn says, By the 1950s, you get this very, very ingrained stereotype established, and it can only be shrugged off by, like, proof of heterosexual success. So back to, like, Dave Dickerson, her career basically shows this shift really well. You know, in the 1930s, you have press writing about her hatchet face, quote-unquote, or doorstop jaw, which caused her to quit track, and she left the limelight. And then she comes back in the, you know, late 40s, early 50s, after she's married a professional wrestler, and she comes back as a golfer. But the narrative really shifts, because this time she's, like, suitably heterosexual. So we go from these articles that say muscle mall and hatchet face and, you know, she's got a boy's body and she hates women, to headlines like, you know, headlines like, Babe is a lady now. The world's most amazing athlete has learned to wear nylons and cook for her huge husband. Or, along came a great big he-man wrestler, and the babe forgot all her man-hating chatter. So, you know, it's the lesbian until proven straight, I guess. And then suddenly you, you know, are able to be, you know, perceived in a more serious way. Yeah. All you need is the right man to tame you. Exactly. Yeah. But, you know, how much is this, like, manage lesbian, a homophobic boogeyman, versus actually, you know, versus a strong actual presence of lesbians in sports? Right. Like, when we talk about lesbians in sport, it's like you don't want to uphold stereotypes, but at the same time it is a stereotype for a reason. There do tend to be a lot of lesbians playing women's sports. And women's sports really become a site of queer community, right? We know, based on testimonials from players, that sport really does serve as a gathering place. It's a safe place. It's a place for people to find each other. You know, like bars were. And often they're safer than bars are. Because, you know, bars can be targeted in a way that the sports leagues really, you know, weren't. You know, Khan says that these leagues provided space for lesbian sociability without naming it as such or excluding women who were not lesbians. It doesn't put as much of a target on your back as, like, I'm in a lesbian bar and therefore I've got this marker on me, as opposed to, well, I'm just in this league, and look, there are people who aren't gay here. Yeah. And I mean, like, gay people, right, like, throughout history are really, really good at creating safe places in a world that's really hostile to them. And sports leagues and sports teams really are one place where that happens. Phyllis Irwin, whose partner June played on a women's company softball team in the 40s and 50s, wrote that, where else but at the games could we gather in public at a time when gay bars could be raided and you could lose your job if you got caught in a raid? Yeah. Khan says so much of it. Yeah. The stakes are so high. Yeah. And then another, we have another player named Ann McGuire. She was a PE major, which many, many of these women were. You'll notice the pattern. You will. Also an amateur bowler in the 1950s. She said, I had been trying to figure out who I was and I couldn't put a name to it. I mean, it was very, no gay groups, no literature, no characters on Dynasty. I mean, there was just nothing at the time. And trying to put a name on it, I went to a bowling tournament, met two women there, and for some reason something clicked and it clicked in a way that I was not totally aware of. I love that. Yeah, there's this quote from baseball player Nora Ross. She says that her time, you know, playing softball or baseball was, it was my first exposure to gay people. I was pursued by the one I was rooming with. That's how I found out. And then she proceeded to get involved with her roommate and lived the, quote, gay lifestyle the whole time she played. We love a lesbian until graduation. Exactly, exactly. It was like, A, way to U-haul Nora, right? Like, it was like, oh, you start dating your roommate. Way to be a, way to be a stereotype. And then, yeah, literally just like lesbian until graduation. So good. And also, just like, as a bonus, it was easy to meet women, too. Player Lorraine Summer from the league said, well, it was very nice because, you see, you developed your friendships. You didn't have to go out looking for women. They were all right there. You've got a built-in dating network right there. Like the WNBA. Yeah. Or women's soccer. Whatever. But most of all, though, like sports gave, essentially gave these women somewhat of a cover to avoid suspicions. In this athletic setting, these qualities that would have been like red flags for queer obedience were thought of as just part of, you know, sport culture. They were positive. You know, aggression and competitiveness and muscles, all of those things were like, well, yeah, but you need those to succeed in what we're doing. And Khan says it permitted lesbians to express the full range of their gender sensibilities while sidestepping the stigma of psychological deviance. Jojo D'Angelo, who was one of the players in the league, called athletics a comforting and comfortable place that just, you know, kind of allowed these things to happen. It was also a place for opportunities for unmarried women, and that's something that we kind of see coming up. You know, we talked about this, about, you know, queer women going into convents or, you know, going to see. These are places that are complementary to queer life. That same player that we talked about earlier, Lorraine Summer, said, back then you either had to go into the convent or you had to get married, and that was about it. Nobody ever thought that there was anything else for women back then. So it was, thank God we had the sports, right? So this is, you know, this is just an opportunity for women to get access to things that they would not have had inroads to before. At the same time, everything, you know, had to be hush-hush. You have this, you know, this quote-unquote safe space, but you have to do it extremely closeted. Lorraine Summer, again, she says, you knew right darn well that this one was going with that one, but yet it just wasn't a topic of conversation. Never. So there's a real big emphasis on coding through dress and behavior, right? We go back to that Butch Stamps dynamic. It's like people are coding, you know, based on their dress and signaling, hey, I'm part of this community. And this flying under the radar could also have allowed for a more, like, gray space for women who maybe didn't, like, identify as lesbian, but they're in a place now that they can explore, right? You don't have the same kind of, you know, tied, the same kind of commitment or target on your back as, like, going into a lesbian bar as, you know, for women who are just, like, exploring their identity. So let's talk about how, surprise, surprise, there were actually a whole bunch of gaymos in the All-American. There really were a lot of lesbians in this league, and what I found really surprising when I started to research this was that even of the players who are still alive, which there aren't, you know, many, but there are some, they still won't really talk about this. When I was writing my piece, I tried really hard to get some of them to talk to me, and it's just not spoken about. Most of them, if they are queer, are not out, at least not publicly, not going to speak about it publicly. And part of that is because... Where does this quote come from? I can't remember. Fuck. Na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na. Pause. One second. I knew this was one that I needed to go back and find. Pause. Pause. Pause. Before I get right... Pause. Pause. I was wondering... Pause. Pause. Pause. Pause. It's... Playing with the Boys, Gender, Race, and Baseball in Post-War America by A.J. Richard. Yep. All right. This is because these women were, as A.J. Richard says, indoctrinated into a culture of sport that denied a lesbian presence. They are also women of a time of war, when to be deviant was to be without rights, possibly to be hunted down, investigated, and publicly shamed. And so even though many of these players have avoided speaking candidly about their sexuality, there is plenty of evidence, from stories and statistics and obituaries and lots and lots of coded language, as we know queers love some subtext. We love ourselves some subtext. Oh, I didn't know that. Now I know. But there was a huge effort, really, to tamp down on all of this. So we know this, right? All of this conduct is in place, and league officials enforced those rules incredibly strictly. They would punish players who were found in same-sex relationships, or even players who had the appearance of being a lesbian, and that was incredibly subjective of what we meant by appearance of being a lesbian. So some examples of this are Connie Wisniewski. Okay, so Connie Wisniewski, a five-time All-Star. She played from 1944 to 1952. She was given a warning that she would be cut from the league if she got a bald haircut, because she was considered masculine. A player named Dottie Ferguson, who played from 1945 to 1954, was warned by a team chaperone against wearing Oxford shoes, because they were too masculine-looking. So Oxford shoes and bobbed haircuts are both a no. We had JoJo D'Angelo, who we've heard from already. She actually was kicked out of the league for a bob haircut, which was just a bob. So she did get kicked out of the league for a bob haircut. Yeah. And for some of the players, the league really was their first introduction to queer women. As we mentioned, a lot of them are from rural areas, they're from small towns, and they're not really known for this. First base, Kenosha and Racine Player, who then became a chaperone. Her name was Dottie Hunter. She said she had never heard of lesbianism, and her teammates sat her down and told her everything about lesbian life. The life. She said they told me they had wedding ceremonies. I... Yeah. She does now. Yeah. Why didn't you tell me that this was an option? Seems dope. But, right, there really is a risk to, even though they were all dating their teammates, there was still a risk to dating the teammates. So as much as we talk about this being a safe place, the league itself was safe until it wasn't. One All-American Girls League manager released two players who he suspected of being lesbians because he was worried that they were going to contaminate the team. So now we have the queer contagion trope coming in. And because there was that very strict anti-fraternization policy, they would move players, trade players to different teams as a way to break up suspected romances, making it so they couldn't see each other. Sometimes they would switch the rooming situations just to see players' reactions as confirmation of a suspected relationship. Yeah. And the publicity director, who was named Fred Leo, he learned about a married woman who was having an affair with one of her female teammates. And when she said she did not plan on stopping, she was going to continue the affair, Mr. Leo contacted her husband and her husband came and took her home. Yeah. That player had game. That player had game. That player had game. Yeah. But often, come on, I think about when you watch a reality TV show and they put the most basic sort of mask woman in a house and all the straight women are like, oh my God, she's nice to me and she cares what I think and she doesn't talk over me, she's amazing. And then they get all of the ass. Yeah. Yeah. The bar, the bar is on the floor. When you're used to dating men. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was not. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was started by Forest Park roofing company owner named Emery Parishi. And the owner of the Chicago Cardinals football team, Charles Bidwell Parishi. Wait, no. There we go. Let's try that again. It was started by Forest Park roofing company owner Emery Parishi and the owner of the Chicago Cardinals football team, Charles Bidwell. Parishi owned the metropolitan softball league and decided to turn it pro after seeing the recruitment success of the all American girls league. They had 16, the bloomer girls, the bluebirds, the chicks, the queens, the Cardinals who became. The. The check cashers. And the music means. Can we discuss these names? Yes. The chicks, there was, there were chicks in the, the all American league, but yeah, the queens, the girls, the birds, how many, how many slang terms for, for women can we find? Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. 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Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Oh, I started making TikTok content because I wanted to make Gaylor Swift content, so I'm right there with you. I am. You can buy my book wherever books are sold, ideally your favorite indie bookstore. It's called Hail Mary. It is with me and my coauthor is named Lindsay D'Arcangelo. And I don't know, I'm working on a bunch of stuff. I kind of took a break for a while from writing. I got a little burned out after my book came out, but I am starting to have some deadlines again. So I'd say just like stay tuned for stuff for the first time in a while. Yeah, I'm hoping to run more regular workshops on like how to pitch writing and stuff because it's a thing I do a lot and I'm okay at it. So I would like to teach other people how to be okay at it. You did. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. I love that. Sure. Cool. Stay queer. All right. Yeah, should I stop my recording?