We All Deserve Sunshine
and to see ourselves in sport
I, like many others over the Christmas break, fell in love with my hockey boyfriends.
I squealed, I squirmed, I cried as I watched and rewatched all six episodes of Heated Rivalry. It’s a show that never once passed the Bechdel Test but our women loving household forgave them as it ticked another box that’s equally and depressingly rare. An adult queer love story that answers a simple question — but what if it worked out?
Of course, I love my beautiful boys and of course, I have wished we could have a series about our beautiful women too. We almost had one (which I wrote about at the time and haven’t been able to revisit because of the ache), A league of Their Own. The one season wonder on Amazon Prime that seemed to have been written specifically for me.
That story didn’t work out. Well, it may have but we never got to see it because they don’t bury us queers anymore, they cancel us instead. That’s why I’ve been evangelising for these beautiful boys. I don’t want their story to be ours, I want more happy and complete endings.
The discourse I’ve seen online from some has been frustrating though. People speculating on a sapphic version of Heated Rivalry like:
a) A League of Their Own didn’t just happen and
b) that it couldn’t be a sports story because “women’s sports was always gay”.
How quickly we forget the ground we long fought to cover. Heated Rivalry is a series set between the years of 2008 and 2016. The same period in which I saw professional women’s sports finally come out. There of course were queers in sport before then but like the men in this series, they were forced to hide one love to pursue another.
When Billie-Jean King was outed in the early 1980s it threw tennis into a panic. Billie and other out pioneers were quickly positioned as a problem their sports needed to solve. The implication was that the success of their leagues required a performance of heterosexuality. Women must appeal to men, in every way, if we are to have an audience and a chance at a professional future.
This lead to managers trying to break couples up. Policies that are discriminatory to the queer experience. Athletes being forced to perform heterosexuality in off court activity. Closet doors being firmly sealed by the signing of brand deals. This was all happening during the same time period that Shane and Ilya fell in love.
Their story is a queer story, so it’s our story too. It might be different shades of the rainbow but we’ve all had our experience in sport coloured by homophobia. The thing that turned the table, that made things safer for women to be out sport wasn’t sport. It was queer women. Those that chose to forgo their own security, their own peace, to win us ours.
In Heated Rivalry, 2010 is the year that their romance officially begins. In the real world it was two years later that the international team now synonymous with queerness would have it’s first out player on their roster. Accordingly to her memoir, Megan Rapinoe decided in 2011 that she would be out at the 2012 Olympics.
“We had been talking about the way athletes never come out, particularly when the spotlight is on them. I’d never been in the spotlight before. The team hadn’t been popular enough. Now, as we flew back to into the eye of the media storm, we were popular and I didn’t feel right.”
An excerpt from One Life by Megan Rapinoe.
It would be in the following cycle that she would meet her fiancee and form perhaps the greatest sapphic power couple sport has ever seen. Sue Bird, one of WNBAs finest, would then come out publicly the following year in 2017. Once sold to American men as the girl next door, she was now proudly for the girls.
2017 was the year that collective consciousness awoke to our story. The trajectory of growth for women’s sport in the years since eclipsing all that came before. Erasing this reality in the process. With the majority of fans joining us at this part of the narrative, they came to believe that out athletes were a cornerstone of women’s sports. Which is true but not in the way we’ve come to understand it.
Yes, within our families, within our teams, it has been an open secret all along. But it hasn’t been celebrated. That is so new that there are players still across a range of sport who represent the first wave of out athletes. There are recent retirees who chafe to mention of their wife and kids.
All of this is to say, the timeline lends itself to our own Heated Rivalry story in women’s sport. But perhaps more importantly, it should show men that they could have their own coming out story in sport. Sports won’t make themselves safe for us, that’s up to us. But we have the women’s example example to follow and now Heated Rivalry too.
Both now show what happens when we own our sexuality. Refusing to turn it down to make it more palatable for an imagined audience who will never cheer us on anyway. Self acceptance will never be found through self flagellation. If you apologise for who you are, you’re telling the world the problem is you.
Our history was written by our queer forebears imagining lives for themselves that the world couldn’t. That freedom of creativity is the biggest gift your queerness will ever bestow. The fantasy of the Heated Rivalry romance doesn’t have to be just that. We all deserve sunshine.
In my last representative season, I finally got mine.
With you,
Alice
PS. You may have noticed this appeared to you via substack even though my last newsletter said I’d be moving off to a less problematic platform. Unfortunately, my computer skills met their match so I am having a chat with someone more technically capable than I about helping me facilitate this move on Monday.