Megan Rapinoe, the co-captain of the champion U.S. Girls’ soccer group, is, with a bit of luck and casual, each person’s modern-day favored athlete, leader, and lesbian. As I watched her take the rostrum at the ticker-tape parade in New York on Wednesday, her gestures and posture unapologetically what a number of us watching would classify as dykey (others may also say, courteously, that her presentation became now not historically feminine), I wondered what this second felt like for another lady, the first American expert athlete to pop out. So I am known as the tennis player Martina Navratilova, who is presently at Wimbledon, operating as a commentator but additionally playing—in legends doubles suit—and asked.
Navratilova’s very own coming-out, in 1981, changed into conflicted and mangled. Six years in advance, Navratilova, who grew up in Czechoslovakia, had defected to the United States at the age of eighteen. At the same time that she decided not to return to Czechoslovakia, she also realized that she had become gay. Navratilova becomes one of the world’s pinnacle two lady tennis gamers—the alternative becomes Chris Evert. She had to speak to the click lots, and the press became increasingly interested in the situation of female athletes’ sexuality.
Navratilova had a policy of deflecting the question. “I never said no, I wasn’t gay,” she recalled. “I just stated, ‘I don’t want to talk about it; it’s personal’, which I experience is non-public. But they might never ask that query of a male athlete.” Sports turned into a manly enterprise: “Of route, they may be direct, except they determine skaters or something. Female athletes had to show that they were instant. It’s no longer a girl activity.” There were, of direction, lesbians on the girls’ tennis excursion. However, Navratilova stated that the proportion turned into “percent-wise, no longer than lots higher than the overall populace. There were a lot more lesbians on the golf excursion. However, they were more closeted.”
In 1979, Navratilova fell in love with Rita Mae Brown’s writer, whose 1973 novel, “Rubyfruit Jungle,” stays the handiest American lesbian-themed massive great-vendor. (It was posted by a feminist collective and picked up by Bantam a few years later when it had bought seventy thousand copies.) Brown introduced Navratilova to the sector of politically active lesbians, in which she changed into a movie star, and Navratilova started out contemplating popping out publicly. The hassle turned into her application for U.S. Citizenship, which is still pending and could be denied on the grounds of her homosexuality. (This provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act was dropped in 1990 when it was redrafted by Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, who’s homosexual.) Navratilova advanced a new manner of deflecting the sexuality query: she would say, “I can’t communicate about it now.” Privately, she instructed a few journalists that she couldn’t speak about it until she had become a citizen. She additionally informed some of the opposite tennis players that, once she had her passport, “If all people ask me approximately it, I’m simply going to mention, ‘Yes, I am homosexual.'”
In April 1981, Marilyn Barnett sued Billie Jean King, one of the exquisite lady players and the founding father of the Women’s Tennis Association. Barnett, who has been King’s lover for seven years, claimed that King had promised to support her for existence and that it was a traumatic reimbursement. Navratilova knew Barnett, who changed into a hairdresser and had traveled with King for numerous years. “She did my hair, too,” Navratilova advised me. King mentioned the relationship; however, she stated that it became an affair she regretted and affirmed her dedication to her marriage. “She changed into seeking to faux that she became nevertheless straight,” Navratilova remembered. “She wasn’t. However, she didn’t come out until the past due nineties.”
The lawsuit brought reporters ever more questions about tennis gamers’ sexuality. Navratilova knew that she was to be granted citizenship, which might have freed her to come out—besides for one aspect: “The sponsors had said to the human beings in the fee that if there was another scandal,y would pull their sponsorship from the excursion. So first, I became shielding my citizenship, and then I became protective of the human beings I became with at the W.T.A. I felt I became liable for sixty to one hundred women.” Their livelihoods depended on the big element of the sponsorship money from Avon, the cosmetics enterprise, and then on the back of the W.T.A.
In the summertime of 1981, Navratilova was given her passport. “And two days later, this journalist calls me in Monte Carlo. Now I can’t come out because I’m protective of the tour. So I said, ‘You aren’t going to jot down approximately it, are you?’ He said, ‘Not if you don’t need me to.’ I stated, ‘Of course, I don’t need you to.’ He stated, “O.K., I gained’t, then.” And days later, it became inside the Daily News.” The headline becomes “Martina Fears Avon’s Call if She Talks.”
