[Article: Unlevel playing fields] Page: 3 of 6
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ItDuOF U:Babe
Didrikson
x and Martina
y _ n j:zx Navratilova
battled butch
attacks.
. k"I hate being
w called a homo-
sexual because
I don't feel that way. It really upsets me." King, who ap-
peared at a Gay Games benefit in New York last summer,
has not spoken publicly on the subject since.)
Though Navratilova calls herself "the lone ranger,"
she has said that coming out was liberating. "The main
reward is being able to live the life I want to live and being
honest," she says. "The most known repercussion [of
coming out] is the financial losses I've suffered. If I were
not out, I would have earned millions of dollars in en-
dorsements. But it's not just the money. It's also the pub-
lic's acceptance. Even though I know people come to see
my matches who might not otherwise attend tennis tour-
pn mentw. there are still hisses, boos, and jeers when I
step on the
court or- whenI'm playing. Maybe they
don't like my hair or my
nose, but I doubt that's
the reason."
Navratilova knows
her example hasn't em-
boldened other gay ath-
letes. "I've been out
since 1980, and I've nev-
er noticed a line forming
behind me. Still, I think
it's becoming more ac-
ceptable for people to
come out, and as levels
of acceptance increase,
so will the numbers of
people who come out. It's an individual decision and de-
pends on how comfortable people are with their sexuality."
T A PPR EC IAT E the power of homophobia over
sports, you have to first understand the place of
sports as a sacred male preserve. In ancient
Greece, women were not only forbidden to
compete in the Olympiads (while men watched
other male athletes run and wrestle in the buff), women
who were apprehended in the vicinity of the stadium were
dragged to a nearby cliff and hurled to their deaths. Things
have improved. But the passage of time hasn't encouraged
men to share athletics with the female half of the human
race. Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic
Games, fought desperately to keep women from participat-
ing. As lesbian athlete and author Mariah Burton Nelson
points out in her new book, The Stronger Women Get, The
More Men Love Football, de Coubertin hoped the Olympics
would foster "manliness," which would "reverse the de-
cline of a French upper class grown weak and effete."
As women gradually gained entry into the Olympics in
the early i9oos, men took pains to denigrate their
achievements. Babe Didrikson, a lesbian who competed in
the 1932 Olympics in track and went on to a successful ca-
reer- as.a -pro golfer, was.-commonly -described. as ."man-..
nish" by male sportswriters. (Didrikson, whose relation-
ships with women were known among her peers, later
married a wrestler.) In 1967, the International Olympic
Committee, suspicious of the improvement in women's
performance times, began requiring women athletes to
undergo chromosomal sex tests to prove they were fe-~ k,,~ i I
I
AP WIDE WORLD PHOTOS
male. (I wonder if they
suggested the same tests
for men who ran slowly.)
When Navratilova took
women's tennis to a new
level with increased
training, Sports Illus-
trated in 1983 quoted
"continued suggestions"
that she was "the tip of
some science fiction ice-
berg: Team Navratilova
and all that." Says Can-
dace Lyle Hogan, a
writer who is research-
ing a book on the historyJUNE 1994 0 U T
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tc
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[Article: Unlevel playing fields], article, June 1994; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc916969/m1/3/: accessed June 7, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting UNT Libraries Special Collections.