LGBTQI+ History Month and Women's Tennis
In this blog post, I shall focus
on the relative lack of visibility of lesbian, bisexual and transwomen on the
professional women’s tennis circuit and in particular, the first ‘out’ lesbian
tennis player. Despite the prejudicial stereotype that sporty women are more
likely to be lesbian, a stereotype that may influence girls to opt out of sport
at an early age, there are shockingly few professional women in the history of
tennis who identify as being part of the LGBTQI+ community. This is especially
surprising in recent decades, when coming out seems to have a less negative
impact for sportswomen, for instance with role models such as Amelie Mauresmo
whose sponsors supported her coming out rather than dropping her, as was the case
for Martina Navratilova.
There is a misconception that “tennis
is full of lesbians” as Margaret Court, one time tennis player turned preacher,
claims and then she goes on to admit that “there were only a couple” in her day
but makes it sound as though that was bad enough because they were predatory:
This is typical of homophobia,
hate speech and prejudice towards lesbians, which can lead to depriving
promising young girls of becoming tennis players and depriving the women’s tour
of great athletes. Stakhovsky’s attitude is an example of how such appalling prejudice
can deny girls and women access to sports and how it can impact on their life
choices, both career and personal:
I share Navratilova’s disbelief
that there are no gay men on the ATP tour. There have been gay and bisexual
male tennis players in the past and a lack of diversity on the ATP is something
that should be addressed not celebrated.
Being a lesbian in tennis is not
something new. One woman, among others, I find inspiring, as an openly 'out' lesbian tennis player
myself, is Helen Jacobs (USA, 1908-1997) who was the first well-known lesbian
player back in the 1920’s, 1930’s, living with her female partners,
Henrietta Bingham and later Virginia Gurnee. Jacobs was not only a tennis player but became
a writer and served in the US Navy reaching the position of Commander in the US
Navy intelligence. Only a handful of women achieved this. Her on-court tennis rivalry
with Moody is well documented. Jacobs was always gracious and sportswoman-like,
retiring in 1947 around the age of 38yrs old. This means that she retired when
she was older than Federer and Venus Williams are now, showing that playing
tennis around your 40’s is nothing new! Although not as ‘successful’ at
winning titles as Moody, Jacobs was nonetheless a powerful tennis player with a
cracking serve, great overheads and a backhand as a weapon that rarely let her
down. She was also an aggressive net player, reaching the Number 1 spot in
1936. Her greatest success was in doubles, but Jacobs also won the triple at
the US Open in 1934, winning all three titles; the singles, doubles and mixed
doubles. She also won the US Open
singles a further three times, meaning that she won the singles four years in
succession from 1932 to 1935. She also won the women’s doubles in three out of
the four years that she also won the singles (1932, 34, 35). Jacobs was a Wimbledon champion in 1936 and
runner up at the French Open, twice in the singles and once in the women’s
doubles.
At Wimbledon in 1933, Jacobs
became the first woman to wear shorts (made for men because shorts weren’t part
of women’s regular attire) on court and The Championships did not collapse! So it feels
rather strange that during my lifetime, I’ve heard so much commenting on
women’s tennis attire, from how feminine or not players look to increasingly
detailed, arbitrary rules, restrictively prescribing clothing do’s and don’t’s
at Wimbledon!
Women tennis players do wear shorts on the tour but it is still
relatively rare, despite the fact that shorts for women are available whereas
Jacobs had to make a bolder statement by ‘cross-dressing,’ as it were, in order
to wear the same attire. To my mind, shorts look better and are more practical
when playing any sport, which is why I wear/wore them on court, especially for
matches.
Jacobs was inducted into the International
Tennis Hall of Fame (1962) and the National Gay and Lesbian Sports Hall of Fame
(2015). She was a cover girl for Time Magazine (1936) where she helped make a
more masculine-type sporting attire of shirt and shorts fashionable for women. She
went on to be a sports fashion designer.
For her profile on the
International Tennis Hall of Fame see:
I often wonder why lesbian
players don’t receive the same hype, promotions and advertising as straight
players, some of whom have both their tennis results and love lives followed
with interest even if they are not in the top 10. Parity means that we should
enjoy news about the love lives of lesbian players alongside straight players because
it brings home the message that lesbians lead personally fulfilled lives. (It
also makes the tour very heterocentric if we only focus on the boyfriends and
husbands of female tennis players.) I think this is something Jocelyn Rae would
agree with because she thinks, as do I, that seeing the example of gay women
tennis players of all rankings may help other lesbian players to have the courage
to identify themselves as part of the gay community, much as she was encouraged
by the example of Billie Jean King.
“I know I’m not high profile like
Billie Jean or Mauresmo, but I still think we should talk about our sexuality,
because if you can help one person to come out or have that first difficult conversation,
why wouldn’t you?”
In this blog post I’ve focused on
the first ‘out’ lesbian tennis player because it’s easy to forget that lesbian
players did exist in the earlier part of the twentieth century! There have been
famous lesbian players since Helen Jacobs, such as the legendary Billie Jean
King, and Martina Navratilova and others (llana Kloss, Jana Novotna, Hana
Mandlikova, Gigi Fernadez, Lisa Raymond, Rennae Stubbs, Amelie Mauresmo, Casey
Dellacqua, Johanna Larsson, Richel Hogenkamp) which I shall discuss in future
blog posts to celebrate the contribution of lesbians to tennis and the message
behind LGBTQI+ month. I shall also include transgender issues in tennis, as
they are very under-represented in women’s tennis and have faced additional
obstacles to playing professionally. To date, as far as I am aware, there has
only been one well-known transwoman player, Renee Richards.
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