Missy “The Missile” Giove Arrested for Transporting Marijuana

Missy Giove was one of the most daring downhill biking racers on the circuit before she retired in 2004. She won several championships and was known for her “take no prisoners” style of riding which led to numerous crashes and injuries in the process. Missy was also the rare lesbian athlete who didn’t need to come out because she was never in. She was always open about being a lesbian. In a sport like mountain bike downhill racing, which embraces the non-traditional more than more mainstream women’s sports, Missy was a popular star whose outrageousness endeared her to her fans of all sexualities. According to this article, it seems that Missy's zest for living life on the edge ( of legality in this case) extended beyond mountain biking.

Remembering Joanie Weston: Roller Derby Amazon

Apparently it is karma for me to write about roller derby today. I led a workshop last week for some high school coaches and one of the women who attended told me she is competing on a flat track roller derby team here in Western Mass. Then the next day I ran across an article on the internet about women’s roller derby. It got me thinking about my own association with roller derby in the 1950’s. I know this really dates me, but you young ‘uns out there hang in there with me, ok?

In the mid-50’s I was about 10 years old. I already knew I was an athlete, but it was sort of like being all dressed up with no place to go back then. There were no sports leagues for girls, except for swimming, which I didn’t get into until I was 12. The sports I liked, baseball and football, were basically off limits for me, at least in any organized way. I played both sports every day after school with the boys in my neighborhood – baseball in spring and summer, football in the fall and winter. I was always the only girl on the field, but no one cared about that. I knew how to play and that was all that mattered to my buddies back then.

My sports heroes were men – Roy Sievers of the Washington Senators and Eddie LeBaron of the Washington professional football team with the racist mascot name that shall not be spoken by me. My Grandmother Griffin and I were huge Senators fans and loved to listen to games together. I remember when my Grandmother Scott took me to the wax museum in DC when I was around 10 years old and I saw a wax figure of Babe Didrikson frozen at the top of her golf back swing. I was transfixed – here was a woman athlete famous enough to be in the wax museum with Presidents and movie stars. After that, I read everything I could about the Babe and was thrilled to learn about her accomplishments in so many different sports. Her story told me that there were women like me after all. Women who loved making diving catches, hitting the long ball, outrunning the defense, stealing home.

Back in the 50’s, remember, television was new. Our family had one with a small screen and a rabbit ear antenna sitting on top. It seemed like the only things on TV were Milton Berle, professional wrestling and roller derby, at least that’s all I remember. Roller Derby is what stands out most for one reason – Joanie Weston, the Blond Bomber, the Roller Derby Queen, and an Amazon among the other roller derby players.

She was tall, 5’10”, and she was tough. You did not want to be on the receiving end of one of her elbows. She’d regularly send her opponents catapulting over the railing or leave them sliding and spinning out of control on their butts in her wake. She was an all around athlete who once hit 8 home runs in a college softball game. When she took on roller derby she approached it with a dedication and devotion to the sport and training for it that made her the marquee player of that era.

Watching her take off on a jam chasing the pack with powerful strides that ate up the distance, swooping and ducking around opponents, gliding on her skates, bracing for contact and accelerating past entire teams for the maximum score and then clamping her hands on her hips to signal the end of the jam was thrilling and I loved watching her. She was everything that I felt was inside me, but had no outlet. I just knew, given a chance, I could be like Joanie Weston. Knowing that there was a Joanie Weston and a Babe Didrikson held out possibilities. I wasn’t the only one. There were other ways to be a woman than the ideal of domestic bliss – wives taking care of their husbands and children - that dominated the post-war 50’s. It took me a little longer to understand that another part of my longing then was, not only did I want to be like Joanie Weston, I had a big fat crush on her too.

I hadn’t thought about Joanie Weston and the roller derby for a long time before this week. I googled her and found out that she died in 1997 at 61 of a rare brain disease. She was married to a man, but co-owned a gay bar in the Bay Area with some of her roller derby teammates. She continued to give roller derby clinics almost right up to her death and she played softball in the lesbian softball leagues in the Bay Area. It seems Joanie defied convention right up to her untimely death.

Little girls today, especially the ones whose souls burn with a passion for sport – for running and swooping, for jumping and rolling, for pushing harder and faster – have so many Joanie Westons and Babe Didriksons in so many different sports. I hope someday in the distant future each of these little girls has a chance to reflect on her sports sheroes and remember fondly a woman who helped to show her the way to be herself like Joanie Weston did for me.

Check out this great documentary featuring some of the women, including some wonderful older lesbians, in the early roller derby, High Heels On Wheels.

Lesbian Coach’s Team in Deep Doo Doo

I ran across this interesting news item from the Bangor Daily News (That’s in Maine, for you non-New Englanders). It seems that high school softball coach, Kelly Jo Cookson, was fired in 2006 by the school system. The school claims she was fired because she forced her team to walk barefoot through sheep feces at a team picnic as a hazing activity in 2005. Cookson claims she was fired because she is a lesbian and that the hazing incident was just a pretext for the real reason for her dismissal. Cookson’s lawsuit is the first one to be heard after Maine included sexual orientation as a protected category under their Human Rights Law. OK, let me take this one chunk at a time.

Anyone who reads my blog knows I am completely opposed to team hazing in all forms, especially when the coach (who should know better) is forcing the hazing on her or his team. It is bad enough when teammates do it to each other. When the coach is directly involved, it is particularly egregious. It is tough enough to opt out of hazing from older teammates. Who would want to be a party pooper (a particularly appropriate phrase in this case) when the coach is leading the hazing?

I just need to get this out of my system, ok? I’m trying to imagine how Cookson came up with this idea of forcing her team to walk barefoot through sheep doo and how she made this all happen. This was not just a spur of the moment activity (“Hey, I know! I’ll just stop by the sheep field and pick up a load of crap and have the team squish through it barefoot at the picnic this afternoon.”). Cookson had apparently been doing this for three years. That is a lot of ewe doo.

Is she a sheep farmer on the side? How did she get it to the picnic? In the back of her SUV? Where did she put it? In a child’s wading pool? On a big plastic sheet? Did she just dump it onto a field in the picnic area? Did they have the feces fest before or after they had the picnic? I mean, that would be a major appetite killer for me. I’m sure sheep poop has some bonding effects – to your feet, your clothes, your legs – but I’m sorry, Coach Cookson, I don’t get how tiptoeing through the t---field bonds me with my teammates in any effective way.

What is wrong with people? This just goes to show that lesbian coaches can be just as stupid as straight coaches can be.

OK, now that I’ve got that out of my system, let’s get to the other part of this story. Cookson claims that other coaches at her school also led hazing activities on their teams and they were not punished. She was singled out. Further, Cookson had already been reprimanded by the school superintendent for hazing her team. She claims she was not fired until after it came to the attention of the new school superintendent that she was a lesbian (and after one of her team member’s parents notified the school that they intended to file a law suit over the hazing incident).

The Maine Supreme Judicial Court has kicked the case back down to a lower court and made it clear that they believe Cookson may have some basis for her claims that the hazing incident was merely a pretext for firing her because of her sexual orientation. Cookson’s attorney used a sports metaphor in responding to the Supreme Judicial Court’s decision:

“While the Brewer School Committee has been high-fiving around home plate, Kelly has scored the tying run on a sacrifice squeeze and we’re going to extra innings. The game is never over until the last woman is out.”

I don’t know if Cookson was not rehired because she is a lesbian. The jury will have to determine that. It certainly wouldn’t surprise me. This stuff still happens and it happens a lot more often than most people think. Lesbian coaches and athletes at the high school and college level are still dismissed from teams, not rehired, harassed, and ostracized.

I have had two conversations in the last month with women targeted by this kind of discrimination. One conversation was with a college coach who has been dismissed after being accused of having an inappropriate relationship with a player. There was no investigation, no evidence presented. Just the accusation and boom, the coach is gone. The coach denies the accusation and is seeking legal counsel to defend herself. The other conversation was with two lesbian athletes who were dismissed from a college team. Their previous coach was fine with them being out and in a relationship. Their new coach…not so much. In both cases there were charges made to cover over the real reason for the dismissal or to supplement the charges, in the case of the coach. So, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if, in this case, the school system is using the hazing incident as a pretext for firing a lesbian coach.

If so, I hope the school system finds itself in as deep a pile of sheep doo doo as the softball team did.

Including gender transitioning and transitioned athletes

A new report jointly released by AthletesCAN, the Canadian Association for the Advancement of Women and Sports and Physical Activity (CAAWS), and the Candian Centre for Ethics in Sport (CCES) entitled Promising Practices: Working with Transitioning/Transitioned Athletes in Sport, examines issues related to the inclusion of transitioned/transitioning athletes in sport (the document intentionally uses this terminology instead of “transgender” or “transsexual”). The report is a thoughtful and well informed discussion of the major issues to be considered in developing effective policies that are respectful and fair to all competitors. This document advances the conversation about gender transition and sport in important ways and should be on the reading list of all sport leaders in the United States.

The report also raises lots of questions. For example, we just don’t have the research to answer questions about whether transitioned/transitioning athletes have a physical advantage or disadvantage when compared with physically born men and women. What we do have is research on transitioned and transitioning non-athletes and the effects of testosterone and estrogen on their physiology, but how this applies to athletes’ performance and at what level of competition is a big question. We have no reason, according to research, to assume that transitioned athletes have an advantage or a disadvantage. As the report notes, we already know that the variability in performance and hormonal levels varies greatly among physically born men and among physically born women and that each binary gender category of male and female overlaps the other in performance and hormonal levels.

We also know that much of the conversation about inclusion of gender variant athletes is contaminated by prejudice, misconceptions and mistaken assumptions. This report is a major giant step forward in addressing these problems. The report is a reasoned and up-to-date discussion that counters some of the most persistent misconceptions and stereotypical assumptions about gender variance and gender binaries in general and as they pertain to the sport context.

This is great stuff. I encourage everyone to read this ground-breaking report. Thanks to our Canadian friends for laying the foundation for a challenging and important conversation, not only in the United States, but around the world.

A Tribute to Rodger McFarlane

Last week I learned that Rodger McFarlane, a long time leader in the LGBT community, committed suicide. Rodger was the former executive director of the Gill Foundation, an AIDS activist who helped start ACT UP and the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. Rodger was also an athlete who competed in international triathlons. He accomplished more in his 54 years than most of us will who live to be far older than he was when he died. Rodger suffered from debilitating back problems and other health issues that severely limited his ability to travel and do the work he loved and that apparently was the main factor in his decision to end his life.

I knew Rodger because he supported It Takes A Team. He not only provided us with generous financial support, he also gave me lots of great advice about fund raising strategies. I never met Rodger face to face, but we had several phone conversations in which he exhorted me, who hates to ask people for money, to be more bold and confident. We have an important project in It Takes A Team, he told me, so sell it. You can do it.

It meant a great deal to me to have someone of Rodger’s stature in the LGBT community support ITAT and believe in us the way that he did. In these rough financial times especially, I am trying to channel Rodger’s fund raising pep talks. I will miss him as will everyone who knew him.

First Ever Pride House At Winter Olympics

A group called GayWhistler (for Whistler Mountain where many of the winter Olympic events will be held) has announced that they are sponsoring a Pride House for LGBT Winter Olympians and their friends and family to hang out during the games next winter. On the one hand, any progress in recognizing and supporting LGBT Olympic athletes and coaches is a step forward. Having a Pride House, modeled on other national houses that are available for Olympians from different countries to gather, is a positive step.

On the other hand, the Pride House is not connected in any way with the official Vancouver organizing group or with the International Olympic Committee. It isn’t even clear if the Pride House will be publicized in any official Olympic publications or information distributed to athletes. It is a strictly local endeavor to welcome and support LGBT athletes and coaches at the Games.

Eleven openly gay, lesbian and bisexual Olympians (I don’t know of any trans athletes) competed in the summer Games last year. I suspect there will be even fewer openly LGBT athletes in Vancouver since the number of athletes in the Winter Games is smaller. I always assume that there are many more closeted athletes and coaches who will be competing. So, the point of having a Pride House is not necessarily to accommodate large numbers of LGBT athletes, it is more of a symbolic presence.

It reminds me of some research I did a few years ago looking at the Safe Schools program for LGBT students here in Massachusetts. There were gay students we talked to who never went to GSA meetings, but it made a difference to them that there was a GSA in the school. They felt safer even though they did not belong to the GSA. Maybe Pride House will serve a similar function for the LGBT athletes and coaches competing at the Winter Games.

Since the Olympic movement has not been known for its gay friendliness, it would be great if there was some kind of endorsement of Pride House as a way to make all athletes feel welcomed and safe, but we will need to wait until another Olympic Games for that.

Cal Women’s Basketball’s GLBT Pride Day

This article about Cal-Berkeley was in Athletic Business this month (in the interests of disclosure, I am quoted in the article). I wrote a blog post (February 11, 2008) about the Cal-Berkeley Women’s Basketball GLBT Pride Day promo last year when I first found out about it.

This article provides a little more detail including an interview with the Athletic Department’s Director of Game Day Experience (who knew this was a position?), Megan Mosness. Even though college basketball season is long past, it is would be a good time to start a campaign to get your favorite women’s or men’s athletic program initiate their own version of an LGBT Pride Day at a game.

You can find out who to contact by going to the athletic department web page. Shoot them an email. Call them up. Talk to the Game Experience Director or her/his equivalent. Get your friends to do the same. I bet Megan Mosness would be willing to share her game plan for this event with athletic staff from other schools. We shouldn’t let Cal-Berkeley be the only school with an LGBT Pride Day, should we?

Also, as an aside, read the comments in reaction to this article below the article itself. There aren’t many and most are positive. The only sourpusses seem to be stuck somewhere in a right wing time warp spouting tired crap about promoting an “anti-family” environment and being “exposed” to gay men or lesbians at sports events like we were the Swine flu. Maybe we could suggest a quarantine section at the game for those suffering from the contagion of homophobia.