Amazon recently released a series that reboots the 1992 film “A League of Their Own,” about the Rockford Peaches, one of 15 teams in the World War II-era All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL). The original film studiously avoided — and barely even hinted at — the ballplayers’ potential queerness, as well as the exclusion of Black women from the league, but the series seeks to fix those erasures. It centers queerness and the racism that structured the league and era.
The new series focuses on two queer women who cross paths at the AAGPBL tryouts. Carson Shaw, a White woman whose husband is away at war, is recruited to the Peaches. Max Chapman, a Black pitcher employed at her mother’s beauty salon, is barred from the team despite her clear talent. The series follows both women as they chase their baseball dreams, fall in and out of love and reconcile their own desires and identities with the pressures they face to conform.
The series’ portrait of queer life amid World War II might seem unrealistic to some, but history reveals that queer women and trans men — from butch to femme and married to unmarried — often found opportunities to act on their desires and build queer communities both during and after the war. As the series shows, the formation of these queer communities was indeed often racially segregated, too.
Many scholars have written about the ways World War II enabled the growth of queer communities, bringing together young men and women from across the nation to live and work in sex-segregated spaces. For many, that experience served as an awakening to the possibilities of same-sex relationships and provided an introduction to the very words “homosexual,” “gay” and “lesbian.” One member of the Women’s Army Corps, which began in 1942 as an auxiliary unit, recalled that even during basic training, lesbian relationships were ubiquitous: “Everybody was going with someone, or had a crush on somebody or was getting ready to go with somebody.”
Women on the home front also found new opportunities for same-sex relationships, including in the wartime industries that began taking on women as workers for the first time. Elizabeth “Deedy” Breed, a White woman from Connecticut, had her first lesbian love affair with another woman she met while working at United Aircraft. The relationship was ill-fated. After reading Radclyffe Hall’s classic 1928 tale of queer woe, “The Well of Loneliness,” Breed felt there was no way to build a happy gay life and, soon after, married a man. But her feelings for women never disappeared. Decades later, in the 1970s, after becoming involved with the feminist movement, she ended her marriage and came out as a lesbian.
As the series “A League of Their Own” demonstrates, underground bars were important meeting spaces for many White lesbians, but they also typically excluded Black patrons. Ruth Ellis, an unmarried African American lesbian who lived in Detroit during the war, remembered that she met lesbians — both married and single — at house parties rather than at bars. Ellis’s own home eventually became known as “a house where queers go,” which sometimes included married ladies from the Black church.
After the war ended, military leaders ramped up crackdowns on queer women in their ranks. Beverly Todd, a White woman from Michigan, had several relationships with women in the Air Force in the early 1950s. Despite the pains she took to hide them, the captain of Todd’s unit discovered one of her affairs. In the middle of the night, he and other officers came to her room, separated Todd and her lover and questioned Todd for more than nine hours. Todd’s lover was kicked out of the military, most likely given an “undesirable” discharge that would have prevented her from receiving veterans benefits. Meanwhile, Todd promised the military’s psychiatrist that she would change rather than be sent to a civilian mental institution. “I did what they wanted me to do,” Todd recalled. Eventually, she married a man.
Even after the sobering experience of being thrown out of the military, some women found ways to explore their desires for women, including by playing sports. After being discharged from the military in the 1950s because of her lesbianism, Beverly Dale, a White woman, moved to Detroit, where she joined softball and bowling teams. She remembered that games provided opportunities to inconspicuously meet and date women. In contrast with the surveillance she experienced in the military, sports provided a relatively safe space in which to socialize with other queer women, provided they publicly maintain romantic relationships with men.
After the war, queer women faced not only public discrimination but also familial homophobia and transphobia for defying gender and sexual norms. In 1953 in New Orleans, Doris “Blue” Lunden, another White woman, was still in her teens when she was caught up in a police raid of the Goldenrod Inn, a lesbian bar in the French Quarter. Lunden was arrested, and her name was published in the next morning’s newspaper. Initially, she lied and told her father she didn’t know what kind of bar the Goldenrod was, but she left home nonetheless, in part to escape the pressure to fit in. Months later, she returned to tell her father that she was a lesbian and was living with another woman. By that point, she had a crew cut and was wearing men’s clothes. “I’d rather see you dead,” he told her. It was the last time they spoke.
“A League of Their Own” reflects a long history of queer women across the country finding one another and, together, confronting oppression. It depicts a brutal police raid of a lesbian-owned bar and details the efforts some of the Peaches take to protect themselves by hiding their lesbian relationships. It hints at how queer women and others began organizing in the 1950s and 1960s — against police harassment, medical misunderstandings of lesbians and gay men as sick, and obscenity laws that limited the circulation of gay publications — long before the Stonewall Riots of 1969. The Daughters of Bilitis, founded by a racially diverse group of women in 1955 in San Francisco, was the first lesbian rights group in the nation’s history. Through its many local chapters and its nationally circulating newsletter, it helped to connect queer women across the country.
The series also reminds us of the many ways queer women and transmasculine people have claimed and created territory for themselves, their lovers and their communities in ordinary and unexpected places. This message — and the history behind it — is particularly resonant today as the United States continues to see the decline of explicitly lesbian spaces. In the early days of the pandemic, two Brooklyn filmmakers created the Lesbian Bar Project, a fundraising effort to help “celebrate, support, and amplify the remaining lesbian bars” in the United States. From a historical preservation standpoint, the project is a worthy endeavor that draws attention to the dramatic degree that lesbian bars have declined in numbers since their peak popularity in the 1980s.
While the Lesbian Bar Project seeks to spotlight the vitality and importance of lesbian bars, “A League of Their Own” also reminds us that queer and trans folks have long made and remade space for themselves and continue to do so. These spaces, whether in homes, workplaces, bars or on baseball fields, have been central to forging queer community for decades and cannot be easily contained or erased.