sue bird f*cks: she doesn't have to be a respectable queer anymore
she's talking about sex and is more marketable than ever
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Before we get into today’s newsletter: The killing of non-binary teenager Nex Benedict, who died after being attacked in an Oklahoma high school bathroom, has been heavy on my mind and my heart, especially as a parent of a trans child. My partner, William Horn, wrote this very good piece about anger and bravery and all of the things trans people shouldn’t have to be and shouldn’t have to say.
As a trans adult, my truest ambition has been to make the world a little safer for other trans people. I'm not the only person in my community with this ambition. So many of us feel like ambassadors, hoping that if we answer enough questions, explain clearly, demonstrate our humanity, cis people will understand that no trans adult or child is a threat to anyone based solely on their transness. All of us hope to make a gentler world — not just for our teenage selves, but for kids like Nex. All of us hope that for every cis person we explain ourselves to, we save a trans person violence and hatred. But it doesn't work, and Nex's death shows us clearly that it never will.
Read the whole thing at POPSUGAR.
Now, I want to talk about Sue Bird and how much joy it gives me to see her be embraced, successful, and happy as an out lesbian. Bird’s relationship with fellow sports superstar Megan Rapinoe is one of the highest profile relationships in all of sports. In fact, the two are the most decorated couple in American sports history, with the most championships between them than any other athlete pairing.
Last week, Bird and Rapinoe appeared on the
podcast together. They made some jokes about their sex life, and Bird spoke publicly for the first time about being afraid to come out earlier in her career. “It was basically told to me that the only way I was going to have success from a marketing standpoint is to really sell this straight, girl-next-door [image],” she said. “At 21, I was afraid.”To understand why it feels so powerful—and subversive—to see Bird posing naked in the pages of GQ while embracing Rapinoe, or to share the cover of InStyle with Rapinoe alongside photographs of the two of them in their shared home, or to be appearing on the “Pablo Torre Finds Out” podcast and (sort of) talking about her sex life with Rapinoe, you need to understand how Bird was marketed when she entered the WNBA. To understand why it’s such a big deal for Bird to be an out athlete despite playing in a league in which at least 25% of the players are openly queer, we need to go back to 2002.
Bird entered the WNBA after a standout career at UConn, where she won two national championships and her team went undefeated her senior year. That season she won the Naismith Award, the Wade Trophy, the USBWA Women’s National Player of the Year award, and the AP Player of the Year. As a young point guard, her basketball IQ and leadership potential were already evident. She was the No. 1 overall draft pick by the Seattle Storm that year, and she would stay with the franchise for her entire 22-year WNBA career.
The WNBA was in its fifth year and facing “slipping TV ratings and stagnant attendance,” according to Sports Illustrated. The Storm had ranked dead last in attendance the season before. The league had always struggled to market itself and its players, fearing that appearing too Black or too gay would alienate “mainstream” audiences and drive the potential of straight, male fans away—something women’s leagues have wrongly assumed they need to succeed and are only now beginning to understand they don’t. In 2002, Mary G. McDonald described the WNBA’s idealized image as that of the “good white girl,” noting that “constant emphasis on the players' moral attributes… helps to distance the league from projections of alleged deviance imagined to be embodied by ‘fatal women’—that is, bodies marked as black and lesbian.”
That is the context in which Bird was drafted into the W, as a white, small-framed, feminine, conventionally attractive woman. She had never spoken publicly about her sexuality and was therefore presumed to be straight, though she would say later that she’d realized she was gay while in college and came out to her family shortly after the beginning of her pro career. The league saw a major marketing opportunity and the media jumped on a women’s sports story they’ve always loved: “hot woman also happens to be good at sports.”
To try to capitalize on Bird’s “mainstream appeal,” the WNBA sent her on a promotional blitz, including an appearance on Fox Sports’s “Best Damn Sports Show, Period,” where the Hartford Courant said “the hosts gushed about how beautiful she was as Bird appeared uncomfortable.” That same year, Bird attended the ESPY Awards with Backstreet Boy Nick Carter, a publicity stunt arranged by their agents. When asked by ESPN what “the worst question” she’d been asked all year was, she said, “Probably all the questions in regard to Nick Carter” and lamented how interested the public was in her love life.
Ahead of Bird’s debut, the Seattle Storm’s then-director of merchandise, Jeremy Owen, bragged to Sports Illustrated that “a lot of the people ordering [Bird’s jersey] are guys,” while Karen Bryant, the Storm's then-vice president of operations, told the magazine that “much of [the increase in ticket sales is] from guys referencing Sue.” Whether these men were driving ticket and merch sales because they found Bird attractive or because they wanted to watch her play basketball, the Storm executives don’t say, but the implication is the same—Bird is valuable to the league because she brings in male viewers.
This is a dynamic Lyndsey D’Arcangelo and I explore in our book, Hail Mary, about the National Women’s Football League. Athletes who are conventionally attractive are often “judged by [their] looks first and [their] athletic ability second.” We wrote that Dallas Bluebonnets quarterback Barbara O’Brien’s “good looks and feminine appearance made her a press favorite” and “the hyperfocus frustrated O’Brien, who understood football to be a team sport and wished that other Bluebonnets players received some of the recognition.” These players were often contrasted with their larger or more masculine counterparts, whose sexualities were sometimes speculated about. All of this is, of course, rooted in both racism and homophobia.
“These characterizations reveal deep and century-long anxieties about women who played sports, a fear that they were hypermasculine and that athletics would make them undesirable to men,” we write in Hail Mary. “These paternalistic fears were rooted in homophobia, which ties into another trope that filled media coverage of the league. While players like… O’Brien dealt with the societal paradox of being both aesthetically pleasing and good football players, others dealt with the assumption that because of their athleticism, they must be lesbians.”
Bird was one of the faces of the WNBA’s 2002 “This is Who I Am” campaign, which pictured players in street clothes rather than their basketball uniforms—something else of a trope when it comes to promoting women athletes (and something else we explore in Hail Mary). Marketing athletes by putting them in street clothes immediately distances them from their sport, which serves to both feminize them and make them appear less threatening (to men). It also serves to diminish them as athletes. A Dime magazine photoshoot from 2003 features Bird in a jersey dress laying seductively on a bed (while holding a basketball, naturally). Bird told Pablo Torre that she had to say no to several other poses, including a shot they wanted of Bird without her shirt on.
“I never challenged,” Bird told GQ of her early days in the league. “I never pushed the limits… In an attempt to be feminine, I was in all these clothes that would be considered ‘feminine’ clothing, but it didn’t work for me.” But she says now that she was in an “impossible situation” by essentially being told that she could play the along and help the league grow, or go against the party line and leave the fate of the league hanging in the balance.
Studies from 1990 and 1997 found that female athletes were significantly less likely to be portrayed as active sport participants and more likely to be portrayed in passive and traditionally feminine poses than their male counterparts. In 2005 an updated study from The Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport examined coverage of women’s sports from the 2003-2004 season and found a shift: “sportswomen were overwhelmingly represented on the court, in uniform, and in active, athletic images.” Bird came on the scene just as this shift was beginning, but when there was still a lot of work to be done.
“You can tell when someone’s hiding something, and I feel like that’s how the WNBA was with our marketing,” Bird told GQ in 2021. “I don’t really blame them, because it was the year that it was and the time that it was in our society. The irony is the early [league] taglines were ‘This is who I am.’ And yet I don’t think for anybody it was actually who we were.”
As Lindsay Gibbs recounts at Power Plays, a 2002 article from the Hartford Courant called Bird “articulate with fresh-faced, girl-next-door appeal.” Constance Schwartz, the then-vice president of strategic marketing with The Firm, said Bird was “a beautiful person, which definitely helps” and then recounts a male friend who found her “so hot.” Sports Illustrated described her as “pretty, quick-witted and not too imposing at 5'9",” noting that “she fits in anywhere” (all of this is, of course, code for “white”). She was called “a marketer’s dream” and many column inches were dedicated to the number of sponsorships she would receive (a glaring disparity in a predominantly Black league, and one that hasn’t been overcome to this day).
In 2005, the year after Bird helped lead the Storm to their first WNBA Championship, Sports Illustrated asked her if she had met any men while playing overseas in Russia (she describes having some “interesting run-ins” and a man who texted her but she was unsure how he had gotten her number).
It is true that someone doesn’t need to publicly talk about their sexuality in order for it to be valid or recognized. “I think people have this assumption that if you're not talking about it, you must be hiding it, like it's this secret,” Bird told ESPN in 2017, the year she came out publicly and announced that she was in a relationship with Rapinoe. “That was never the case for me.”
Bird was adamant that despite not coming out to the public until 15 years into her professional career, it was important to wait until the timing felt right for her. “Even though I understand there are people who think I should have done it sooner, it wasn't right for me at the time,” she told ESPN. “I have to be true to that. It's my journey.”
Bird isn’t wrong, of course. No one owes the public a coming out, ever, if they don’t want to provide one. But also, as I’ve mentioned above, female athletes get hamstrung by the media and personal narratives—whether it’s because they’re “too pretty” or because they’re gay (or even presumed to be gay)—can easily overshadow their athletic accomplishments. Women’s sports already struggles to get the same kind of game coverage that men’s sports does—stories tend to lean heavily on lifestyle content or focus on who someone might be dating or be quick to position them as role models above all else. And that’s not even counting the fact that, until recently, women’s sports only received about 4% of all sports media coverage period. For someone like Bird, it makes sense that she would want her play to be the leading story, first and foremost.
But it’s more complicated than that, as Bird indicated with her comments on Torre’s podcast last week about how she was told that the only way she could successfully market herself was to present a straight, relatable image, and the fear that came with that pressure. She credits the younger generation of WNBA players—many of them Black and masculine-of-center—with pushing the league to become more accepting of queerness and a non-normative public image (it’s worth noting that there is still a discrepancy in media coverage between Black and white MOC players, as evidenced by Risa F. Isard and Dr. E. Nicole' Melton’s 2021 research1).
It’s really beautiful to see someone who came into the league positioned as the great, hot, white (straight) savior of the WNBA come into her own off the court. Her public image as a basketball player is legendary and nearly-peerless—four WNBA championships with the Storm2, a historic five Olympic gold medals, a 13-time WNBA All-Star, WNBA all-time assists leader, the list goes on.
Now, at the end of her career and post-retirement, that public image is more holistically true to who Bird is as a person. She is a talented athlete, yes. She is a beautiful woman, yes. But her talent and beauty do not exist for the male gaze and they never have, no matter how much the league and the media may have wanted them to (Bird joked to GQ that the only people who were surprised when she came out were “a bunch of dudes on Twitter”).
Early in her career, the WNBA put Bird in a bikini in promotional materials and looking back on those images feels deeply uncomfortable—which is exactly how Bird looks in them, too. She posed in a swimsuit again, alongside several other WNBA players in the 2022 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. And despite the criticisms I had about that shoot and the league’s decision to participate in it, there is no denying that Bird appears in those swimsuit photos on her own terms and therefore explicitly rejects any cisheteronormative projections onto her image.
“When you do come out publicly and it’s just known, [people] know exactly who you are on the first hello,” Bird told GQ in 2021. “There’s something very liberating about that. You can just be.”
In coming out publicly and celebrating her relationship as freely as she does, she reclaims her own narrative and puts the early marketing of her image into new, clearer focus. She is a gay woman, just as she was when the WNBA made her the face of their league over two decades ago.
“It makes me happy that Bird has received arguably the most mainstream attention in her professional career in the last [seven] years, since coming out and sharing her relationship with Megan Rapinoe with the world,” Gibbs writes at Power Plays. “Trust me: Between being heralded as the WNBA’s Straight White Savior in 2002 to her status today as half of a high-profile and heavily-sponsored queer power couple today, there were many years — over a decade, really — where Bird went largely under-the-radar and underappreciated.”
And then! For the woman whose default mode has been described as “cautious” and who has said that she never wanted to challenge the status quo or push too hard for most of her career to joke about sex, and queer sex at that, shows a level of comfort that pushes at the bounds of respectability politics.
Bird revealed to GQ that Rapinoe made the first move. She told
that competence—athletic or otherwise—had “sex appeal.” And she joked about how hard pro athlete schedules can be on sex lives, even revealing that her friends bet on whether she was going to “get some” after seeing Rapinoe for the first time in a few months (she did not, they were too tired).“We just did a hug and kiss it out, roll around a little, on top of clothes, dry hump,” Rapinoe said. Bird, who has always been the more reserved of the two, smiled shyly. Then: “You just said ‘dry hump,’” she quipped. “Let’s take a moment for that.”
Sure, these are fairly tame anecdotes3, but they’re still a very long way from the Sue Bird who came onto the scene all those years ago, as the quiet kid who didn’t want to rock the boat or challenge the system.
For many queer public figures, they rely and lean on a “love is love” attitude, that focuses on the ways that queer love is no different than straight love, even though they are different. They have to be different, just by nature of the world we live in! Queer public figures often have to toe the line of respectability to gain mainstream acceptance and out of fear of alienating “middle America” (which ignores the fact that there are plenty of queer people in middle America, but I digress).
That requires queer celebrities and queer athletes who are positioned as “role models” to also deny a bit of their humanity—they must be stripped of the unique cultural markers that come with queerness and they must, of course, be sexless. Once you are a public queer person, your right to be a sex symbol or even just a sexual person disappears, lest you make mainstream fans uncomfortable, lest you scandalize the children. There is this contradiction that exists specifically for queer women, and especially for feminine queer women, which is that they are hypersexualized and their sexuality and desire is often filtered through and for the male gaze (Google literally had to change their algorithm so searches for “lesbian” would stop bringing up only porn).
That is the rub: queer women’s sexuality must either be for men to ogle or it cannot exist in public at all. So for Bird to claim her right to reference and speak about her sex life with Rapinoe is perhaps the biggest “fuck you” of all to the world she entered in 2002.
Bird is no longer a 21-year-old who feels like she needs to carry the future of an entire professional women’s basketball league on her shoulders. She’s 43, she’s in love, she’s retired, and she isn’t scared anymore.
“Black WNBA players who present as more masculine received an average of just 41 media mentions. Meanwhile, white athletes who present more masculine received more than five times that amount (an average of 212). These numbers make clear that white players have more leeway to express themselves in a variety of ways. They are forgiven — and even embraced — for being different and breaking the norm. Their Black teammates, however, are penalized with less media coverage when they do the same.”
The overall record for WNBA championships is Rebekkah Brunson, with five.
Please tell me I’m not the only one who remembers the YouTube videos Courtney Williams made with her now-ex-girlfriend where they talked about scissoring and strap-ons.
Sue Bird was a massive influence on my own coming out
learned so much. tyty