The Wall Street Journal’s decision to feature a front-page photo of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan playing softball has ignited a national discussion about why people assume that women who play the field are lesbians.
Despite being wildly popular with both sexes, the game is to gay women what stickball is to Brooklyn.
“Throughout history, softball has been a focal point for lesbian women, so, in a sense, there’s a kernel of truth in the stereotype,” said Pat Griffin, author of “Strong Women, Deep Closets: Lesbians and Homophobia in Sport.”
“It’s an issue of women being physically competent, physically strong, and doing things with other women.”
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The picture of Kagan swinging the bat that sparked the debate was taken 17 years ago, when she was a assistant professor at the University of Chicago Law School.
That photo prompted a number of gay-rights activists to charge that because the game is so closely associated with lesbianism, the newspaper was trying to insinuate that Kagan is gay, but the Journal denied that.
The unmarried legal whiz — a New Yorker whom Obama nominated for the country’s highest court on Monday — has long been the subject of rumors that she plays for the other team, but she has refused to comment.
Her sexual orientation has been chattered about on blogs for months prior to her being picked for the court.
A CBS blogger recently posted a story in which he said she was gay, but quickly retracted it after coming under fire from the White House, which denied that Kagan is gay.
Softball is largely identified as a woman’s game, especially at the high school and college level, and lesbians have always gravitated to it, Griffin said.
When the sport became popular after World War II, it provided a respite for lesbians in a hostile world, giving them a place where they could socialize among other women, and not conform to society’s strict ideas about proper behavior for ladies, author Yvonne Zipter said in “Diamonds Are a Dyke’s Best Friend,” her book about lesbianism and softball.
The stereotype has persisted even today, according to both straight and lesbian players.
“Unfortunately, I think that it’s common for people to associate playing softball with being gay,” said a lesbian softball player from Manhattan.
“There’s a stigma associated with a lot of women’s sports, and while it has lessened over the years it’s still there — for some sports more than others.”
One of the reasons she thinks that the game can’t shake its sapphic rep has to do with the bulky uniforms — compared to, say, those in figure skating or gymnastics.
“Many of the heavily stigmatized female sports are the ones in which women wear concealing, baggy clothing,” she said.
“A lot of female athletes try to distance themselves from this stigma by wearing makeup or ribbons in their hair during games.”
The head coach of the Harvard University softball team, Jenny Allard, in 1997 became one of the first college coaches to come out of the closet.
“It’s an issue we deal with. People jump to conclusions. We have very competitive athletes who are straight, gay, bisexual. It’s not different than any other sport,” she said.
Another softball player, who is straight, said that announcing her love for the game is tantamount to coming out of the closet to some people.
“It’s extremely annoying,” said the 30-year-old from Queens.
Recently, when someone she knew came out of the closet as a lesbian, a friend said to her, “Really? She doesn’t play softball or anything!”
The association between softball players and lesbians is so strong, several Facebook pages — like “Not all softball players are lesbians” and “Softball: it’s not just for lesbians” — have been devoted to debunking the stereotype
In Kagan’s case, several of her close friends have come forward to say that she is not gay.
“I’ve known her for most of her adult life, and I know she’s straight,” Sarah Walzer, Kagan’s law-school roommate and close friend, told Politico.
“She dated men when we were in law school. We talked about men — who in our class was cute, who she would like to date, all of those things. She definitely dated when she was in DC after law school, when she was in Chicago — and she just didn’t find the right person.”
And disgraced former Gov. Eliot Spitzer — a Kagan pal — also vouched for Kagan as a hetero, telling Politco, “I did not go out with her, but other guys did.”