when your favorite athletes let you down

Finding shared identity with the queer women athletes we root for can sometimes mean we assume a shared affinity or politic exists where it doesn’t.

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Before I get into this week’s essay, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the political reality of the current moment and the ways it is tied to the world of sports. The Trump administration has waged a full-scale war on immigrants. As ICE agents, members of the National Guard, and Marines continue to abduct people off the streets, separate families, and assault protesters in Los Angeles who are trying desperately to hold their ground and defend their city and their neighbors, sports play on around them.

The Sparks hosted the Golden State Valkyries this weekend, just two miles away from the protests. “It’s ridiculous the National Guard is here,” Sparks fan and Torrance native Deborah Massa told Marisa Ingemi of the San Francisco Chronicle. Meanwhile, in Miami this weekend, the FIFA Club World Cup begins—and ICE agents will be there, too, and have warned that non-American citizens should carry their papers with them to avoid being arrested.

The U.S. is set to host the World Cup next year and the Sport & Rights Alliance has put out a warning about the risks posed to fans, players, and workers who attend. Their press release identified “immediate risks to the human rights of immigrants; freedom of the press and free expression; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) rights; safety for children; and the right to be free from discrimination, requiring urgent and transparent intervention.”

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when your favorite athletes let you down

Last week, Israel Daramola wrote at Defector about the changing public image of athletes in the age of social media. He wondered what happened to the “cool athlete,” before concluding that the simple cool factor that so many of our favorite athletes in the 1980s and 1990s possessed was simply the result of fantastic marketing by professional advertising companies whose job it was to make the public fall in love with these players.

“It’s not so much that the athletes of the past were inherently cooler, nor that athletes now are incapable of being cool,” Daramola writes. “Rather, there once was an enormous infrastructure of advertisers whose job it was to create a mythos and style to our best athletes. Sometimes they’d highlight already big personalities like Jordan or Shaq or Charles Barkley. Other times, they’d find ways to inscribe personality into more modest stars, like Hardaway or Bo Jackson.”

It wasn’t just athletes who had this kind of image shaping, either. Going back to the earliest days of Hollywood, studios tightly controlled the public narratives about their stars. When the studio system crumbled, celebrity publicists stepped in to shield the stars from the prying eyes of the media and public. Taylor Swift still subscribes to this model of celebrity, employing bulldog publicist Tree Paine to help shape her image. As I wrote for The Daily Beast in 2023, Paine’s style of PR closely aligns with that of Pat Kingsley, who I think of as “the godmother of modern celebrity PR.”

Kingsley is also the publicist who guided many famous lesbians through some of the toughest scandals of their careers—she helped Billie Jean King through her 1981 lesbian affair while King was still married to a man; protected Lily Tomlin and Jodie Foster while they remained closeted; and facilitated Ellen DeGeneres’ infamous coming out cover for Time magazine.

lesbian PR

It is only through the advent of social media and celebrities’ ability to have more direct access to their fans that the level of manufacturing has decreased when it comes to public perception of who they are as people. Athletes and other celebrities are starting their own podcasts and media brands in record numbers, toeing the line between authenticity, access, and polish. And while they all still employ publicists, they speak much more freely and openly than they used to, for better or worse. Angel Reese has a podcast, as do Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird, Christen Press and Tobin Heath, and Ashlyn Harris, among so many others. “This has granted us a more direct and in-depth knowledge of athletes as people, and it turns out we often don't like what we see!” writes Daramola.

via X

It’s not just male athletes who fall into this trap—women’s sports fans, many of whom have supported these athletes in part due to a perceived shared sense of values, are increasingly disappointed in the reality of those players.