On this chapter of The Queerest Things I Watched Last Week, wow, A League of Their Own was gayer than I anticipated! Here are my thoughts after binging it last weekend.
- A League of Their Own – Season 1 [Streaming]
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Like almost everyone else in the wlw TV fandom world, I was super excited for A League of Their Own the series. I tried not to read too much about it ahead of time because I prefer going into a series unspoiled. I knew it was going to have queer characters, but WOW A League of Their Own is gayer than I ever expected!
Confession time: I think I watched some of the original movie, but I don’t 100% remember, so I didn’t have an emotional or nostalgic tie to the show. However, I know what it’s like to try to find queerness in movie or show where there is no explicit queer rep (see Some Kind of Wonderful or The Facts of Life). I also daydream of re-doing shows that should have been gay and making them gay. This was exactly that. A queer do-over dream come true!
Abbi Jacobson and crew did a lot of research, including interviews with players who are still alive, and discovered — SURPRISE — there were a lot of queer women in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. There was also segregation in full effect and black women could not join the AAGPBL. The show explored these truths and put them at the center of the story with the two main characters, Carson (Abbi Jacobson) and Max (Chanté Adams). The two of them are the link between their parallel stories.
My wife and I were immediately invested and delightfully surprised by there being no predominant straight stories. All of the major stories involved queerness which is something we rarely get to enjoy even though queer people have been around since the dawn of time. And in a sport that had many queer participants, it’s a story we deserve.
Also, required companion reading is Carmen Phillips’ episode by episode guide to all references to the original movie.
If you need any more compelling evidence you should watch it, read this review by B. Cook.
Is there such a thing as too much gay? I don’t think so.
This week: We were in the middle of binging Paper Girls when A League of Their Own came along. I will finish it and report back next week.
Way gayer than anticipated; really liked it but I think ketamine might have altered my enjoyment of tv like this or Glow where I cant help but to constantly imagine the adventure making the project itself present in a lot of the scenes. The world war 2 background really adds a lot of depth to it, along with the stories from the different backgrounds kind of meeting in baseball works well.
What I found interesting was thinking about how with world war 2 looming, and literally characters go missing as the war engulfs the people. And the USA was incredibly repressive at this time.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/All_American_Girls_Professional_Baseball_League_members_performing_calisthenics.jpg
Looking at the league, it also almost feels like the USA was getting the woman ready to enter the war if necessary. And I got that feeling when watching the show, and I found photos like above that also inspired that feeling.
Near the end of the war in Germany, our soldiers were fighting their elderly and children. Which is a really poignant image if you think about the event in its grand scale and all the different ways it changed everything.
The person saying there was too much queer is a really weird position. As the show displayed we were coming out of a society that gay people literally had to frequent speak easy’s. And the Wizard of Oz being interpreted two different ways by two different communities and having the pitcher walking that line.
The number 15% is coming out of a society that there were undercover cops who could hookup with people and arrest them. These are obviously not accurate. No one could get an accurate number, its all jut estimates. Also straight people would be more likely to run infront of those machine guns first, but that is just my opinion.