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Game changers
Pioneering women coaches and researchers share decades of insight
Pat Griffin, Helen J. Carroll and Sue Rankin agree queer women in sports face unique challenges that stem from societal ills. (Photos courtesy Griffin, NCLR and Rankin & Associates respectively)
With Athlete Ally, the You Can Play Project, GO! Athletes, Break the Silence and dozens of others organizations and even gay representation at last in the NBA and NFL, it’s easy to think the era of homophobia in sports is behind us. But three LGBT women who’ve had long and pioneering careers in the field stress two main points: one, it ain’t over yet and two, even in the apparent victories, shades of sexism and stereotypes remain.
Helen J. Carroll, a lesbian, was an acclaimed national championship basketball coach from the University of North Carolina-Asheville before joining the National Center for Lesbian Rights in August 2001 to launch its Sports Project, which works to eliminate discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in sports through advocacy, outreach and litigation. The project works on all levels of athletic competition to ensure that LGBT athletes can compete and participate “open and equally.”
After retiring as associate professor of education from Pennsylvania State University in 2013, Sue Rankin runs the consulting firm Rankin & Associates in which she does climate assessment work for universities. She’s the author of several LGBT books such as “The Lives of Transgender People,” “Campus Climate for Sexual Minorities: a National Perspective” and “Our Place on Campus: LGBT Services and Programs in Higher Education.” For 17 years, Rankin, who identifies as queer, was head coach for women’s softball at Penn State.
Pat Griffin is the founding director of Changing the Game, a GLSEN sports project that focuses on K-12 school athletic and physical education programs. She’s professor emeritus in the Social Justice Education Program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and former director of the It Takes a Team! Education Campaign for LGBT issues in Sport. She’s a two-time Gay Games medalist and the author of “Strong Women, Deep Closets: Lesbians and Homophobia in Sports.”
If there’s anybody in the country qualified to discuss the nuances of LGBT people in sports, it’s these three. During lengthy and wide-ranging interviews last week, they talked freely about the impact of having out players like Michael Sam (the St. Louis Rams) and Jason Collins (the Brooklyn Nets), why out women are often shortchanged by comparison and what hurdles the country is still grappling with on these fronts.
“One thing we’ve realized in the Sports Project is that we still have a large number of people out there who are still being discriminated against in individual cases and certainly with transgender players,” Carroll says. “We’re doing a lot of work in that area right now because you’ll often see policies that are adopted against trans players that are in effect for an entire state. That’s going to continue if you don’t have a [National Center for Lesbian Rights] that can back up people legally and work with them pro bono. … I can’t tell you how many times we’ve seen [coaches come out] and get fired on the spot.”
Griffin says, “so much change has happened in the last five years, it boggles the mind … It’s very exciting, but we’re certainly not home free.”
Although in some ways she longs for a day when an athlete coming out will not be considered newsworthy, she also laments the wildly disproportionate amount of coverage Sam and Collins got compared to, say, Brittney Griner, the Phoenix Mercury (WNBA) center who came out in 2013. She says the reasons are multi-layered.
“The piece I always pick up is that it has so much to do with gender expectation and how society reacts if nobody thinks you’re gay,” Griffin says. “If you’re Michael Sam, he could have gone in as a closeted gay man and nobody would have said, ‘Oh, I wonder if he’s gay,’ but if you’re a woman and an athlete, you’re already going against heterosexual orthodoxy because you’re sweaty, competitive, strong, so you’re breaking all those gender expectations and people automatically go, ‘Oh, she must be a lesbian.’ Any woman who exhibits strength and leadership — ask Hillary — or any woman who tells some guy she’s not interested, they go, ‘Oh, you must be a lesbian.’ It’s reserved as a way to let women know they’ve stepped out of bounds and it’s used very effectively to make women have to apologize. It affects men a little differently because of sexism.”
Variations of this phenomenon can also be seen, Rankin argues, in the varying reactions seen in the coming out of, say, figure skating Olympic gold medalist Brian Boitano, whose 2013 coming out at age 50 was seen as wildly overdue, versus still-active players in other sports such as Sam.
“It’s again that sexism and heterosexism coming into play,” Rankin says. “If you’re Brian Boitano in figure skating or even Greg Louganis in diving, these are considered gay sports so having a gay man in them is not seen as a big deal. But in pro football or pro basketball when you have gay players — it’s not really that they’re considered more macho because all sports are grueling — but we see in those sports traits that we traditionally assign to men, if you will or what we think of as a man in our culture, then that sends a different message.”
The three women all say, based on personal experience and their research, that significant numbers of lesbian players on teams for which they played and coached in years’ past, did provide opportunities for community.
Upon moving to Massachusetts for graduate school in the ‘70s, Griffin noticed a “community of lesbian friends” and “a discovery process” on the women’s swim team she coached. She says being fully out at sports conferences as early as 1982 made her feel like a lone voice in the wilderness and a “pariah.”
“I’d have women walk out of workshops at conferences after 10 minutes because they were just too scared to stay,” she says. “Scared that if their administrator knew they were seen at a session on homophobia and sports, they’d lose their jobs. It’s amazing how uncomfortable it was in those years.”
Rankin, who coached softball at Penn State until 1996, remembers a “definite underground within the athletic world for lesbians,” she says. “If you played, you were automatically pegged as being gay.”
And Carroll who says basketball has “pretty much been my life,” remembers the “wonderful experience” she had coaching many years in North Carolina where a kind of “don’t ask, don’t tell”-type policy took hold.
So if those kinds of experiences — at least for women — were relatively common, has homophobia in sports really been that big of a problem?
“This really gets into stereotypes,” Carroll says. “Is it easier for lesbians in sports than gay men? The answer is no, it’s not easier, it’s just different. If it’s so easy, why do we not have more women coming out? … Even if people on the teams know, the women don’t talk about it in the media or do anything to help the movement or help the situation. … From the outside, it may look like it’s this culture where everybody knows, it’s not really a big deal but again, it’s that combination of sexism and homophobia at work.”
Griffin argues that just because some women may not have been castigated for their perceived sexual orientations, that phenomenon probably had a scary downside for gay men.
“If we really knew, there probably are more lesbians playing pro sports than gay men and I’d say the reason for that is that in some ways, when you’re a little boy, you get the femininity beaten out of you or the gay,” she says. “There’s actually research to back this up. It’s less likely that you would find young gay men who have persevered who identified themselves as gay early on to get to the professional ranks. That would be one way to explain that.”
Regardless of the challenges that remain, Carroll says the work she, Rankin and Griffin are doing is pioneering and important.
“What Pat and Sue have really done is they’ve laid a groundwork for people who are doing media articles and research to go back and look at,” she says. “People in media are always asking for statistics and asking, ‘What does this look like?’ What little has been done, for years it was Pat and Sue who were doing it and that was really important. They’ve been working on this for decades to we have people who really know the lay of the land and how the attitudes have changed from the ‘70s and ‘80s up until now. People often say, ‘Well, everything’s changed in the last five years,’ and that’s just not true. It’s been changing for the last four decades but just reached a tipping point in the last five years where we started seeing some movement really, really fast. That never would have happened without all that work in the past.”
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Memorial for groundbreaking bisexual activist set for May 2
Loraine Hutchins remembered as a ‘force of nature’
The Montgomery County Pride Center will host a celebration honoring the life and legacy of Loraine Hutchins, Ph.D., on May 2. People are invited to attend the onsite memorial or a livestream event. The on-site event will begin at 10 a.m. with a meet-and-greet mixer before moving into a memorial service around the theme “Loraine a Force of Nature!” at 11 a.m., a panel talk at 12 p.m., break out sessions for artists, academics, and activists to build on her legacy at 1 p.m. and a closing reception at 2 p.m.
Attendees are encouraged to register for the on-site memorial gathering or the livestreamed memorial. The goal of this event is also to collect stories and memories of Loraine. Attendees and others can share their stories at padlet.com.
An obituary for Hutchins was published in the Bladelast Nov. 24, where people can learn more about her activism in the bisexual community. A private service for friends and family was held in December but this memorial service is open to all.
Alongside her groundbreaking work organizing for U.S. bisexual rights and liberation including co-editing “Bi Any Other Name: BIsexual People Speak Out” (1991), she also integrated faith into her sexual education and advocacy work. Her 2001 doctoral dissertation, “Erotic Rites: A Cultural Analysis of Contemporary U.S. Sacred Sexuality Traditions and Trends,” offered a pointed queer and feminist analysis to sex-neutral and sex-positive spiritual traditions in the United States. Her thesis was also groundbreaking in exploring the intersections between sex workers and those in caregiving professionals, including spiritual ones.
In an oral history interview conducted by Michelle Mueller back in August 2023, Hutchins described herself as a “priestess without a congregation.” While she has occasionally had a sense of community and feels part of a group of loving people, she admitted that “I don’t feel like we have the shape or the purpose that we need.”
“I’ve often experienced being the Cassandra in the room, the Cassandra in the community. Somebody who’s kind of way out there ahead, thinking through the strategic action points that my community hasn’t gotten to yet, and getting a lot of resistance and hostile responses from people who are frightened by dissent and conflict and not ready for the changes we have to make to survive,” she said.
“For somebody who’s bisexual in an out political way and who’s been a spokesperson for the polyamory movement in an out political way, it’s very exposing. And it’s very important to me to be able to try to explain and help other people understand the connection between spirituality and sexuality,” she explained citing how even as a graduate student she was “exploring how to feel erotic and spiritual, and not feel them in conflict with each other in my own spiritual contemplative life and my own sensual body awareness of being alive in the world.”
“Every religion has a sense of sacred sexuality. It’s just they put a lot of boundaries and regulations on it, and if we have a spiritual practice that is totally affirming of women’s priesthood and of gay people, queer people’s ability to minister to everyone and to be ministered to be everyone, what does that do to the gender of God, or our understanding of how we practice our spirituality and our sexuality in community and privately?”
“There’s no easy answer,” she concludes, and she continued to grapple with these questions throughout her life, co-editing another seminal text, “Sexuality, Religion and the Sacred: Bisexual, Pansexual, and Polysexual Perspectives,” published in 2012. Her work blending spiritual and queer liberation remains groundbreaking to this day.
Rev. Eric Eldritch, a local community organizer and ordained Pagan minister with Circle Sanctuary who has worked for decades with the DC Center’s Center Faith to organize the Pride Interfaith Service, is eager to highlight this element of her legacy at the memorial service next month.
a&e features
Queery: Meet artist, performer John Levengood
Modern creative talks nightlife, coming out, and his personal queer heroes
John Levengood (he/him) describes himself as a modern creative with a wide‑ranging toolkit. He blends music, technology, civic duty, and a sharp sense of wit into a cohesive artistic identity. Known primarily as a recording artist and performer, he’s also a self‑taught music producer and software engineer who embodies a generation of creators who build their own lanes rather than wait for one to appear.
Levengood, 32, who is single and identifies as gay and queer, is best known as a recording artist who has performed at Pride festivals across the country, including the main stages of World Pride DC, Central Arkansas Pride, and Charlotte Pride.
“Locally in the DMV, I’m known for turning heads at nightlife venues with my eye-catching sense of style. When I go out, I don’t try to blend in. I hope I inspire people to be themselves and have the courage to stand out,” he says.
He’s also known for hosting karaoke at Freddie’s Beach Bar in Arlington, Va., on Thursday nights. “I like to create a space where people feel comfortable expressing themselves, building community, and showcasing their talents.”
He also creates social media content from my performances and do interviews at LGBTQ+ bars and theatres in the DMV. Follow the Arlington resident @johnlevengood.
How long have you been out and who was the hardest person to tell?
I have been fully out of the closet since 2019. My parents were the hardest people to tell because my family has always been my rock and at the time I couldn’t imagine a world without them. Their reactions were extremely positive and supportive so I had nothing to fear all along.
I remember sitting on the couch with my mom, dad, and sister in our hotel room in New Orleans during our winter vacation and being so nervous to tell them. After I finally mustered up the nerve and made the proclamation, I realized my dad had already fallen asleep on the couch. My mom promised to tell him when he woke up.
Who’s your LGBTQ hero?
My LGBTQ heroes are Harvey Milk for paving the way for gays in politics and Elton John for being a pioneer for the fabulous and authentic. My local heroes in the DMV are Howard Hicks, manager of Green Lantern, and Tony Rivenbark, manager of Freddie’s Beach Bar. Both of them are essential to creating spaces where I’ve felt welcome and safe since moving to the DMV.
What’s Washington’s best nightspot, past or present?
Trade tops the list for me because of the dance floor and outdoor space. It’s so nice to get a break from the music every once and a while to be able to have a conversation.
We live in challenging times. How do you cope?
I’m still figuring this out. What is working right now is writing music and spending time with family and friends. I’ve also been spending less time on social media going to the gym at least three times a week.
What streaming show are you binging?
After “Traitors” Season 4 ended, I was in a bit of a show hole, but “Stumble” has me in a laughing loop right now. The writing is so witty.
What do you wish you’d known at 18?
At 18, I wish I would have known how liberating it is to come out of the closet. It would have been nice to know some winning lottery numbers as well.
What are your friends messaging about in your most recent group chat?
We are planning our next trip to New York City. If you can believe it, I visited NYC for the first time in 2025 for Pride and I’ve been back every quarter since. Growing up in the country, I was subconsciously primed to be scared of the city. But my mind has been blown. I can’t wait to go back.
Why Washington?
It’s the closest metropolitan area to my family, but not too close. I love the museums, the diversity, the history, and the proximity to the beach and mountains. It’s also nice to live in a city with public transportation.
Aging RFK Stadium has come down, but the RFK grounds are still getting lit up. Welcome back to the stage Project GLOW, D.C.’s homegrown electronic festival, on May 30-31. Back for its fifth year on these musically inclined acres, Project GLOW returns with an even more diverse lineup, and one that continues to celebrate LGBTQ antecedents, attendees, and acts.
Project GLOW 2026 headliners include house and techno star Mau P, progressive house legend Eric Prydz, hard-techno favorite Sara Landry, and bass acts Excision b2b Sullivan King, among the lineup of trance, bass, house, techno, dubstep, and others for the fifth anniversary year.
President & CEO Pete Kalamoutsos — born and raised in D.C. — founded Club GLOW in 1999. In 2020, GLOW entered into a partnership with global entertainment company Insomniac Events to produce live events like Project GLOW, which kicked off in 2022.
As in past years, Project GLOW not only makes space, but is intentionally inclusive of the LGBTQ community, one of its most dedicated fan bases. The festival’s LGBTQ-focused Secret Garden stage blooms again — a more intimate dance area that stands on the strength of DJs and musicians who draw from the LGBTQ community. D.C.’s LGBTQ nightlife mastermind Ed Bailey is the creative mind behind Secret Garden again. He joined Project GLOW in 2023.
“Kalamoustos says that “he’s proud of his partnership with Ed Bailey, along with Capital Pride and [nightlife producer] Jake Resnikow. It’s amazing to collaborate with Bailey at the Secret Garden stage, especially after the curated lineup we worked on at Pride last year.”
The Secret Garden will be a bit different from other stages: Eternal (“At the Eternal stage, time stands still. Lose yourself in the dance of past, present, and future, surrendering to the eternal rhythm of the universe”) and Pulse (“Feel the rhythm of the beat pulse through your veins as the heartbeat of the crowd synchronizes into one. Here, every moment vibrates with life as it guides you through a new dimension of euphoria”). The Secret Garden stage is in the round, surrounded by 16 shipping containers. The containers play canvas to muralists from around the world, who are coming in to paint them in a vibrant garden-style vibe. “We gave this stage some extra love with this layout,” K says, “ we finally cracked the code.”
K says that this will be the biggest lineup yet for the Secret Garden, featuring Nicole Moudaber b2b Chasewest, Riordan b2b Bullet Tooth, Ranger Trucco, Cassian, Eli & Fur, Cosmic Gate and Hayla. The stage is also the largest yet, featuring an expanded dance floor and 360-degree viewing.
Across all stages, K says that his goal for the fifth anniversary is “More art and fan interactive experience, more like a festival, strive to be like a Tomorrowland, as budget grows to add more experience.” Last year’s Project GLOW alone drew 40,000 attendees over two days.
K, however, was not satisfied with one festival this spring. GLOW recently announced a “pop-up” one-day event. Teaming up with Black Book Records, GLOW is set to throw a first-of-its-kind dance-music takeover of Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., headlined by electronic music star Chris Lake. Set for April 18, this euphoric block party will feature bass and vibes blocks from the White House. Organizers expect as many as 10,000 fans to attend. Beyond music, there will be food, activations, and plenty of other activities taking place around 6th St and Pennsylvania Ave NW – a location familiar to many in the LGBTQ community, as this sits squarely inside the blocks of the Capital Pride party that takes place in DC every June.
Over the past two decades, Club GLOW has produced thousands of events, from club nights to large-scale festivals including Project GLOW, Moonrise Festival, and more. Club GLOW also operates Echostage.
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