“There’s no crying in baseball,” says Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own. But the film’s more subtle theme is that there are no lesbians in baseball. The 1992 film made no mention of the fact that many of the athletes in the All American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) were gay—although none of them were open about their sexuality except to close friends and some teammates. Reflecting the homophobia of the period, one 1943 magazine article expressed concern that the AAGPBL players would turn women’s baseball into an “uncouth Amazonian spectacle.”
But last Friday, Amazon Prime Video unveiled an eight-episode series, also called A League of Their Own, that includes openly lesbian AAGPBL players. It was co-created by Will Graham and Abbi Jacobson, who stars as Carson Shaw, a catcher for the AAGPBL’s Rockford Peaches. The show follows the lives of Peaches players on and off the field. Rosie O’Donnell, who was in the 1992 film, plays the owner of a gay bar.
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