Lesbian Sportswomen Throughout History

... on dumping her swordsman beau, La Maupin seduced a local merchant's daughter. Desperate to separate the two, the merchant sent his daughter to a convent. Undeterred La Maupin joined the convent herself, and started hooking up with her lover. Shortly into their convent stay, an elderly nun died - bizarrely La Maupin stole the body and placed it in her lover's bed! She then set the whole convent on fire and the two lovers fled. Either La Maupin tired of the girl, or the girl tired of life as a fugitive, the girl returned to her family in Marseilles, upon which she told her tale.

A tribunal was convened and La Maupin (in her absence) was convicted of body-snatching, kidnapping a nun, and arson against a convent! The sentence was death by burning. As a fugitive, she approached her former lover, the Comte d’Armagnac, the Grand Squire of France, and through his influence, convinced Louis XIV to have her death sentence annulled. So, La Maupin's shenanigans continued!

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... to rock climb in the Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park which was near her family home. During a family holiday to New Zealand, she came across photographs of Aoraki /Mount Cook, which totally captivated her. She was introduced to Peter Graham, a pioneering guide in the area, at the Hermitage Hotel in 1908. He taught her alpine climbing, and the following year guided her ascents, of Mount Sealy (2,627m ), The Nun's Veil (2,736m) and of the west ridge of Mount Malte Brun, crossing the famous Cheval ridge to the summit which was the first female ascent.

With Peter Graham as her guide, in 1910, Emmeline climbed Mount Annette (2,235 m), Mount Mabel (1,077 m), a virgin 2,438m peak near Barron's Saddle (at the head of the Mueller Glacier) and finally Aoraki/Mount Cook (3,724 m). Theirs was only the second ascent of the west ridge of Aoraki/Mount Cook, was completed in record time - in 6 hours and made Emmeline the first woman to reach the summit and the first Australian to do so. Other mountains she ascended include: Mount De la Beche (2,979 m), Mount Green (2,828 m), she became the first person to climb Mount Chudleigh (2,944 m), scaled the virgin peak now named Mount Du Faur (2,389 m) and made the first ascents of Mount Nazomi (2,953 m), Mount Dampier (3,420 m), Mount Pibrac (2,567 m), and Mount Cadogan (2,398 m). She also made second ascents of Mount Tasman (3,497m) and Mount Lendenfeld (3,192 m). In 1913 with Peter Graham and David Thomson, the trio traversed all three peaks of Aoraki/Mount Cook.

While preparing for her ascent of Aoraki/Mount Cook, Emmeline embarked on three months of training at the Dupain Institute of Physical Education, Sydney and was instructed by Muriel "Minnie" Cadogan. Hands must have touched and... hearts missed beats! Emmeline fell in love with Minnie, and the two lived together for 19 years. Alas this was not a blissful love story. In the early 1900s, though lesbianism was not illegal, society saw lesbianism as a psychological disorder. Unwittingly, Minnie had cast their relationship into the spotlight as she was a respected feminist in Sydney. They relocated to Bournemouth, England, in 1914, but with the start of World War I their climbing plans abroad were abandoned. Minnie committed suicide in 1929 - the reason why is unclear. One explanation is that Minnie had experienced something akin to a mental breakdown and her family came to England to take her back to Australia which forcibly split the couple up so on the voyage home (SS Port Huon) Minnie committed suicide.

Emmeline returned to Sydney and heart broken over Minnie, she fell into depression. Six year later, in 1935, she fatally poisoned herself with carbon monoxide. Regardless of her significant contribution to mountaineering and shunned by her sexuality, Emmeline was buried in an unmarked grave in Manly Cemetery, Sydney, Australia. An act of kindness: a New Zealand farmer, Ashley Gaulter, who was living near Manly Cemetery read Sally Irwin's biography Between Heaven and Earth: The Life of Mountaineer Freda du Faur: 1882–1935. A true gent, Ashley organised a local stonemason to make a gravestone so that Emmeline has a well deserved marked gravesite in Manly Cemetery.

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Countess Clara von Bismarck (daughter of German diplomat Count Friedrich Wilhelm Bismarck). As well as being a passionate horsewoman, she loved photography and filled 64 photo-albums with 10,000 of her photos.

Renée held political sympathies with Hitler and saw the rise of Nazism as a way of overcoming the humiliating Treaty of Versailles. German diplomats in Switzerland praised her loyalty to the Nazi cause and after WWII, Renée Schwarzenbach-Wille helped German Nazis who had fled to Switzerland to escape the Allies. Though I am HUGELY anti-Nazis I have included her herein as her lesbian daughter lesbian writer and photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach was prpactively anti-Nazis.

Although she married Alfred Schwarzenbach, a wealthy businessman in the silk industry in 1904 and had five children she also had a long-term affair with the German opera singer Emmy Krüger.

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dropped out of her studies to work as his secretary. Hugely frustrated she left her family home and moved in with a friend to pursue a career in art.

She created sculptures of female nudes and in 1921, she illustrated the translation of Sappho poems by Hans Rupé. In 1928, at the Olympic Games held in Amsterdam she won a bronze medal in the sculpture section of the art competition - bizarrely art was part of the Olympic competitive program until 1952! Renée is mostly remembered as the creator of the Berlinale Bär (Golden Bear). In 1953, replicas of the Bär were awarded as trophies at the third Berlin International Film Festival; ever since they've been handed out to Berlinale winners.

In 1917, Renée married Emil Rudolf Weiß, a type artist, book designer, painter and illustrator. Her husband was dismissed from his university post in, 1933, because of an angry statement he had made against the Nazi regime and the law to reintroduce civil service. The following year Renée was excluded from the Academy of the Arts as she was "non-Aryan" – her maternal grandmother was Jewish before her conversion and her works were removed from public collections. During the Third Reich, Renée and her husband lived with considerable restrictions.

Unexpectedly her husband died in 1942 in Meersburg on the Lake Constance. After the war, Renée lived with her "house-keeper" Magdalena Goldmann in an apartment on Innsbrucker Strasse, where they both lived until their deaths. Renée and Magdalena are buried in a common grave in the forest cemetery in Dahlem, southwestern Berlin.

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With 14-inch biceps, Violette Morris was a record-holder in discus and shot-put, played on two separate French women's football teams, boxed (even fighting against, and defeating, men) and competed in horseback riding, road bicycle racing, motorcycle racing, car racing, airplane racing, archery, diving, swimming, tennis, weightlifting, and Greco-Roman wrestling. She was also selected for the French national water polo team even though there was no women's team at the time! In addition to winning medals at the 1922 Women's World Games, she took gold medals in discus and shot put at the 1924 Women's Olympiad and won the 1927 Bol d'Or 24 hour car race.

In 1914, Violette married Cyprien Edouard Joseph Gouraud but they divorced nine years later. Later she became openly gay and her lovers included Josephine Baker and actress Yvonne de Bray.

Her life was full of controversary. Athletic Career: Violette dressed in men's attire and was v feisty which upset the posh world of French women's athletics. The Fédération Féminine Sportive de France (French Women's Sports Federation) refused to renew her licence amid complaints about her lifestyle and barred her from participating in the 1928 Summer Olympics. Violette then decided to undergo a double mastectomy i.e. cut her breasts off! It is claimed that she undertook the mastectomy in order to better fit into small cockpit of a race car, however, her auto racing license was thereafter revoked. In 1930, Violette Morris tried to sue the The Fédération Féminine Sportive de France, claiming damages, as she could no longer earn wages competing as an athlete. The case was unsuccessful as an obscure ordinance from 1800 forbidding women to wear trousers was used against her.

Arrest for Murder: while having dinner with friends, on Christmas Eve 1937, Violette calmed a drunk and aggressive man named Joseph Le Cam (an unemployed ex-Legionnaire) who had an heated argument with one of her friends. The following evening, drunk Le Cam went to Violette's houseboat and after seeing her' friend, with whom he had been arguing the night before, boarding the houseboat Le Cam rushed back, brandishing a knife and threatening both Morris and her friend. Morris fired shots from her revolver, the first two warning shots into the air, the following two at Le Cam. When Le Cam died in hospital. Violette was arrested, charged, tried in the cour d'assises in March 1938, but was acquitted when the court accepted her plea of self-defence.

Nazis Collaborator: Violette Morris was an internationally renowned athlete. Nazis thought, due to her struggle with the French, they could switch her loyalties to the Germans. In 1936, Hitler invited Violette to Berlin to watch the Olympic Games and charm her. After the Berlin Olympics it is speculated that Violette returned to France as a Nazi spy. The French media depict Violette Morris as a sadistic Nazi torturer, and that she was involved with the French Gestapo. The extent of Morris's involvement with the Nazis is unknown. It is reported that Morris supplied black-market oil for the Nazis, ran a garage for the Luftwaffe, and drove for both the Nazis and Vichy hierarchy. Violette Morris was tried in absentia, found guilty by the French resistance and charged with spying for the Germans and leaking Allied military plans to the Nazis. Before the D-Day invasion, orders came from London to take out any would-be Gestapo agents and Morris's name was on that list.

On April 26, 1944, Violette Morris was driving on a country road through Normandy with the Bailleul family, who were favourably positioned with the Nazi regime in France. The car engine suddenly and mysteriously came to a stop upon which French Resistance fighters emerged from nearby bushes. Violette Morris, two adults and two children in the car, were killed in the spray of gunfire. There's no smoke without a fire... for Violette Morris to be assinated by French Resistance fighters must have been an act of fatal revenge for her activities as an informer.

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served with the Royal Army Service Corps re-burying the war-dead, and then moved to Dublin with the Women's Legion Mechanical Transport Section, which transported British officers during the Irish War of Independence.

She bought a fleet of Daimlers and with three former colleagues from the Women's Legion Mechanical Transport Section she set up the 'X Garage' in 1920, in Cromwell Gardens, London. The X Garage offered a car-hire and chauffeuring service which uniquely comprised women-only drivers and mechanics. When the X Garage closed 1925 she commissioned a speedboat, naming it Gwen after one of her former lovers, an actress. With her new speedboat, she won her first trophies - the Southampton Water trophy and at Cannes. Between 1925 and 1930, she became a successful speedboat racer wining the Duke of York's Trophy (1926), the Royal Motor Yacht Club International Race, the Daily Telegraph Cup, the Bestise Cup, and the Lucina Cup. She financially assisted some of her male racing drivers and paid $10,000 of her money to fund the building of one of Sir Malcolm Campbell's Blue Bird land speed record cars.

Openly lesbian "...never a little girl. I came out of the womb queer" Carstairs dressed as a man in Savile Row suites, had tattooed arms, and was thrilled by cars/speedboats, adventure and speed! News of her lezza affairs reached her mother, who warned her to stop and marry instead, or be cut off. So in order Carstairs access to her trust fund and be independent she married a French aristocrat Count Jacques de Pret in 1918, in Paris. After her mother's death, the marriage was immediately annulled on the grounds of non-consummation. Her numerous sapphic affairs included Dolly Wilde and a string of actresses, most notably Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Tallulah Bankhead. Check out Kate Summerscale's The Queen of Whale Cay (1977).

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... the first women's team to wear shorts, tour the continent and the US, and raised money for charity. In June 2019, Lily Parr became the first UK female footballer commemorated with a statue which is displayed at the National Football Museum in Manchester.

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... youth champion. At 14½, she was the Austrian champion and stayed that way for twelve years. From 1925, she won three times the annual five-mile open-water Austrian competition "Quer durch Wien" (Across Vienna) on the river Danube. Even before the rise of Hitler, Fritzi experienced awful anti-Semitism, for example newspapers, like the "Reichspost" and the Christian Social newspapers, wrote: "The Polish Jewess... won the 'Quer durch Wien' swim, a shame for Austria..". Another example of anti-Semitism she experienced was during a swimming race at Graz, Austria which she won. All the judges declared that it was the other swimmer who had won, apart from one judge Karli Schäfer, a famous Austrian figure skater, who said: "I was the first to see Fritzi, and it stays that way." It was decided to hold the race again at the end of the evening. Friederike "Fritzi" Löwy won again and superiorly.

During the 1920s–30s Fritzi won nearly every national title in freestyle. She competed also competed at the 1928 Summer Olympics (Amsterdam), Between 1932 - 1935 she won 5 gold medals at the Maccabiah Games, Israel. Her career was cut short after the Anschluss between Germany and Austria in 1938 as she had to flee from Jewish prosecutions, escaping first to Italy in 1939. Her sister, Anna, was arrested by the Gestapo in Milan in March 1944 and deported to Auschwitz where she died. Fritzi then fled to Switzerland on foot and lived in various refugee camps, such as in Brissago on Lake Maggiore. Many members of her family were murdered by the Nazis, including three of her sisters, three nieces and two brothers in law.

In 1947 Fritzi emigrated to Australia but in 1949, returned to Vienna where she worked as a secretary. Fate kept on rolling bad dice rolls - in the 1960s Fritzi had to fight breast cancer. Hedy Bienenfeld her swimming rival (who too was Jewish but who had also returned to Vienna after the death of her husband) had become close friends with Fritzi, and she kindly helped Fritzi financially.

Though Austria has "forgotten" about the former swimming champion through 2/3 photo albums being discovered at flea market in Vienna and passed on to the collection "Women's Heritage" at Vienna University's historical institute, Fritzi's story is slowly becoming commemorated.

It is thought that Fritzi was bisexual. There are no reports of her having married.

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"... athlete to ever live." She participated in nearly every sport available to her at the time, including: baseball, basketball, billiards, bowling, boxing, cycling, diving, golf, handball, skating, swimming, track, tennis and... volleyball! At the time, however, female athletes were considered unfeminine and verging on being freaks. A New York World-Telegram article wrote "It would be much better if [Didrikson] and her ilk stayed at home, got themselves prettied up and waited for the phone to ring." Seriously?

Bravo, her undeniable successes won her fans. At the 1932 Olympics (Los Angeles, USA) , Babe qualified for 5 events, but could only compete in 3, because this was the maximum allowed for a woman athlete. Of the 3 events, she won 2 gold medals (80 m hurdles in which she broke the world record with 11.7 seconds and Javelin throw with setting a Olympic record throw of 43.69 meters) and received silver medal in the last event (High jump) after a dubious ruling about her high jump style that is still debated today. After the Olympics, though a latecomer to the sport, she began a golf career, where she dominated the women’s circuit and earned the Associated Press' Female Athlete of the Year from 1945 to 1947. How utterly absurd - once, she was asked how someone weighing 145 pounds (66 kg) could drive a golf ball 250 yards? Apparently her height was 1.7 m. She gamely replied, "You've got to loosen your girdle and let it rip."

Babe married "The Greek Hyena" George Zaharias, a Greek American professional wrestler, in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1938. It sucks - they were dismissed by authorities when they sought to adopt.

Babe became a "close friend" of fellow golfer Betty Dodd who she met in a 1950 amateur golf tournament in Miami. As Babe's marriage grew increasingly troubled, she spent more time with Dodd through touring together on the golf circuit. After playing in the inaugural Babe Zaharias Open tournament, in April 1953, Babe was diagnosed with cancer. Surgeons operated, but discovered that the tumour had spread to Babe's lymph nodes and was inoperable. Huge strength of character, 14 weeks after her surgery Babe returned to playing golf, and went on to winning her 3rd US Women's Open by a margin of twelve strokes.

For the last years of Babe's life, Betty moved in with her. Although they never used the word "lesbian" to describe their relationship, it seems likely that their relationship was indeed romantic. Babe's husband out lived Babe by 28 years and apparently married one of Babe's nurses several years before his death.

A salute: Babe's striking maxim: "You can’t win them all - but you can try."

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... a Polish-American track and field athlete who was born in Poland and raised in the USA (Cleveland, Ohio), becoming an American citizen in 1947. Aged 17, in 1927, she qualified for a place on the American Olympic team, however, she was not an American citizen and could not obtain citizenship under the age of 21, so she could not compete. That same year she joined the local branch of Sokół, a Polish sports and patriotic organization active among the Polish diaspora and at a Pan-Slavic meeting of the Sokół movement in Poznań, won her first championships, in the: 60, 100, and 200 meter sprints, plus the running broad jump.

Leading up to the 1932 Summer Olympics, Stella won American national championships in the 100-yard dash (1930), 220 yard dash (1930–31), and long jump (1930). Though she was offered American citizenship, two days prior to taking her oath of citizenship, she changed her mind and instead adopted Polish citizenship, offered to her by the Polish consulate in New York.

In the 1932 Summer Olympics (Los Angeles, USA), Stella represented Poland in the 100 m dash, wining the gold medal and equalling the current world record of 11.9 seconds. On the same day, she finished 6th out of 9 in the discus throw event. In the spring of 1933, she competed at the Championships of Warsaw, where she won 9 gold medals in track and field, including 80 metres hurdling, 4 × 200 relay, and long jump. in Poznań, Poland, on 17 September 1933, she beat two world records in one day: 7.4 seconds for the 60 m and 11.8 seconds for the 100 m.

At the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Stella defended her Olympic title for the 100 m, but was beaten by 0.02 seconds by Helen Stephens of the U.S. A Polish newspaper reporter accused Helen Stephens of being male and Helen was forced to submit to a genital inspection which confirmed her gender as female.

After the 1936 Olympic Games, Stella returned to the U.S. and resumed her amateur career. During and after World War II, she won American national championships in the long jump (1938–1946, 1948 and 1951), the 200 metres (1939–40 and 1942–1948), the discus throw (1941–42) and 100 metres (1943, 1944 and 1948).

In 1947, she became an American citizen, and later married aviation draftsman Harry Olson in 1956. On the 4 December 1980, Stella while buying ribbons for a welcoming ceremony for visiting Polish basketball players she was killed during an armed robbery in a parking lot in Cleveland. A regular autopsy showed that she had no uterus, an abnormal urethra, and a non-functioning, underdeveloped penis. Some sources suggest she also displayed female characteristics. Chromosome analysis revealed that most of her cells contained normal X and Y (male) chromosomes but some were X0 (containing only one X chromosome), resulting in XY gonadal dysgenesis.

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... 1936 Summer Olympics at Berlin. At the age of 20, in 1938, Ratjen competed at the European Athletics Championships, and won the gold medal with a world record jump of 1.67 m (5 ft 5.75 in). Later, Dora Ratjen was determined to... be male and/or intersex. Was Ratjen a hermaphrodite, a transvestite, or simply a boy whose sex had been incorrectly identified at birth?

Gender Confrontation:
On September 21, 1939, wearing a grey two-piece, skin-colored tights, and light-colored ladies shoes, Ratjen took an express train from Vienna to Cologne. A ticket inspector reported that there was a man dressed as a woman in his train. At around noon the train stopped at Magdeburg station. Apparently, Ratjen was stretching her legs on the platform when a policeman approached her and asked to see some ID and noticed how hairy her hands were. Ratjen pulled out an ID card from the European Championships, but the officer wasn't satisfied. He asked her to to accompany him to the police station. Though Ratjen showed official papers that proved their female gender, a doctor concluded that Ratjen was a man. The German government returned Ratjen’s gold medal.

Gender controversy:
In a Time magazine article it indicates that later, Stella worked for a time as a waiter in Hamburg and Bremen, and in that article his name was listed as Heinrich "Heinz" Ratjen. Apparently, "Dora" Ratjen changed his name to Heinrich, a name he had until he passed away in 2008.

Story 1:
(Christened) Dora's father, Heinrich Ratjen, stated in 1938: "When the child was born, the midwife called over to me, 'Heini, it's a boy!' But five minutes later she said to me, 'It is a girl, after all.'" That same year, Dora stated: "My parents brought me up as a girl [and] I therefore wore girl's clothes all my childhood. But from the age of 10 or 11 I started to realize I wasn't female, but male. However I never asked my parents why I had to wear women's clothes even though I was male."

Story 2:
There are rumours that Ratjen later spoke out, stating that the Nazis forced him to compete in the Olympics games to help win more medals for Germany at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

Note:

1968 – IOC institutes introduced sex testing / gender verification for all women athletes – naked athletes were inspected by a panel of medical doctors. It bears beyond belief! In 1966, two Russian women athletes, sisters Tamara and Irina Press, who had set 26 world records between 1959 and 1966, prompted concern regarding their "masculine" appearance and gold medal performances in track and field. They prompted concern about male athletes "masquerading" as women competitors. Some have suggested that the Press sisters were male or intersex while others suggest they were being injected with male hormones by the Soviet government in order to make them stronger. When gender verification was introduced both Press sisters ended their sports careers abruptly.

2000 – IOC institutes suspended mandatory sex testing for women athletes and instituted a "case by case" process when an individual athletes' sex is questioned.

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... and 1,500 freestyle, and was third, in the 100 free. She also won the 250 and 500 yard freestyles at the AAU indoors and won a bronze medal in the 400 free at the 1955 Pan American Games.

In 1978, Susan became an attorney for the Gay Community Services Center of Hollywood, and this led her to becoming a civil rights attorney for the Southern California ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), with a focus on gay and lesbian rights. She later came out as gay. She represented the ACLU on several important LGBT+ civil rights cases. Against the Boy Scouts of America she argued that Timothy Curran (aged 19), a journalism major at UCLA, was unfairly kicked out of the Boy Scouts after a series of articles on gay youth in Bay Area that appeared in the Oakland Tribune-Eastbay Today. She defended the Gay Games against the US Olympic Committee over the exclusive rights to the word Olympic in the United States. The event organisers were sued by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) under the U.S. Amateur Sports Act of 1978, which gave the United States Olympic Committee (USOC)

She also defended the Norton Sound "Eight" - in 1993, 19 women of The Norton Sound (a Naval ship) received letters of dismissal from the Navy for "unsuitability . . . because of participation in homosexual acts". Throughout this time, she was also an activist in the lesbian feminist movement, participating in organisations and events, such as the National Organization for Women and the West Coast Lesbian Conference.

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"... she won! There are too may titles and achievements to list here, but some include:
Wimbledon: 10 times
US Open: 5 times
Australian: 2 times
French Open: 1 time


Founder of:
The Women's Tennis Association
The Women's Sports Foundation.


Honours:
1967 - awarded the Associated Press Female Athlete of the Year
1987 - inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame
2003 - awarded the Philippe Chatrier Award, the International Tennis Federation (ITF)'s highest accolade
2013 - inducted into the National Gay and Lesbian Sports Hall of Fame
2018 - awarded BBC Sports Personality of the Year Lifetime Achievement Award
2022 - awarded the French Legion of Honour

She married Larry King in 1965 but three years later she realised that she was attracted to women. In 1971, she began a relationship with her secretary, Marilyn Barnett. Alas, this didn't work out and Billie Jean King was not only outed by her scoundrel ex-lover, Marilyn Barnett's "galimony" suit, Billie Jean King lost most of her endorsements. Afterwards, she fell in love with her doubles partner, Ilana Kloss, Billie Jean's marriage ended in 1987 and she married Ilana, in 2018.

PS Opps, I was in self denial that I was a lezza and didn't appreciate, among others, Billie Jean King's huge courage - in hindsight I truly, thank them so much!

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... played her first pro tournment. At age 19, Sandra Jane Haynie achieved her first professional title championship at the Austin Civitan Open. Thereafter, her achievements include: Women's PGA C'ship: 2 wins, U.S. Women's Open: 1 win and du Maurier Classic: 1 win. Sandra Haynie became an influential figure in the development of women's golf in America.

Bravo - Sandra, is an out lesbian and a cherished member of the World Golf Hall of Fame.

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... she broke both the men's and women's world record for open water distance swimming by completing a 102-mile (164 km) journey from the Bahamas' North Bimini Island to Juno Beach, Florida which took 27 and a half hours. Aged 64 years old, in 2013, she became the first person in history to swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage (110 mi or 177 km) and without stopping or getting any assistance - which took 52 hours, 54 minutes and 18.6 seconds (another world record).

Diana's mother was a great-granddaughter of Charlotte N. Winslow, the inventor of Mrs Winslow's Soothing Syrup, a popular American morphine-based medicine for children teething that was manufactured from 1849 until the 1930s. She is also a great-grandniece of women's-rights activist Laura Curtis Bullard. At the private Pine Crest School she was taught swimming by Olympian and Hall of Fame coach Jack Nelson who, she has said, molested her (as he did with other girls he coached) when she was 14 years old and continuing until she graduated from high school. Diana and a teammate first reported sexual assault incidents to the headmaster of Pine Crest, William McMillan, in 1971–72, who subsequently terminated Nelson's contract.

Diana was inducted into the United States National Women's Sports Hall of Fame in 1986 and to the International Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame Honoree in 1978. She is an out lesbian who has never let her sexual identity define her.

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... the UBC Thunderbirds, earning two consecutive National Interuniversity Sport titles and in 1974 was named B.C.'s University Athlete of the Year.

As captain, Betty Baxter led Team Canada at the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal – the first Canadian women's volleyball team to compete at the Olympics. Three years later, Betty was named the team's head coach of the National Volleyball Program – the first woman and Canadian to do it, according to Volleyball BC.

19 months into her position, and at the pinnacle of her career, Betty was fired by Volleyball Canada. The media had began to report rumours that she was lesbian and it is thought that she was fired because of her sexuality. Though she was not an out as lesbian at the time, she subsequently came out.

After taking time out Betty returned as a coach for women's volleyball club teams in Vancouver and served as board member and spokesperson for the 1990 Vancouver Gay Games. Betty cofounded the Canadian Association for the Advancement of Women in Sport and the National Coaching School for Women. Baxter subsequently worked as a professional volleyball coach. In 2021, Betty Baxter was inducted into the Volleyball BC Hall of Fame.

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... a sports school in Forst. In the 1970s, the Eastern bloc behind the "Iron Curtain" dominated world gymnastics. From the age of 16, Karin represented her native East Germany and won a staggering 17 medals at various prestigious events:

Olympic Games
1968 Olympic Games, Mexico City: 1 Silver for Uneven bars and 1 team Bronze
1972 Olympic Games, Munich: 2 Golds for Vault & Uneven bars, 2 Silvers for All-around & Team and 1 bronze for Balance beam


1970 World Championships, Slovenia
1 Gold - Uneven bars
2 Silvers - Vault and Team competition


1967 European Championships Amsterdam, The Netherlands
1 Silver - Uneven bars
1 Bronze - Vault


1969 European Championships Landskrona, Sweden
4 Golds - All-around, Uneven bars, Vault, Balance beam
1 Silver - Floor exercise

As the most successful German athlete at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Karin Büttner-Janz was named as GDR Sportswoman of the Year and awarded the title of Merited Master of Sport of the USSR, in 1972. In 2003, Karin Büttner-Janz was inducted into the International Gymnastics Hall of Fame.

Karin ended her competitive career to study medicine at The Humboldt University in East Berlin. During her postdoctoral research, with her colleague Kurt Schellnack she developed an artificial spine disk, known as the Charité Disc. In 2005, she became Extraordinary Professor at the Charité-Unviversitätsmedizin Berlin and from 2008 to 2009 she was president of the Spine Arthroplasty Society (later renamed to International Society for the Advancement of Spine Surgery).

Respect, she is not a shout it loud out lesbian.

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... one of the greatest tennis players of all time. Navratilova was ranked as the world No. 1 in singles for a total of 332 weeks and for a record 237 weeks in doubles, making her the only player in tennis history to have held the top spot in both disciplines for over 200 weeks.

Awards include:
2003 - BBC Sports Personality of the Year Lifetime Achievement Award
2006 - Czech Sport Legend Award
2009 - the Philippe Chatrier Award, the International Tennis Federation's (ITF) highest accolade
2013 - inducted into the National Gay and Lesbian Sports Hall of Fame.

Martina grew up in Czechoslovakia with tennis running in her family. Before the WW2, her grandmother, Agnes Semanska, was a tennis player for the Czechoslovak Federation and ranked No. 2 among Czech women during her amateur career. At the age of 17, Martina Navratilova won her first professional singles title in Orlando, Florida, in 1974. The following year, she was the runner-up at two major singles tournaments in 1975; the Australian Open (won by Goolagong) and the French Open (won by Chris Evert). After losing to Chris Evert in the semifinals of the US Open in September 1975, Martina went to the offices of the Immigration and Naturalization Service in New York City and asked for political asylum. Within a month, she received a green card and in 1981 became a US citizen. It was an incredible tough time for her as she could not visit her family and relatives in Czechoslovakia. (In 2008, she acquired Czech citizenship giving multiple citizenships.)

The same year became a United States citizen, Martina gave an interview to a New York Daily News sports reporter Steve Goldstein, during which she revealed that she had had a sexual relationship with Rita Mae Brown the author of Rubyfruit Jungle. Martina asked the reporter not to publish the article until she was ready to come out publicly. Trust not a reporter - the New York Daily News published the article that July. To firefight the unjust outing Martina and her girlfriend at the time, Nancy Lieberman (an American pro basketball player known as "Lady Magic"), gave an interview to Dallas Morning News columnist Skip Bayless, where Martina stated that she was bisexual and Lieberman identified herself as straight.

Since then Martina has re-identified herself as a lesbian and worked hard for gay rights. In 2000, Martina Navratilova received a National Equality Award from the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay and lesbian activist/lobbying group.

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... "Back then the LPGA always tried to steer us away from conversations about our sexuality. Bring it back to your golf, was the mantra. We had a lot of media training to keep away from our personal lives and focus on our performance on the course. But at the same time, we had this big campaign to promote the mothers on tour and how they balanced playing professionally while raising children. So, it was really a lonely way to live."

"We were fearful of losing what few endorsements we had. All the players knew who was gay and who was not. I think the administration and the rules officials, everyone within the traveling circus of the LPGA Tour knew. But nobody was coming out publicly because there was too much to lose."

Rosie has been in a life long partnership with her caddie Carrie Sexton. In 2013, Carrie received the inaugural Colleen Walker Spirit Award, at the Legends season-closing tournament. The Colleen Walker Spirit Award was created in honour of Colleen, who lost her battle to cancer and to recognise Legends Tour members and associates who best exemplify Walker's determination and spirit.

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... novice league, but only after her mother threatened legal action as league convenors were opposed to a girl playing in the boys' league. Eventually she was welcomed to the Central Ontario Women's Hockey League where she played from 1980 until 1998, finishing her career in the National Women's Hockey League.

Angela played in the first women's world ice hockey championship in 1987. In 1990, she was selected to compete in Canada's National Team at the inaugural IIHF World Women's Championship, held in Ottawa . There she led the team to the gold medal and scored a record-setting 11 goals in 5 games. She also led the Women's Team to gold medals in 1992, 1994, and 1997.Controversially Angela was excluded from Team Canada Women's Team for the 1998 Winter Olympics.

Honours include:
2005 - Female Hockey Breakthrough Award by Hockey Canada
2006 - Ontario Colleges Athletic Association Hall of Fame
2006 - Black Hockey and Sports Hall of Fame
2008 - IIHF (International Ice Hockey Federation) Hall of Fame
2009 - Canada's Sports Hall of Fame
2010 - Hockey Hall of Fame
2021 - named to the Order of Hockey in Canada by Hockey Canada

As a teen Angela sussed she is lesbian. She met her partner, Ange, in 1994, and the couple formalised their relationship in a commitment ceremony two years later.

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... second place at the Bells Beach Surf Classic in Victoria, Australia. By the end of the following year she was ranked number 3 in the world. She had her first professional win at Huntington Beach in California at the start of 1985 and later that year won the World Cup in Hawaii. After suffering a back injury, she retired in 2002. In 2020, Jodie was inducted into the Australian Surfing Hall of Fame.

During her career female surfers faced a fight for any kind of professional recognition: on tour, in the media and in sponsorship. Jodie's reputation as a photogenic and a big wave rider led to sponsorship deals that gave her some financial security.

Rather than not hiding that she was in a stable, long-term relationship with a woman Jodie made the decision to come out on tour and thus became the first openly-gay World Tour surfer. In an interview for abc.net.au Jodie disclosed: "We were second-class citizens in a way... And of course being, on top of that, gay. Well, no-one really came out... I know that the sponsors, when they found out I was gay — I heard it first-hand from someone — that they weren't really happy about it... They needed to cull some people, so they decided that I probably would be the first on the chopping block."

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... South African Web site Mamba Online that Karen is happy to be identified as a gay athlete. During the Olympics Karen gave Outsports her first public statement about her sexual orientation:

"I am an archer, middle aged and a lesbian. I am also cranky before my first cup of coffee. None of these aspects define who I am, they are simply part of me. I am fortunate that my sexual identity is not an issue, and I don’t suffer the level of discrimination and violence that black lesbians in South Africa do. I look forward to the day when this is a non-issue and as relevant as my eye color or favorite sushi."

Bravo!

Though Karen placed 34, she bravely and with humour, became only the second South African Summer Olympian to come out, following beach volleyballer Leigh-Ann Naidoo in 2004 but is the first archer to do so.

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... points scored (2,655), rebounds (1,357), scoring average (21.2 ppg), rebounding average (10.9 rpg), field goals made (1,091) and attempted (2,099), free throws made (473) and attempted (641), and blocked shots (293). In 2013, she was inducted into the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame.

Susan is the first active Amrican WNBA (Women's National Basketball Association) player to admit the fact that she was gay. In an article for fanbyte.com she said "But after that, I got a bunch of requests to do stories with magazines and profiles. We were on a playoff run, and I had the option in that moment. The PR person said, "Do you want to do these?" And I was like, "You know what, it's too much attention away from our team." I did my statement, and that was it. I didn't want to be a spokesperson, because that's all I had to say about it. At the end of the day, I Google search myself and the first thing I see is that I'm gay [laughs]. Not basketball. Which is fine." Hmmmmm.

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