Previously on Femslash Friday: Mean Girls’ Lesbian Layers.
A League Of Their Own is part of a cadre of movies that made up the definitely-feminist, almost-lesbian boom of the early ’90s, alongside Thelma & Louise, Tank Girl, and Fried Green Tomatoes. A League Of Their Own is to a particular type of women what The Shawshank Redemption is to a particular type of man — if it’s on TV, we’re going to drop whatever in order to watch it to the end, and it’s almost always on TV.
Rather like Thelma & Louise, Tank Girl, and Fried Green Tomatoes, A League Of Their Own looks like a movie that was filmed in a separatist lesbian paradise, then four days before wide release, someone told the producers to try to make every female character plausibly straight. The compulsory heterosexuality is a sloppy afterthought — Rosie O’Donnell gets a boyfriend back home, Geena Davis pines after a distant husband, Madonna gets to dance with a few drunk soldiers, and everyone prayed that would be enough. No one bothered to do anything about Lori Petty’s character; it was too late to try.
There are certain phrases — “confirmed bachelor,” “keeps to herself,” “career woman,” “eccentric gentleman,” “as single as they come” — that connote queer plausible deniability; to a straight person they might just refer to someone a bit odd, but to the right listener it’s the same as screaming “GAY GAY GAY.”
Lori Petty’s Kit is all ears and elbows and mud-streaked determination and she’s GAY GAY GAY, and that’s marvelous. Remember how she gets announced on the field?
“Then there’s pretty Dottie Henson, who plays like Gehrig, and looks like Garbo. Uh-uh, fellas, keep your mitts to yourself; she’s married. And there’s her kid sister Kit, who’s as single as they come.”
Lori Petty in “Tank Girl,” with her girlfriend Jet Girl (YES HER GIRLFRIEND I REFUSE TO ACKNOWLEDGE HER KANGAROO BOYFRIEND [it’s a weird movie])
The tension between Dottie and Kit (“This is our daughter Dottie, and this is our other daughter, Dottie’s sister”) can be read as any number of ways — Dottie’s pretty and married and talented, Kit’s scrawny and single and a difficult try-hard, Dottie successfully reads as feminine and straight and Kit doesn’t, Dottie’s a big ol’ lesbian and Kit’s an enormous ol’ lesbian. Take your pick.
Lest we forget, Josephine D’Angelo (the real-life ball player whose life inspired A League Of Their Own) was an out lesbian who was fired from the league for getting a “butchy” haircut. However you want to define Dottie, you have to admit her eyebrows are at the very least bicurious. Those eyebrows have gotten at least one Rockford Peach out of her blouse.
Obviously, any movie set in a nearly all-female environment (all the boys are off at war, WHERE THEY BELONG) or focusing on women who play sports is going to have, you know, a lesbian skeleton; whether or not the movie pings depends on how well the gun-shy producers can hang a few heterosexual scarves to cover up those gay, gay bones. And, you know, there are not so many movies focused on women’s non-romantic relationships (with their sisters, with their friends, with their employers, with themselves) out there that I want to take away one of the very few that do, so if you want to keep this, straight ladies, I’m not going to get mad.
But replace “baseball” with “lesbianism” in the following exchange, just as a fun thought experiment:
Jimmy Dugan: This is chickenshit, Dottie, if you want to go back to Oregon and make a hundred babies, great, I’m in no position to tell anyone how to live. But sneaking out like this, quitting, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life. Baseball is what gets inside you. It’s what lights you up, you can’t deny that.
Dottie Hinson: It just got too hard.
Jimmy Dugan: It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard…is what makes it great.
This pose is known as Queen Of The Dykes
AND THERE’S MORE. I would like to posit a slightly different angle on the Madonna/O’Donnell (MADONNELL) relationship, one that will not require you to adjust your set in the slightest. It is a difference in degrees, not in kind. They are presented as a pair of boisterous, working-class best friends — Madonna is the TOUGH SLUT to Rosie’s BRASSY BROAD, and they brawl together like the Titans of old. They fight out of an superabundance of energy and joy; they fight as gods play.
Their relationship comes across less Lucy-and-Ethel from I Love Lucy and more like Ralph-and-Alice from The Honeymooners. It’s all slap-slap-kiss (with the kiss remaining firmly off-screen); half of their squabbles are about Madonna’s sexuality (“Every man here has seen your bosoms”) and Rosie’s frustration at her love of male attention.
You don’t fight like that with your sex-loving best friend, you fight like that with your charismatic girlfriend whose flirting and experience makes you jealous and lonely. NOT THAT I WOULD KNOW.
I was once thrown out of a bar in Pasadena after becoming convinced the employee attempting to clean up a spill in the vicinity of my lady-friend was in fact attempting to hit on her because he did not respect our relationship. He was not; he was trying to pick up glass. I spent a few hours on the curb waiting for her until she was ready to come home. The fault, in retrospect, was largely mine. I have been Rosie O’Donnell. Dating Madonna is like dating a meteor — it is a struggle to keep up and you are as dazzled by the light she gives off as everyone else. When she goes, you are quickly left behind.
Tags: a league of their own, femslash fridays, lesbians everywhere, lgbt
The last paragraph.
Seriously, that’s my Friday done, and also, Toasties, if you haven’t been listening to this you may want to go ahead and do so:
raespoon.bandcamp.com/album/i-cant-keep-all-of-our-secrets
Oh, man, this was my running/walking playlist when I was doing Zombies, Run! last year. It’s so good. Now I want to go running even though that would be a terrible idea because my feet have issues and it’s pouring rain.
It is verboten at work because it makes me want to cry A LOT.
love rae spoon!
“However you want to define Dottie, you have to admit her eyebrows are at the very least bicurious. Those eyebrows have gotten at least one Rockford Peach out of her blouse.”
This is an A+ pair of sentences. Also, this movie forever and ever and ever (plus flashbacks to sixth grade, when I went around singing “This Used to Be My Playground” and writing tearfully in my journal. THIS MOVIE FOREVER.)
My week – nay, my life – has been leading up to this post.
This is beautiful.
Hey who wants to sing their fight song with me?
gather round
We are the members of the All-American league, we come from cities near and far!
We have Canadians, Irish ones, and Swedes
We’re one for all, we’re all for one, we’re all-American!
Each girl stands, her head so proudly high
Her motto, Do or Die.
She’s not the one to need or use an aaaaaliiiiiiibiiiiiiii.
This was literally just on television the other day and I obviously dropped everything and watched it
MY BOSOMS JUST FELL OUT
I’m with you on Kit and Madonna/Rosie, but I think they do too good of a job with Dottie’s heterosexuality. I always read temptation that was pulling her away from the far off milquetoast husband to be a combination of baseball and bad-news Jimmy, with whom she had some excellent sexual tension.
Everything else is spot on. I think it can still be a movie about female friendships while still having lesbian undertones.
Dottie and her husband have zero chemistry. He’s a plot device at best. And yes, Geena Davis and Tom Hanks have great, screwball chemistry. But I always saw it in a buddy movie sort of way. Like they connect on the level of mutual passion for baseball. Jimmy recognizes her ball player soul.
Tom Hanks does not belong in this movie. Tom Hanks, who I love, does NOTHING FOR ME in this movie.
Bill Pullman and that guy who Marla marries are so very superfluous. Why marry Marla off? I remember thinking as a kid, “That’s not right.” I fast forward through all the boyfriend scenes in Whip It. Why superfluous men in women’s sports movies?
Tom Hanks is the man trying to remain relevant in the sisterhood, knowing that the patriarchy has left him behind, and that he doesn’t understand the rules of this other society, with its dames and its skirts and its crying in baseball. He knows baseball; he understands baseball; baseball has never let him down. But he doesn’t know baseball the way these ladies play it, and he can never be as important to them as they are to each other, and he knows. He knows this, and it terrifies him.
Sexual tension with a lesbian. Yeah— Nadine would have been the best ‘boyfriend’ I ever had. I worshiped her. She turned me on like a—- something or other very ON . What a surprise it was to find myself wishing she were a man before we got to second base and having to say so. She said, “A tiger can’t change his stripes.”
Damn it!
signed,
hopelessly heterosexual and still wondering why sometimes— Why? Why? Why?
Madonna and Rosie are Maureen and Joanne from Rent before Rent was even a twinkle in Jonathan Larson’s eye.
By the way I just wanted to say, I have the same thing with Naomi Watts as I do with Michael Fassbender.
I absolutely love this movie!
My best friend LOVES this movie, and I have not yet seen it, because I am a piece of dirt on the bottom of a shoe. I’ve been trying to convert her to Toastism for a while now, but I suspect this post may tip the balance in my favor.
Finally the Femslash Friday I was born to read. *catches ball in bare hand-claw, glaring eternally*
This movie is about my hometown of Rockford, Illinois!! My grandfather grew up there and he used to go see the Peaches play. I have a Peaches t-shirt and a Peaches poster and I love this movie more than anything and will drop everything to watch it any time it’s on. Both because baseball and because hometown.
Other things from Rockford include:
-Cheap Trick (we call them “the Hometown Boys”)
-Sock monkeys
-Fasteners of all varieties (we’re–no joke–“the SCREW CAPITAL OF THE WORLD”)
-the voice of The Little Mermaid
-Michelle Williams of Destiny’s Child
-other things
It’s a manufacturing town on hard times these days and its violent crime rate is higher than Chicago’s….so send some love Rockford’s way, why dontcha. Bring the kiddies.
I am very happy indeed that Cheap Trick are in fact the Rockford Peaches.
Sock monkeys?!
Hahahaha I got into a fight (read, sat there in stunned silence as I was bitched out) with my boyfriend last night because we were playing pool and I was talking to the lady playing pool at the next table. She was a nice Aussie! She was cute! We were discussing pool vs. snooker. But then all of the sudden “YOU AREN’T EVEN PAYING ATTENTION TO THE GAME and blah blah blah blah” and what I’m saying is that my boyfriend is Rosie O’Donnell and I am Madonna and there is now exactly one instance in my life that I can be compared to Madonna and it makes me happy.
What does everyone think about Marla?? I never really gave any thought to her sexuality because I was too busy crying at how everyone was mean to her and how hard her dad tried to raise her in a way where she wouldn’t be ostracized, in his mind, and how much he loved her etc etc. But the characters in the movie put quite a lot of effort into making her more traditionally feminine. And she gets married to a man, too, right? So many questions now.
I totally see Marla as gay. She reads more butch to me than the others combined. I don’t know what to make of the whole scene where they put a dress on her and get her drunk so she can meet some guy – it seems like an outside choice to make the movie less gay. Although when I saw it in the theater, I really wanted her to be happy and what’s his name at least seemed to appreciate her.
I mean, you can be awkward and unfeminine and still be neither a lesbian nor a transperson.
I think Marla welcomed the help to be more feminine, since her dad was clueless. The movie shows her learning to be confident and expressive because she no longer has to fill the role of the son her father never had.
Do you need a good cry? A cathartic Friday release? YOU’RE WELCOME: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtChKjaVEdM
This is perfect.
Also, I have gotten into more than one (yelling) argument with dudes (and ladies, but usually dudes) who say that A League of Their Own isn’t an “inspirational” sports movie because Dottie “lets” Kit win by purposefully dropping the ball. I say this is absolutely not true, and we would not even be having this conversation if it was a movie about brothers. Ninety-nine times out of 100, Dottie would have held on to the ball, but this one time she didn’t. Because no one can be perfect all the time, and this one time, Kit was better. I have a lot of feelings about this movie, but this is something I will argue to my death. (And if anyone knows that this is not true from dvd commentary/director’s interviews/etc., please do not tell me and burst my bubble.)
I have learned through careful trial and error that the ending of A Leage of Their Own is just something you should never discuss within your friendsgroup if you want to keep the peace. Blood will be shed.
I agree with you and will stand by your argument to the death. However, I think your perspective on this varies on whether or not you were the ‘Golden Child’ in your family. My little sister is ‘Dottie’ to my parents and she believes it was on purpose. I identified more with Kit’s feeling of inferiority so I think she really dropped it.
Which bar in Pasadena? Most of those bars tolerate a surprising amount of shit given that they’re located in a town where you can’t park on the street overnight.
Help, I’m stuck here gazing rapturously at that picture from Tank Girl.
birds do it, bees do it
oh my god the sibling issues just get more painful every year WHY, MOVIE, WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS
Femslash Fridays make me super happy, as does this movie. Love, love, love.
Also, not to add more to your plate, but have you looked at the new Sailor Moon anime? The second episode is FULL of longing looks and not-well-hidden subtext between Ami and Usagi. If it’s something you’re interested in, of course.
My favourite moment is in the climactic game, when Dottie comes up to bat, and the announcer says, “Big Dottie Henson strides to the plate”, as we watch Geena Davis do just that, with killer swagger. Something about the explicit use of “big” always sends shivers down my spine.
Mallory, you will get into heaven on the strength of the lesbian skeleton metaphor alone. ” . . .how well the gun-shy producers can hang a few heterosexual scarves to cover up those gay, gay bones.” Bliss. Also, god bless you for the Queen of the Dykes photo. (I don’t know why all the religious references, I’m an atheist.)
There’s no atheism in baseball!
That must be it!
I’m such a failure at lesbianism in terms of the necessary benchmarks: Don’t understand the appeal of “Closer to Fine,” liked but faded out on Ani, saw this movie and thought it was nice enough and all but not in a feelsy way. Oh, and not a lot of girlfriends, which is also kind of key (zero boyfriends, though). Maybe I’m Marla, as someone once suggested, and I just need a man and makeover. I’m hanging the future of my sexual orientation on the next time this comes on TV. I’ll report back.
I'm such a failure at lesbianism in terms of the necessary benchmarks: Don't understand the appeal of "Closer to Fine," liked but faded out on Ani, saw this movie and thought it was nice enough and all but not in a feelsy way. Oh, and not a lot of girlfriends, which is also kind of key (zero boyfriends, though). Maybe I'm Marla, as someone once suggested, and I just need a man and makeover. I'm hanging the future of my sexual orientation on the next time this comes on TV. I'll report back.
I barely have words for how much this article delighted me. Are you going to do “Fried Green Tomatoes” one day, or is it just too gay already to bother?
This post inspired me to finally watch this movie properly — I had seen every scene in it, variously and in totally random order, throughout my childhood, but never actually sat down and seen it start to finish.
To be honest it mostly just made me really emotional about the fact that my baby sister is moving to college in a week, but, you know. Lori Petty and Geena Davis’ eyebrows are great too.
I realize now that I’ve been a Dottie/Mae shipper since before I even knew the word “lesbian”. I want a sequel that takes place about twenty to twenty five years later, long after the Ladies’ Leagues have been disbanded, with the two of them living in a cute little apartment in Greenwich Village and kicking major ass at Stonewall!
I want the exact same thing, but with Doris/Mae! They’re basically married already. It just makes sense. (Also, I figure both Madonna and Rosie could really use a movie of this caliber on their resumes at this point in their respective careers. Am I wrong?)
I had all the feels for this film in middle school/early high school. And the cassette single. A “Fried Green Tomatoes” Femslash Friday will have me in tears. Bring it Mallory.
Mallory, I think I am falling slowly in love with you
THAT’S WHERE I RECOGNIZE LOLLY FROM!!!
That’s been bothering me for a while.