Every few months, I learn that another one of my former soccer teammates is Queer via Instagram.
It’s usually not in a formal coming out post, which I think we left behind in the 2010s — more often, she/they simply posts a lady on Valentine’s Day or a selfie from the sidelines of a pride parade, a bi flag in stripes of glitter on her cheek.
I'll send a screenshot to my best friend, one of the only out lesbians I ever encountered in a decade of youth soccer, like, “another one?!”
I don’t know why I’m surprised — it’s women’s soccer. From Bend it Like Beckham to Abby Wambach and her wife’s World Cup-winning kiss, the sport is famously gay as hell. ‘Playing for the other team’ (like, soccer team) is one of the most obvious ways to say dyke without saying it. But for years, I thought I was alone.
This seems like a huge oversight, considering that I grew up in Seattle, walking across rainbow-painted crosswalks from one oat milk-coded coffee shop to another one across the street. I feel extremely lucky to know that, for the most part, what actually mattered to my soccer community was how many goals I scored, not my sexuality.
Still, a couple offhand homophobic comments from teammates over the years made me retreat from the moments of bonding that turn a team into a community. More pervasively, there were codes of locker room femininity I never quite grasped. What’s the point of putting on mascara or straightening your hair before a soccer game?
I didn’t have the typical gay experience in the high school locker room of noticing a friend’s sports bra and realizing — oh. By high school, I already knew I was Queer, and I assumed my shaggy short hair made it clear to everyone too. So I was careful to look away while we were changing to avoid making anyone uncomfortable.
After showering, I snuck glances at the team captain doing her eyeliner in the mirror. She worked with a type of easy, precise femininity that terrified me, made me awkward in its presence. Sometimes our eyes would meet, and I would look away.
I looked down so resolutely that I never really looked at anyone at all.
While they were making assumptions about me, I was making assumptions about them too. I never considered that the captain or the goalie or apparently like half of the team were crushing and flirting and otherwise discovering themselves on a parallel track to mine.
Some of my glossy ponytailed teammates are now in toxic Queer polyamorous relationships at liberal arts schools. Some went on to join sororities. Some of them might even be in toxic Queer relationships in sororities.
There’s no one way to be an athlete, and there’s no one way to be Queer.
Seeing a picture of somebody who was bitchy to me in high school posing with a flag sometimes gives me a knee-jerk sense of resentment. Mostly though, I feel chagrined that I couldn’t see beyond our differences at the time. I lost touch with most of those people and I regret the connections, or at least recognition, that could have been.
Still, I’m glad that we all seemingly ended up in a similar place: living more fully as ourselves, or at least hard-launching our girlfriends on Instagram.