Sports Edition II: Rugby and the Lesbian Network
In this three-part series, I’m looking at stories from women who found community, love, and political activation through three different sports: softball, rugby, and martial arts. For today’s issue, a warning that I describe some homophobic violent threats.
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Leona Thomas first met other lesbian women through sports—ice hockey, to be precise. It was the 1980s, and she was a college student at the University of Pennsylvania. Her community quickly expanded beyond campus when she joined the Philadelphia Women’s Rugby Club, which included members from all over the city.
Practice was a couple times a week, and there was usually a game on the weekend, which might have been out of town and involved several hours of travel. There would often be parties afterward, and crashing at someone’s house after that. A real community formed around this sport.
Leona came to rely on that network one day in an emergency. She had started seeing one of her housemates, who became her first real girlfriend. When one of their other housemates found out about their relationship, they attacked Leona’s girlfriend with a knife in her own home. Angry and afraid, Leona called some of her teammates to ask if they could help them to find a place to stay.
“I had a place to stay in less than 20 minutes,” she remembers. “The next morning when we got to the [rugby] field, we had places to stay for the next several weeks while we figured it out. It was even done before I got on the field.”
This kind of community building and natural networks—the informal “lesbian hotline”—are part of what defines this community for Leona. One of its defining traits, she says, is that “there wasn’t one leader. There wasn’t one area. You had people and women who decided that something was important, and they formed up to create something that they saw was needed.”
Today, Leona has been a lesbian activist for over 34 years, and she is a proud lesbian parent and grandparent.