The WNBA finals were in full swing, and the lesbians were playing to win. In a stunning upset, the Minnesota Lynx team beat the New York Liberty 95-93 in overtime in game one of the WNBA finals on Oct. 10. It was a nail-biter as the Lynx flipped a 15-point deficit into an amazing turnaround in the literal last five minutes of play.
The win — the biggest turnaround in WNBA history — prompted Minnesota coach Cheryl Reeve to voice her excitement. The crowd went wild. Shooting guard Courtney Williams — who had 23 points, including a four-point play with 5.5 seconds left in regulation, and thus led Minnesota to the historic win — told ESPN, “The basketball gods were on our side tonight.”
Or maybe the goddesses. Williams, like about a third or more of the WNBA, is an out lesbian. She and her partner N’Shya appeared on season two of the limited-series “Pride is Love,” and N’Shya posted on Instagram for Williams’ 30th birthday in May, “Happy 30th birthday to my person!! My best friend, my lover, my protector and diary. The last two years with you have been amazing and I’m so honored to experience you. 30 is CRAZY and so fitting. I’ve seen you grow so much in the last two years.”
Couples like Williams and N’Shya are not rare in the WNBA — rather they have become a comfortable norm, with Alyssa Thomas and DeWanna Bonner, NaLyssa Smith and DiJonai Carrington among WNBA couples.
In a study by Interbasket in 2022 of out players, the numbers calculated to 38% of the league. And while those numbers have fluctuated year to year, the 2024 season currently features 42 out players across 12 teams, with only the Chicago team lacking an out player.
Homophobia from the right
Clay Travis, founder of OutKick, and a controversial right-wing sports commentator, stirred outrage in July when he told Fox News that then-rookie “Caitlin Clark is a white heterosexual woman in a Black lesbian league and they resent and are jealous of all of the attention and the shoe deal that she got.”
Is the league largely Black, like the NBA? Yes. Are lesbians a backbone of the WNBA? Also yes. Is there anti-Clark sentiment from lesbian players or fans? No — that’s a false narrative spun by the right to breed homophobia about a sport and league that has garnered tremendous excitement in recent months due in part to Clark’s stunning performances in her final college season.
Coming out in the WNBA
The New York Liberty’s Sue Wicks was the first WNBA player to come out publicly in 2002. When Phoenix Mercury star Brittney Griner came out in 2013, she opened the door to other current players coming out, notably Williams, Sue Bird, Layshia Clarendon, Jonquel Jones, Breanna Stewart, Diana Taurasi, Dewanna Bonner and Elena Delle Donne.
Last summer, New York Liberty’s Breanna Stewart announced that she and Lynx star Napheesa Collier, who is straight, are forming a new professional women’s league called Unrivaled. The league aims to give WNBA players an alternative to playing overseas during the off-season, addressing the significant pay disparity—where WNBA athletes earn just a tenth of what their male counterparts make. The arrest and prosecution of Olympic gold medalist and WNBA all-star Griner as a political prisoner in Russia where she led a team, UMMC Ekaterinburg, for a half dozen seasons made all WNBA players wary of their commitments abroad.
The Unrivaled league plans to start in 2025. The initial season will be run from January through March and will be played in Miami. In July, both Stewart and Collier were formally announced to appear and play in the inaugural season of Unrivaled.
The Unrivaled alliance underscores how in real life, rather than right-wing outrage politics, there’s no conflict between lesbian and straight players in the WNBA. But that took work and a decision from the league management itself. In May 2014, in advance of Pride Month, the WNBA launched a Pride campaign, becoming the first professional sports league in the U.S. to openly reach out to LGBTQ+ fans — and potential players.
In 2011, WNBA president Laurel J. Richie told then NBA deputy commissioner Adam Silver that outreach to the LGBTQ+ community was a good marketing strategy. Then came Richie’s Pride initiative for the league in 2014.
In 2022, Connecticut Sun guard Jasmine Thomas, who was drafted into the WNBA in 2011, told ESPN, “There are players around the league who have identified as part of the LGBTQ+ community but have not always felt accepted or that the workplace was an inviting place to be able to share that.”
Thomas added, “It felt at one time like they were afraid to share that part of our experiences. Now they’re embracing it.”
Thomas, who is out and who retired from the league in January, now works as an ambassador for Athletes Ally. The group’s mission is to end homophobia and transphobia in sports and to activate the athletic community to exercise their leadership to champion LGBTQI+ equality.
Why is the WNBA so gay?
Many arguments can be made for why women’s sports are more openly gay than men’s sports. Do lesbians and queer women and teens gravitate toward sports? Possibly. There’s a long history of lesbians in women’s professional sports with notables like Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova becoming household names as both tennis icons and out lesbians in a time when there were few of those.
But team sports especially have been welcoming for young queer women — a refuge from enforced femininity and a more relaxed concept of gender identity and also sexual orientation. Did it take outreach from the WNBA to draw in out women? No. But it certainly made it more comfortable for those already in the league to come out.
There are no out players in the NBA and only a few have ever come out. So whatever the WNBA is doing, it’s working for the sport and the league, which has won more Olympic medals than the men and continues to breed more and more excitement — suggesting the audiences are embracing the players, not the false narratives of homophobia and racism.