‘A League of Their Own’ Co-Creator: We Can’t Lose Queer Film and TV Projects Amid Studio Caution

When I was a kid, I had the feeling I was undercover as a boy. I was on a little league baseball team called the Chesapeake Bagel Bakery Bagels, which means I was a Bagel, though I never felt like I deserved the name. I was certain that the other boys on the team were going to look at me and see that I was somehow different, that I was attracted to them and wanted to tear their circular-bread-emblazoned uniforms off, that I was a Danish in a Bagel uniform. I was terrible at being in the closet. When we played Truth or Dare, I would dare my friends to kiss me, and then intentionally laugh loudly to emphasize how hilarious and not at all sexy I found that idea.

I was big, and awkward, and I used to have a recurring dream that I was an animated character in a world of live-action people, but none of them would tell me I was animated, so I just walked around trying to be a person like everyone else. For years, I told these stories and they ended, after a couple of handjobs in the high school cafeteria bathroom and the discovery of James Baldwin’s Another Country, with coming out as a gay man.

Joan Didion wrote in The White Album, “We tell ourselves stories to live.” Part of what she meant, I think, is that we come to rely on our stories as a kind of infrastructure; we build lives, friendships and marriages on top of them. They become foundational, tectonic in ways that are deeper than we understand. And like anything tectonic, it was alarming for me when the stories I’d always told myself about being a gay man started to move.

When I first heard the word “nonbinary,” I didn’t know what it meant aside from the fact that I was no longer in my 20s. At first I watched the beautiful rethinking of gender that Gen Z queer culture hath wrought as if it were happening on the other side of a generational glass wall. And then one time, I was telling my “coming out” stories to friends college age daughter, and when I said “I felt like I was undercover as a boy” I could see on their face a little shift of the eyes — They heard it differently than others had. And I started to listen to my old stories in a new way: Like the dream about being an animated character, I looked back and remembered that character hadn’t been a boy. They’d been gender neutral. At some point when we were in Pittsburgh shooting A League Of Their Own, I told my wonderful husband that maybe if I was in my 20s, I’d think about identifying as nonbinary. And in his wonderful-husband way, he just said, “does that mean you are?” “Pass me the dog,” I answered, as I tried to pretend that his words hadn’t just rung a bell between my heart and my stomach.

It made me wonder where my understanding of myself as a gay man had come from. In Another Country, or Angels in America, or everything by Terrence McNally, I had found something that rhymed enough with my own experiences that I could feel I belonged to it. But looking back, I realize I never quite felt completely reflected in those stories; it was as if I’d been given half a mirror.

In the absence of a full one, I believed I was seeing my whole reflection. We know that representation matters because 89 percent of queer people say seeing themselves in TV and film helps them understand who they are and makes them feel better about themselves. We know intellectually that large numbers of queer people say that seeing themselves in stories, being given the infrastructure of understanding themselves, has helped them with depression and even helped them stay alive. But I’ve had a I’ve had a personal experience of that in the last few years, as I’ve been part of retelling a set of stories that were part of my childhood, and finding a better mirror for myself within them.

I grew up on Penny Marshall’s A League of Their Own and loved it as an unpretentious, funny, outsider-y piece of Americana. But as Abbi Jacobson and I, along with our beautiful team of writers, started to research the stories behind the movie when working on the Prime Video series, it became clear that sitting underneath it was a history that was new to me. It was joyful, emotional, warm and, yes, Americana — and at the same time, it was deeply and authentically queer, and centered on women of color who were left out of the film. In the process, we met an incredible group of queer people in their 80s and 90s, including a woman named Maybelle Blair, who shared her stories with us, and when we asked her what it was like for her to find that so many of the other players were like her, she said, “oh it was a party.” A party! For queer women in 1943! Of course, there was a lot of pain underneath that statement, including a story about running from a bar raid that made its way into the show.

We also found incredible stories of what we might now call trans and non-binary people using the new wartime factory uniforms to express themselves authentically and finding each other in the army or wartime industries. Hearing not just the hardship of their stories but the incredible joy, how they navigated sexuality and gender norms to live as they wanted, to fall in love, to play the game they wanted, was transformative for all of us. For me, feeling the courage behind the stories of gender-nonconforming people in the 1940s, and along with our amazing team reflecting them into the stories of Max (Chanté Adams), Bertie (Lea Robinson) and Jess (Kelly McCormack), also made me understand that I wasn’t seeing myself wholly.

A huge part of my experience had nothing to do with the show, but telling those hidden stories with other queer people also made me feel profoundly not alone, a personal experience of why representation matters. And I wasn’t alone. Since Season 1 of the show was released, Abbi, me, Desta Reff and our amazing cast have experienced a response that’s unlike anything I’ve ever felt or seen. It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve been a part of — Even 10 months after the release of the show, we get dozens of messages, art, poetry, from people who watched the show and changed their pronouns, who watched with their parents or grandparents and came out to them. More than anything about the show itself, to me it proved an intense need for these kind of stories. Which makes sense, of course, if you look at what’s happening to LGBTQIA+ lives in the world around us.

In a museum recently, I was talking to an art historian, looking at some beautiful old pieces with strong queer undercurrents, when she said: “The truth is, for the last century, when times move forward, the museum has brought these paintings out. And when the country gets bad, we move them into storage in back.” We’re living in one of those times now. The Human Rights Campaign has for the first time declared that LGBTQIA+ people are living in “a state of emergency” in the U.S. Our lives and our identities are being politicized in a way that they haven’t been since the 1980s through the more than 500 LGBTQIA+ hate bills that have been introduced in state legislatures this year, and through the attacks on corporations that support queer rights, as well as prominent queer figures like Dylan Mulvaney.

These efforts are having their intended effects — corporations and brands are beginning to assume a neutral stance on our rights and existence rather than incur the wrath of these customers. GLAAD reports a decline in LGBTQIA+ representation in media this year, and I, along with most other queer writers, can tell you personally that the atmosphere has turned frigid in the past year and a half, and A League of Their Own has been one of the lucky ones. While states are passing “Don’t Say Gay” laws, we’ve seen a corresponding tidal wave of cancellations of shows with strong queer characters — especially female, trans and nonbinary characters. Creators now hear constantly about the need to find shows that are bigger, broader, that aren’t catering to a “niche” audience, without deep recognition of the fact that queer people are being attacked by some portion of that “broad” audience. And when we’re talking about “global TV,” there’s little recognition that LGBTQIA+ rights are still in their infancy in many of the countries that now represent the growth opportunities for platforms. 

How does this affect the expectations of queer shows domestically or globally? What I hear now from my executive friends at multiple networks is that the new logic is that predominantly queer shows won’t work in this new age of political attacks on LGBTQIA+ people unless they are extremely cheap. If they have a price-tag equivalent to the average premium drama, they won’t work on the efficiency metrics that are now used by most networks to determine an approximate cost per view. Our stories — in particular stories that touch on gender identity — are increasingly seen as too “controversial” by too much of the audience, which is exactly what the forces mobilizing against us hope to accomplish. 

This moment is a tipping point for queer representation. What we know is that, if our stories are “moved to the back of the museum” for now, we will see an effect. Teenagers coming of age, 100 year olds like Maybelle Blair, and people like me won’t have the profound impacts that diverse and authentic queer storytelling can bring: A more full mirror to see yourself in, a greater sense of confidence and of self, and a connection to a bigger community and to our own history. If Joan Didion is right and we “tell ourselves stories in order to live,” then what happens when we lose those stories?

Will Graham, who recently came out as nonbinary, is the co-creator of A League of Their Own and showrunner of Daisy Jones & The Six on Prime Video.