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The Lavender Locker Room: 3000 Years of Great Athletes whose Sexual Orientation was Different
by Patricia Nell Warren
Wildcat Press
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The Lavender Locker Room: 3000 Years of Great Athletes whose Sexual Orientation was Different, by Patricia Nell Warren (Wildcat Press, $24.95, 368 pages)

This is a terrific book-- informative, breezily written, filled with interesting facts, and totally fun to read. It's also a little, well, all-over-the-place, ahistorical, and at times just plain silly. But if you're interested in sports, lesbian and gay history, or the gossip associated with each, then this is the book for you.

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There's always been a thriving market-- both commercial and conversational-- for information on who's gay and who isn't. This "genre" was probably started by Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, who compiled what was probably the first list of famous historical homosexuals in their 1897 work Sexual Inversion. Since then books such as Noel Garde's 1964 From Jonathan to Gide or A.L. Rowse's 1977 Homosexuals in History: A Study of Ambivalence in Society, Literature, and the Arts are early examples of the driving queer desire to identify like-minded people throughout time. Even smarter people, such as Sigmund Freud, enjoyed spelunking through history-- and case histories-- to uncover who was under the covers of notables such as Da Vinci and Michelangelo.

But queers in the arts is old news, so Patricia Nell Warren's racy run through homos in sports has new, often provocative, material. There are some surprises in this chatty, if highly speculative, three-millennium survey, but they aren't contemporary baseball players or football champions. And that makes it even more interesting. Rumors swirled about baseball great Sandy Koufax being "that way"-- and then being so angry when someone suggested it. But contemporary sports icons are, in some sense, post-out: not many people really care. Even the coming-out of major figures such as Billy Bean or Esera Tuaolo these days raise only the eyebrows of the most middle of Americans.

Warren, who gained enormous fame with her 1974 novel about an openly gay track star The Frontrunner, touches here on whatever comes into her wide-angle range of vision. She begins with Achilles and Patroclus-- you remember them from The Iliad and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, right? Well, forget the fact that the Greeks didn't have locker rooms (no need to change when athletes competed naked in the Olympics) or the fact that these two men are probably literary inventions. What Warren focuses on here is how the film Troy suppressed the homoeroticism of the literary traditions to fashion a more hetero duo for Brad Pitt and Garrett Hedlund.

Warren gayly skips onward through history and touches on Joan of Arc-- mid-15th century-- and speculates that she may have been transgendered or intersexed rather then lesbian (which actually makes some sense when we consider that medieval concepts of identity were far more concerned about gender then sexual practice). But the interesting part of the Joan of Arc chapter is that Warren argues her sport was jousting-- not the Hundred Years War. Thus Warren explores jousting in the Middle Ages and now-- information you can't find many other places. The same is true for her chapter on George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who was one of the first in Europe to breed horses when he wasn't dating James I, he of the King James Bible. L'affaire Villiers/James was fascinating: never one for modesty, James once wrote, "I wish to speak in my own behalf and not to have it thought to be a defect, for Jesus Christ did the same, and therefore I cannot be blamed. Christ had John, and I have George." Warren finds occasion here to discuss the history of horse racing in the United Kingdom and the relationship of horse breeding to royalty.

For Warren, 20th-century gay sports really kicks in with late 19th-century pioneer balloonist Alberto Santos-Dumont (and you thought you knew everyone connected with the history of ballooning). There follow entertaining essays on Amelia Earhart, Ana Maria Martinez Sagi (the once famous Spanish "virgin of the stadium," expert skier, leftist, and contemporary of Lorca), and babe Didrikson Zaharias-- claimed by many to be "the most complete women athlete who ever lived."

Warren loves a good tale, so the life of Big Bill Tilden-- who reinvented men's tennis in 1919 and whose career was ruined by a teenaged male prostitute-- suits her just fine. And she is not adverse to including non-gay "friends of Dorothy"-- or are they friends of Patroclus's?-- such as Jim Bouton, author of the 1970s Ball Four, along with obvious "out" people such as Martina Navratilova and Dave Kopay. Warren also has a smart chapter on gay cowboys and rodeo stars, and some insightful comments on homophobia and figure skating.

Warren writes in an animate, conversational style that makes for easy, fun reading. Sports heroes become an excuse for a series of meditations on a variety of subjects: same-sex love, or the lack of it, in Brokeback Mountain, Troy, and The Messenger; gladiators as sex symbols; the importance of fencing in the Harry Potter series; women who wore pants in the 1930s; and the politics of hormone testing for women athletes. Luckily for the reader, Warren always has an informed opinion and a backlog of wit that makes her stories-- and the ensuing digressions-- highly entertaining.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com