“As I entered my teens, my mother frantically escalated her efforts at a gender change–mine, not hers. She did not share my excitement at having been named center of the 90 pound YMCA boys’ football team. In fact, she refused to allow me to play with boys any longer. Being an enterprising youngster, I simply wandered from the football fields in the park across the street from our house to the softball diamonds. No doubt, my mother would have joyfully reconsidered her decision had she known that I had found a lesbian softball team. These women wore pants, sharpened their cleats, and were as good at brawling as they were at playing ball. Most folks would have looked on this field and seen more brawn than beauty–no Southern belles in this line-up. But these women were beautiful to me. I was at home where women dressed as they pleased and found joy in their play and each other. They let me sit on the bench with them and keep score; they laughed a lot and tousled my hair. The first baseman gave me a baseball cap with the team name emblazoned across the front. I only took it off when I went to bed. I still have it, packed away with the memories of strong women, who I now know were also beautiful, who by opening their hearts to me, opened mine.”
— Bonnie Ruth Strickland, “Beauty and the Butch” (via butchspace)
