The discriminitory WNBA...hmm...

Throwing upan air ball Local WNBA team misses slam-dunk opportunity to market to lesbian fans
By KATHERINE VOLIN Friday, November 11, 2005
WHEN THE WNBA EMBARKED UPON its virgin season in 1996, heterosexuality reigned supreme.
Rebecca Lobo, Lisa Leslie and Sheryl Swoopes were displayed by the league as proof that the elusive combination of physical prowess and heterosexual beauty was alive and well within the WNBA.
Swoopes was the first player signed to the WNBA, and her pregnancy,which started showing early in league days, seemed further evidence that if the league had lesbians, it wasn’t announcing it.
Funny how things turn out. Swoopes came out publicly in October.
“I just thought it was interesting that someone that the league had presented as a model of motherhood and coming back to play after giving birth [is a lesbian],” says Sandra Robinson, a local self-identified “die-hard” WNBA fan.
Robinson and her partner, Juanita Deans, have held Washington Mystics season tickets since the team’s inception. Although they were both pleased to learn that Swoopes is a lesbian, they say that the WNBA in general and the Mystics in particular have done little to acknowledge their lesbian fan base.
Pat Griffin, author of “Strong Women, Deep Closets: Lesbians and Homophobia in Sports,” says that in the WNBA’s early days, lesbians were ignored in favor of selling the athlete’s heterosexual appeal.
“Certainly lesbians are a huge fan base of sports of all kinds,” Griffin says. “I think they wanted to make the lesbians as invisible as possible and to really put the emphasis on ‘look at these heterosexual sexy athletes.’”
Robinson says that the number of lesbians at the game is so high that some women only come to socialize with other lesbians.
“I’m a big basketball fan, so I really enjoy the games for the action, for the style of play, but also it’s turned into a big chance to see some of our friends,” Robinson says.
Robinson says the WNBA’s summer season — it generally runs May to September — is as much of a chance to hold court as to watch the ladies play on it.
Sheila Alexander-Reid, a former Mystics season ticket holder, agrees that Mystics games have been a mainstay of the local lesbian social scene since the WNBA came to Washington.
“At halftime, all the lesbians go up to the little bar or restaurant area on the club floor [of the MCI Center, where the home games are held] and socialize and network and eat and drink,” Alexander-Reid says.
The Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest gay civil rights organization, holds a party at every season opener, an event an HRC spokesperson says draws a diverse crowd, including a “significant number of lesbians.” HRC holds no such event for Washington’s NBA team, the Wizards.
ALTHOUGH HRC KNOWS THAT THE lesbian market at the Mystics games is virtually unmatched, the league and team pass over lesbians as a moneymaker, Alexander-Reid says.
“For the first three or four years, it seemed like they went out of their way to avoid any public connection with the lesbian community,” Alexander-Reid says. “They sort of courted us privately.”
All this was happening, Alexander-Reid says, while the Mystics were accepting critical backing in the stands from lesbians.
“I believe without the lesbian support, the WNBA would have folded several years ago,” Alexander-Reid says. “They’re sort of the unheralded backbone of the WNBA.”
Mystics management says the team is reexamining marketing strategies. Sheila Johnson, a former owner of Black Entertainment Television, purchased the Mystics franchise in May. Chief operating officer Curtis Symonds says the new management is still establishing how to best market the team.
“Our core market for the Mystics are young women, 18-34 and young ladies 10-17,” Symonds says. “I’ve been on board now for three months and I’ve got to tell you, we haven’t done much in the past [to market to lesbians].
Symonds says that the team keeps no precise data on the number of lesbian fans.
Ticket holder Deans says the untapped potential of lesbians at WNBA games baffles her.
If you had every gay person boycott one game, I doubt very seriously that the arenas would be half full,” Deans says.
“Why miss marketing to gays and lesbians, especially lesbians, when the dollars are there? ... If you picked one day and say this is gay and lesbian day, if you had one day that said, ‘We want your business,’that would go miles.”