The WNBA Has Brought Lesbian Lust Mainstream. Now What?

Two of my closest friends are obsessed with women’s basketball, which is maybe not a surprise because, well, we’re gay. And I don’t mean that we’re gay in the broadly defined way that we have romantic relationships with women (though that’s true), I mean we are gay in the ways that we have an encyclopedic, all-consuming gay interest in the pop culture we take in and the jokes we make. Our interests are g-a-y. It’s a long-standing joke that queer women love sports, but I’ve always enjoyed the specific girly-femme performance where I pretend not to know anything about “sportsball.” 

My friends tried to bait me into their conversations. They promised me that the WNBA was one of the internet fandoms' then best-kept secrets, they’d share scores and clips of game highlights, but their pleas fell on plugged ears. Then, finally, out of desperation as much as anything else, four years ago one of them sent me a picture of Minnesota Lynx guard Courtney Williams. She was on a beach, with a Philadelphia 76ers jersey bunched up over her left shoulder, abs and tattoo sleeve on full display, pants hanging low, face scrunched up from the sun. 

Hate to be a cliche, but let’s be for real, that’s all it took. I locked in.

We’re living in a record-breaking rise of the WNBA. Many of the mainstream conversations have centred around the league’s historic rookie class, including Chicago Sky forward Angel Reese and Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark, both of whom hooped against each other in college to similar national attention.  But even before that rookie class made their debut, the W (as it's known by fans) has been on a steady upward trajectory; 2023’s season viewership was up 21% from the year before. People turning in for the first time are learning an undeniable truth that queer fans like me have known for years: the league is not only supremely talented, filled with incredible women and an important history of activism, these women are also fine as hell.

Oh, did I say fine? I meant FOINE. Across TikTok feeds and memes, Black queer thirst is finally taking centre stage. Creators are cracking jokes about practising for their “big moment,” when a chance encounter at a game could make them the next WNBA wife, to the tune of nearly 190k likes. They’re wondering if players who already have girlfriends are looking for a third. While new male fans of the league are busy joking about the day when players will fly them out for a good time, queer fans are reposting and laughing, because they know who’s really the object of many players’ desires. It’s fun and lighthearted, flickering instances of group chat fame going viral not only for their mutual recognition of horniness but also because who doesn’t enjoy a little kiki with their friends? 

These moments are also a long-deserved breath of fresh air from a league that for years ran from the attention of its lesbian fanbase and players.

“I never wanted to say it,” said Jennifer Azzi in the ESPN documentary Dream On, which focuses on the 1996 USA women’s basketball Dream Team and their undefeated Olympic run that led to the creation of the WNBA. In addition to being a member of that ’96 team, Azzi was drafted to the WNBA as a guard for the Detroit Shock in 1999.  “I would have never come out during that time because I was afraid that I would be seen differently and maybe wouldn’t be as marketable or that companies wouldn’t want to sponsor me.” 

Those sentiments were backed up by Rebecca Lobo, a forward/center in the 1990s and 2000s for Team USA and the New York Liberty. Lobo recalled that while no one said it explicitly, the overall feeling impressed by the NBA was “we have to present them as straight women. We have to present them as women that can appeal to Middle America.” 

For Black players, race couldn’t be separated out from nuances of gender, sexuality, and presumed salability. “If you looked kind of hard, that wasn’t what they really wanted,” said Carla McGhee, also on the ’96 team, in Dream On. “Hard,” of course, reads a lot like code for masculine-presenting Black women. Basketball legend Sheryl Swoopes, who had a public long-term relationship with a woman partner in the 2000s and 2010s, put it bluntly: “What the NBA was doing was saying, ‘We know that we’re already going to have the gay and lesbian community to come out and support. So what can we do differently to get more men to come out and watch?’”

When it came to Black and queer women, the league “didn’t know how to market these players authentically as they are” said Tamryn Sprull, author of Court Queens, in the documentary Unfinished Business, which in part focused on the early seasons of the New York Liberty, a founding WNBA team. Queer fans who bought tickets, merch, and made grassroots investments early in the sport were not embraced by a league that worried that their queerness, and the queerness of its stars, ran afoul of the family-friendly image they were banking on leading the sport to financial success. 

Frankie de la Cretaz summed it up nicely for The Washington Post, “For many years, women’s sports has struggled against the stereotype that all women athletes are lesbians, while also facing the reality that many of them are.” 

Change doesn’t happen quickly, and then sometimes it feels like it comes all at once. Seventeen years after the league’s founding, Brittney Griner, a masc lesbian and the 2013 #1 WNBA draft pick, wore a cream and white men’s three-piece suit to her draft night.

Standing at 6’9” and with a head full of sandy brown locks, she immediately became a queer thirst icon (even if I didn’t care about sports, I can personally attest to sharing more than a few photos of BG working out in a tank top, with some choice words attached, during my baby gay years, ahem). She also became the first openly gay athlete to be signed by Nike, regularly modelling their menswear line at that. It was a watershed moment. 

Brittney Griner’s unabashed queerness came just in time for a league that was already moving towards acceptance of its queer fanbase. When chasing the desirability of straight men and “Middle America” didn’t produce the kind of prosperity the league dreamed of, the WNBA made room for the LGBT fans that had been there all along. The league became the first in the United States to adopt a Pride platform in 2014. Now LGBT Pride nights are a regular occurrence. Roughly a quarter of the league is out as queer, at least one player (Layshia Clarendon of the LA Sparks) is out as nonbinary, and their partners are all celebrated courtside.  We’re in a sweet spot where the stylists of player’s girlfriends are getting well-deserved Vogue features, but players, like Las Vegas Aces forward Syd Colson, aren’t so far removed that they can’t join in on gay inside jokes with their fans. 

The normalizing of Black queerness in the WNBA is straight up intoxicating (pun not intended). My forever crush Courtney Williams is right now featured prominently with her girlfriend on the WNBA app underneath a banner proclaiming that “Pride is Love”  — which OK yes, is a little on the nose and hasn’t been updated since June, but I digress. In 1996, Team USA members were subliminally encouraged to stay in the closet, this summer 2024 Team USA forward Alyssa Thomas is on the cover of SLAM Magazine with her fiancée and Connecticut Sun teammate DeWanna Bonner, proclaiming them the new “Love & Basketball.” They’re known as the  “team parents” by their teammates because they are the only two Connecticut Sun members over the age of 30 (and no, you don’t have to ask, of course AT is the team daddy). The will-they/won’t-they saga of Connecticut Sun guard DiJonai Carrington and Indiana Fever forward NaLyssa Smith had TikTok pulling out the stringboard. It got so hot that even straight people rejoiced when NaLyssa got her family back. 

Still, politics of desirability, and the way they frame both thirst and capital, haven’t missed a beat. When this year’s WNBA season debuted a partnership with Kim Kardashian’s SKIMS line, the brand’s sexy television ad, while featuring queer as well as straight players, focused solely on women with full faces of makeup who are comfortable being femme-presenting (and all of whom were lighter skinned). A related social media campaign included greater player diversity in terms of gender presentation and skin tone, including showcasing Las Vegas Aces guard Chelsea Gray in boxer briefs, but the difference was hard to miss. Similarly, a 2022 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue cover featuring W players focused on players in full faces of makeup and feminine bathing suits. Queer people come in forms and are finally being embraced by the league, but it’s not difficult to see which players are most often brought to the front of the line when it comes to branding — and why.

In a 2022 ESPN feature of New York Liberty (then Connecticut Sun) center Jonquel Jones, who at that point was the league MVP, Katie Barnes noted that “being Black, gay and self-described as more masculine puts Jones at an intersection that has traditionally struggled to attract brands, even as the WNBA itself — players, teams, and lordship — has become the most LGBTQIA+ inclusive professional sports league in the United States.” That followed a 2020 study conducted by the University of Massachusetts Amherst which found that Black players received roughly half the media attention as their white peers (that’s despite the fact that the W is roughly 80% Black). The researchers behind the study told Barnes that the number went down even further for Black queer players, and even more so for Black queer masculine players. 

All of this history goes back to those silly little memes and brazen Black queer thirst. We are at a threshold. It’s genuinely groundbreaking to have lesbian lust, which is otherwise so often shamed as lewd, even when intended as harmless, centred in how we talk about the WNBA. Every time a baby gay puts a sweat drop emoji underneath a video of Natasha Cloud an angel gets their wings, or something like that. 

But as the league grows, it’s critical not to lose track of the ways desirability, thirst, and packaging intertwine and play with each other. It’s remarkable to see how the W has grown, and also that growth still comes with asterisks. Black queer fans thirsting online are proving in real time they are ready to take the game to its next heights. Sometimes a meme is just a meme, and sometimes it's symbolic of both a rich history and a limitless future.