LGBTQ+ Athletes Claim the Field

About LGBTQ+ Athletes Claim the Field

Striving for Equality: LGBTQ+ Athletes Claim the Field is a nonfiction young adult book by Kirstin Cronn-Mills, published by Twenty-First Century Books in 2016. The book documents the experiences of openly gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender athletes across professional, collegiate, and amateur sports — tracing the history of LGBTQ+ visibility in athletics from the closeted era through the wave of high-profile comings-out that marked the 2010s.

The book covers figures including Billie Jean King, Martina Navratilova, Dave Kopay (the first major professional athlete to come out publicly), Michael Sam (the first openly gay player drafted by an NFL team), Caitlyn Jenner, and Abby Wambach, among many others. Each story is placed in its historical context — the norms and risks that shaped whether and how athletes disclosed their identities, and what changed as the cultural environment shifted.

Cronn-Mills also addresses institutional responses: how professional leagues, Olympic bodies, and collegiate athletic associations have handled LGBTQ+ inclusion, and where policy has lagged behind the experiences of athletes. The book connects sports to the broader LGBTQ+ rights movement, showing how athletics has been both a mirror for and a driver of changing attitudes.

Sports as a Site of LGBTQ+ History

Athletics holds a particular place in LGBTQ+ history because it has been — for both men and women — a place where gender norms are enforced and contested at the same time. Women's sports have long been a site of homophobia directed at female athletes who did not conform to expected femininity. Men's sports have operated under intense pressure to suppress any expression of non-heterosexual identity. What Cronn-Mills documents is the cost of those pressures — the careers managed in silence, the relationships hidden, the athletes who waited until retirement to tell their stories.

She also documents the change: athletes who came out while still competing and found that the reaction was not what they had feared, younger athletes who grew up with openly gay role models and did not carry the same weight of secrecy, and advocacy organizations that changed locker room culture at universities and high schools.

Why the Book Has Been Challenged

LGBTQ+ Athletes Claim the Field has been challenged in school libraries for its LGBTQ+ content. It has faced removal actions in school districts enacting broad sweeps of any material that includes LGBTQ+ themes. As a nonfiction title, it has also been challenged on the grounds that it promotes a viewpoint on contested social issues.

Educators and librarians who support the book argue that students who are LGBTQ+ and involved in sports need access to history that reflects their experiences — and that a book documenting real people and real events is precisely the kind of resource a school library should provide.