By: Lucas Fink By: Lucas Fink | June 20, 2022 | People, Culture, Celebrity, Art, Events, Women of Influence Latest, Television, Movies, Entertainment,
A line of buzzing filmgoers snaked down the block and into the street outside the Castro Theater, the iconic marquee of which read “Frameline46 Opening Night: A League of Their Own.” Frameline is the pioneering queer cinema non-profit behind the San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival, which returned for its first in-person festival premier since 2019 last Thursday, June 17th.
Inside the Castro’s singularly ornate auditorium, attendees - juggling all manner of refreshments from the Castro’s bar - scoured for seats as Frameline’s board president Nadir Smith, executive director James Woolley, and director of programming Allegra Madsen offered opening remarks.
See also: Your Guide To The Most Anticipated Titles At The SF LGBTQ+ Film Festival This June
The lights finally dimmed, eliciting a wave of hoots and hollers from the joyfully rambunctious crowd. The next two hours were filled with gasps, pregnant silences and - overwhelmingly - uproarious laughter as the audience experienced the first two episodes of Prime Video’s upcoming television drama A League of Their Own.
Created by Will Graham and Abbi Jacobson and directed by Jamie Babbit, 2022’s A League of Their Own is a queer reworking of Penny Marshall’s 1992 film of the same name. While both follow the exploits of a professional all-female baseball league in a World War 2-era America, the show works to unearth the queer stories its creators saw latent in the original.
As co-creator Graham articulated in the Q/A portion following the screening, it was clear to him that an untold queer narrative lay “behind and underneath the surface” of Marshall’s film. Joining Graham for the Q/A were director Jamie Babbit and the most special of guests: Maybelle Blair, one of the inspirations for Marshall’s classic who herself participated in professional all-female baseball in the 1940s. In a remarkable feat of serendipity, Blair - just days before the premier at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival - came out as a gay woman at the age of 95.
When asked about making her queer identity public after remaining in the closet for so many years, Blair likened her coming out to trying to stand on a leg on which you’ve been sitting for 85 years that has fallen asleep: “you’re gonna fall flat on your face”. Blair’s witty, sprightly effervescence garnered guffaws and applause from the audience for the remainder of the Q/A.
Blair’s contributions spoke to both the joys and obstacles queer folk encountered historically and continue to encounter; she explained that, as a young gay woman, she and her peers “had to be very, very careful” in navigating their identities lest they lose their jobs or even their closest friends and family. After falling in love with a girl in high school and feeling as if “they were the only two in the world,” Blair recounted how heartening it was to discover so many other queer women while playing in the league: “It was wonderful; girls came from all over the United States and a lot of them thought they were alone too. We had quite the time.”
Both Graham and Babbit stressed how crucial Blair’s insights were to the writing process and how, in many respects, Blair was the key to the show’s attempt to represent queer identities authentically. Blair responded in kind by extolling the showrunners: “I think so much that these people up here on stage have captured what Penny Marshall would’ve loved to have done.”
Unearthing and celebrating the queerness hidden in history is a joyous - and utterly necessary - task for us in modernity, and what better way to kick off the 46th year of San Francisco’s International LGBTQ+ Film Festival than by revelling in a queer spirit that no longer has to conceal itself. Catch the pilot episode of A League of Their Own coming to Prime Video on Friday, August 12th.
Photography by: Haniel Espinal/Unsplash