Welcome back to Queer Eyes, stream of consciousness writings from my gay mind. Today, I would like to talk about sportz. I am fully aware of the sporto/queer divide being discussed frequently on this campus; the proof is in the Grill. One day, a friend of mine walked up to me and asked, “Yo do you wanna go sit on the arts and crafts side?” Oh no. I believe there has been some confusion. The dynamics of the Grill are fluid, and though it is probably a lovely space for crafts or physical activity, it is essentially the gay bar of Grinnell’s campus.
What else in the universe is unquestionably gay and involves sports? The WNBA. This league is gayer than a crowd live-streaming the Ellen show guest-featuring a live unicorn playing Lady Gaga through a nose flute. One of the gayest team of them all is the Phoenix Mercury, who won the WNBA Championship in 2009 and 2014. Of the five players who started on the team that year, four of them are married to each other, including Brittney Griner, who has already married another WNBA star in the past. But essentially, Diana Taurasi (the greatest person to ever play the sport of basketball, arguably) married Penny Taylor (arguably the best Australian basketball player ever) and now they are raising a vegan child, as Taylor is an assistant coach and Taurasi plays starting point guard (P.S. Google Diana Taurasi kissing Simone Augustus; I think it is very funny). The other members of this team were DeWanna Bonner and Candice Dupree, who are currently raising their twins, despite the drama of Dupree being traded. This couple posts work-out vids of themselves lifting their children around their suburban Arizona home, and Bonner returned to basketball less than a year after giving birth to her twins, averaged double digits a game and helped carry her team to the league semi-finals. QUEER INSANITY.
There are these two specific ones and there is one specific, arguably regrettable, thing that I did. My friend’s mom used to work for the Chicago Sky, and has the inside deets and hot goss, and she informed me that Allie Quigley and Courtney Vandersloot are getting married. This made me physically overflow with excitement. Vandersloot is the only reason I applied to college at Gonzaga, just so that I could say that I went to the school where Vandersloot once played. Quigley has been the sixth man of my heart and the league for more years than I can count. So obviously upon hearing this information I had to do some sleuthing. I found a wedding registry under the names Courtney Vandersloot and Allie Quigley with the wedding location set to Chicago. I scrolled through the list of items to confirm my suspicions, and they were asking for a pool basketball hoop, so I knew it had to be them. I was very emotional. It was late at night, I was watching the fourth quarter of what could have been Sue Bird’s (queer goddess of assists dating professional U.S. women’s soccer player Megan Rapinoe) last professional game of basketball and I had consumed a high quantity of frozen dairy. I scrolled through this wedding registry and decided I did not want them to think of me every time they took a shower. I settled on purchasing them an ice cream scoop. It’s not too creepy to think that a random person you don’t know or will ever meet sent you an ice cream scoop for your wedding. I had approximately 69 cents in my bank account, but I did it anyway. The wedding isn’t for months and I am the only person who has purchased anything from the registry. They probably opened it up in the mail and were like “psshh, neither of us know this human being so maybe we should make our wedding registry private.” But my personal DREAM is that they think it is so funny that they invite me to their lesbian-basketball-themed wedding. Then I would self-implode and be happy forever.
Conclusion: I am a weirdo; the WNBA is full of the queer power couples of my dreams; ice cream is always the answer. Unless you are lactose intolerant like my roommate. Omg wait — what if Vandersloot and Quigley are lactose intolerant! Maybe they can eat yogurt? Is yogurt dairy? What even is yogurt?
— Gaylord Phoenix
