Maybelle Blair, Who Inspired ‘League of Their Own,’ Comes Out at 95

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on June 20, 2022. It has since been updated.

At the age of 95, Maybelle Blair, a pioneering baseball player who inspired the classic film “A League of Their Own,” has publicly come out as a lesbian. Maybelle was a member of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, a women’s professional baseball league that ran from 1943 to 1954. According to HuffPost, the women’s league inspired the 1992 classic film “A League of Their Own,” which starred Geena Davis, Tom Hanks, and Madonna. It also inspired an Amazon Prime series of the same name. While promoting the series, Blair opened up about her sexuality, which was met with thunderous cheers from the audience. The caption of the post read: “For most of her life, sports legend and 95-year-old AAGPBL player Maybelle Blair felt like she had to hide her authentic identity. Today, she came out publicly for the first time.” We couldn’t be happier for her and continue to promote love, acceptance and education on and off the field.

Blair, a California native, played for the Peoria Redwings in 1948. She was in attendance at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival in New York for the series created by “Broad City”’s Abbi Jacobson and Will Graham. “I think it’s a great opportunity for these young players to realize that they’re not alone and they don’t have to hide,” Blair said. “I’ve been hiding for 75, 85 years, and this is actually the first time I’m coming out,” she said to cheers from the crowd. Madonna played Maybelle Blair in the original film and was known as “All The Way Mae,” which is what Blair was called during her acting days.

Blair recounted how she developed feelings for girls, making her feel guilty at first. “I was like, oh my god, Maybelle, what’s wrong with you? Because I had a crush on this girl in high school and eventually, we had a little thing, you know how you do it. It was really bad because in our day and age, you didn’t dare tell your family or let anyone know that you were gay, it was the most terrible thing in the world,” Blair said, according to LGBTQ Nation. Blair recalled how joining the league changed her life. “I went back to Chicago and I made the team and I can tell you it was the most amazing time of my life because they asked me to go to a bar,” she recalled. “Well, it turned out to be a gay bar and I’ve never been happier in my life.”

Blair’s speech at the film festival was shared on the official “League of Their Own” social media accounts. The new series, like the film, is set in 1943 and tells the story of the fictional Rockford Peaches team. The original film was directed by Penny Marshall. “Twenty-eight years ago, Penny Marshall brought us a story about women playing professional baseball that had been largely overlooked,” Graham and Jacobson said in a statement in August 2020. “We grew up obsessed with the film, just like everyone else.” » Abbi Jacobson revealed on “The Drew Barrymore Show” that she had sought the director’s blessing before he passed away in 2018. Jacobson, who also stars in the series, revealed that it would go beyond the original film and take “a deeper look at race and sexuality, following the journey of an entirely new set of characters as they chart their own paths to the field, both in and out of the league.”

Jacobson said the series also explores race, and one of the main characters is a black woman. “There’s a door that opens for a lot of white women and women who pass for white and come into the league that we all know about from the movie,” she said. “But what about the black women who weren’t allowed to try out and had to kind of carve out their own path to play baseball? It’s also a really queer story,” she said.

Rosie O’Donnell, who starred in the original series, has confirmed that she will be making a guest appearance on the show. “I play a bartender in one of the scenes at the local gay bar,” she said on the podcast “Everything Iconic With Danny Pellegrino.” The cast also includes Roberta Colindrez, Nick Offerman, Saidah Arrika Ekulona, ​​Kate Berlant, Kendall Johnson, Kelly McCormack, Alex Désert, Priscilla Delgado, Aaron Jennings, Molly Ephraim, Melanie Field and Dale Dickey. Nick Offerman plays Rockford Peaches coach Casey “Dove” Porter.