In August 2012, a lot of people were suddenly paying attention to women’s sports. The London Olympics had just wrapped, and the US women’s soccer team had won gold at Wembley with Abby Wambach and Megan Rapinoe on the roster. (If you’ve ever mixed those two up, no judgment. It happens to the best of us.) That same month, Cleis Press published Girls Who Score.
Edited by Ily Goyanes, the anthology collects erotic stories about lesbian and queer women who play, train and sweat. It isn’t limited to stadium athletes either. The /books entry notes scuba divers and gym regulars alongside the traditional jocks, which widens the field nicely. The book was a Lambda Literary Award finalist in Lesbian Erotica.
Sports erotica isn’t a stretch. Athletic stories already have most of the ingredients: bodies doing what they were built for, competition that crackles, close quarters, uniforms, coaches and rivals. Then there’s the locker room, a setting that has done a lot of quiet work in the lesbian imagination for decades.
There’s also something specifically lesbian about it. Women’s sports have long been a place where queer women found each other, often decades before anyone said so out loud. Think of the softball team, the rugby club, or the gym teacher everyone whispered about. An anthology like this takes that open secret and makes it the whole point. And competence is attractive. A woman who knows exactly what her body can do is a good starting point for an erotic story.
The publisher matters here too. Cleis Press was founded in 1980 by Frédérique Delacoste and Felice Newman, and it became one of the main homes for lesbian and queer erotica, including the long-running Best Lesbian Erotica series. Newman also wrote The Whole Lesbian Sex Book, so Girls Who Score comes from a house that has been thinking carefully about lesbian desire for a long time. The contributors include Sinclair Sexsmith, Delilah Devlin, Gina Marie and Elle, and readers of Cleis anthologies will recognize a few of those names.
The format suits readers who like their erotica in short bursts, one story per sitting. It’s also useful for writers of lesbian romance and erotica who want to study how to build heat in a few thousand words. Sports fans are an obvious audience, but so are people who don’t care about sports at all and can still appreciate a well-fitted pair of shin guards.
A few questions for the comments. Did you have a sports crush growing up: the coach, the captain, the girl on the other team? Which sport is most underused in lesbian fiction? (Curling. The answer is curling.) And when you want something steamy, do you reach for a short-story anthology or a full-length novel?
The bibliography rates it Good. Full details are on the Girls Who Score entry in the Lesbian Bibliography.