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  Sarah had playing commitments and couldn’t be there, but Rachael was, and I thanked her for being my voice of reason. I told the story of how Lori and I had sat next to each other on the flight back from the World Cup and talked about coming out—how she’d told me I needed to do it and she wasn’t fucking around. I said the words “when I came out” about a hundred times, and each time felt an echo of the original buzz. The experience of winning a big tournament was one type of joy, and this was another: being recognized for trying to change hearts and minds. It felt like the culmination of everything good that had happened that year.

  Before we wrapped up, the organizers played a showreel. David Beckham called me “an attacking player with a great right foot” and said it was a shame it still took courage to come out. Some younger women called me an inspiration and a role model. Most surreally, Tom Hanks popped up to call me a “fine daughter of our great country,” praise my hammy dramatics on the pitch, and express a hope that, following my example, others would come out. He summarized the way I went about things—“I’m a lesbian, deal with it, then go out on the field and kick ass”—perfectly.

  At Christmas, I made a decision. As a stopgap after the collapse of the league, I had been playing for the Seattle Sounders, a team that belonged to the Women’s Premier Soccer League, an amateur division that after the WPS folded had scrambled together an elite team. Seattle was a fun place to live, better than Florida in any case, but with the new women’s professional league still in development, the argument for staying wasn’t strong. I was feeling more confident than ever, and when Olympique Lyonnais, the most successful women’s club in the world, offered me a six-month contract starting in January, and for good money by the standards of women’s soccer—fourteen thousand dollars a month—I said yes. My decision wasn’t just about the money. I had traveled a lot with the national team, but we only ever stayed in one place for a couple of days and never really got to experience different cultures. I wanted to explore and branch out, experience something that, after the rush of playing in Europe during the Olympics, I imagined was going to be great: living in a country where soccer was everything.

  11

  OLYMPIQUE LYONNAIS

  I don’t think the French ever really knew what to make of me. When I arrived in Lyon in early 2013, I thought it would be a fun sojourn with better soccer than any league team in the US could muster and an easy way to see a bit more of the world. When I left six months later, I was escaping a coach I didn’t jell with; teammates who didn’t want to hang out; and a period that had been lonely, frustrating, and unsatisfying. I couldn’t wait to get back to the States.

  Don’t get me wrong, Lyon itself was beautiful. It’s a stunning city—the third largest in France—in the southeast of the country, bisected by two rivers and full of medieval churches, grand opera houses, and architecture that made me feel I was a long way from Redding, California. Obviously, what I loved most about Lyon was the fact that it boasted the best women’s league side in the world. At the Olympics, a whopping eleven members of the French national team played for Olympique Lyonnais, including Louisa Nécib, Eugénie Le Sommer, and Élodie Thomis, thanks to whose efforts the team had won two consecutive UEFA Champions League titles and six French league championships in a row. I assumed I would fit right in.

  Things looked promising at first. I rented a Smart car. I had room for visitors in my two-bedroom apartment, which was underheated, of course—this was Europe—but at least the wi-fi worked. I wasn’t the only foreign player on the team; Olympique Lyonnais Féminin boasted four other top international players—two Japanese players, one from Switzerland, and one from Sweden. Every club-level team I’d played in going right back to Portland had had international players, and we always put ourselves out to make them feel welcome. As the foreigner this time round, I couldn’t see any reason why my experiences would be different.

  The stereotype about the French is that they are arrogant, but that wasn’t my expectation. To me, France meant socialism or, at least, social democracy, a more left-leaning interpretation of government than in the US, encompassing universal health care and better welfare provisions. Because of this, I assumed that as a matter of course French culture and society would be liberal, or at least more liberal than in the US. I also assumed the players themselves would be super chill and laid-back. The French way of playing is much more fluid than ours, and almost languid compared to our style. Clearly I’d have no trouble fitting in.

  That first expectation—that France would be achingly liberal—was blown apart immediately on my arrival. The headline in Le Monde when I arrived in France was “Gay Icon,” as if no gay person had ever achieved prominence before. As far as I could tell, there were no other out lesbian soccer players anywhere in France, an even worse record than in the US. When I turned up a few days later at the training center in Décines-Charpieu, just outside the city, it was to a scene of mutual bafflement. A lot of the French players had assumed all American athletes were giant-size and were amazed to discover how small I was. For my part, the romantic image I’d been nurturing of the French as more liberated than Americans didn’t exactly match up to reality. I didn’t find my French teammates arrogant. I found them intensely reserved. There was hardly any laughing or joking on the team, partly because Olympique Lyonnais was the number-one women’s club in Europe, if not the world, and the players seemed terrified of losing their spots.

  It went deeper than that. I was used to making a lot of noise, pushing back against a coach if I disagreed with them, and breaking out of established playing patterns to try something new, even if the end result was a wild shot that went fifty yards over the crossbar. I wasn’t afraid of making goofy mistakes and was always the first to laugh at myself, which was definitely not the vibe on the team. I got the feeling that, in France, this kind of “rule-breaking”—particularly by women, toward a male coach—was generally frowned upon. The French players thought I was crazy. I thought they were afraid to step out of line. We didn’t get one another at all.

  The coach, Patrice Lair, was a highly respected figure in French soccer, but we had a tough time communicating from the get-go. The language barrier was obviously a big part of this. He would mutter asides during practice, and even though I would call on a French player to translate, asking sharply, “What did he say? What’s going on?” the effect of not understanding everything was disorienting. I could, however, tell when I was being criticized; and although he spoke highly of me afterward, at the time he was really hard on me, always chirping that I wasn’t doing well enough. No one else on the team talked back to him or called him out on what I thought was his bullshit, which probably riled him up even more. At one point, he made me play a match with the B team, which I took to be a kind of public shaming.

  I shrugged it off—I’d be going home soon enough—but other things bothered me. There was no homophobia on the team, but I was surprised by how intolerant the town itself seemed. Perhaps it would have been different in a large, international city like Paris. But in Lyon, I didn’t see any same-sex couples walking around holding hands and the message seemed to me to be clear: You can’t be too gay in public.

  Making friends was hard, too. It’s not that the local players were hostile, exactly; I felt they were “America curious”—intrigued by us and envious of the fact we lived more freely than they did. The bigger problem, for me, was that they weren’t very outgoing or social. Practice was only a couple of hours every day, and afterward everyone just scattered and did their own thing. It was bizarre. At home, whatever team I was playing on, we all made plans with one another and ensured that the international players were included and looked after. Here, there was nothing like that.

  Lyon got boring very quickly. I was out all the time, bobbing around the city, going to dinners or the opera house on my own, but there’s only so much tourist stuff you can do—only so many weekends you can spend silently looking at mediev
al architecture. I kept thinking: Are people going out and not inviting me? I was never invited anywhere, but I honestly don’t think they were deliberately excluding me. It seemed to me they were broadly unhappy, and unlike the Brits, who love being unhappy, the French just seemed . . . unhappy. It was a lonesome and dispiriting time.

  I buried my head in training. We were working our way up the Champions League table, which we had high expectations of winning. And I tried to keep up my activism. In February, a year before the Sochi Winter Olympics were due to take place, gay athletes started speaking out about homophobic legislation in Russia. A bill was making its way through the Russian parliament that outlawed “homosexual propaganda,” including same-sex couples holding hands in public or gay charities organizing public events. Gay athletes, including New Zealand speed skater Blake Skjellerup, had started to speak out about it, but the IOC and other athletes had been conspicuously silent. I was furious. When USA Today called me for comment, I told them my girlfriend and I had been together at the London Olympics, and that if I had been competing in Russia, we would have been breaking the law. “What year are we in?” I asked. “People are still being arrested for saying it’s OK to be gay? What is the IOC or major sponsors doing, if anything?”

  It was hard to know what effect any of this had, or what else I could do. Whenever I gave an interview, the gay rights stuff was front and center, and talking about it felt better than doing nothing. But after the thrill of winning the award at the LA Gay and Lesbian Center, I had occasional moments of doubt. It was fantastic that coming out had gone so well for me, because others might be encouraged to follow suit. But the extra attention and praise also gave rise to occasional middle-of-the-night worries that I wasn’t doing enough to justify the spotlight.

  The season ended in anticlimax. After scoring four goals in fifteen matches, including in the quarterfinals of the Champions League, I traveled with the team to England for the semis against the German team VfL Wolfsburg. It was a disappointing match, both personally—the coach took me off at halftime—and professionally. The game at Stamford Bridge drew a crowd of twenty-one thousand people, the kind of number we could only dream of for most league matches at home, but when you lose, you don’t care about that. After a lackluster game, we lost 1–0 and were out of the tournament.

  At this point, I could have left Olympique Lyonnais and never returned. But I was annoyed to leave France on such a downer. We had crashed out of the Champions League at the last minute, in an echo of my experiences losing the World Cup final, and my ambition was fired up. All the downsides of my six months in Lyon were temporarily overturned by my desire to have another crack at the European title. Unwisely, perhaps, I signed on for a second season, starting in September.

  At least I would have the summer at home. It was an exciting time to go back. I had missed the launch of the National Women’s Soccer League, the replacement for the WPS that we hoped would stick around for good this time, and would fly back to play the second half of the season with my new team, Seattle Reign. There were eight teams in the NWSL, including old teams like the Chicago Red Stars, and new ones like the Reign and Houston Dash, and coming in midseason after my months in France was like a warm hug after an ice bath. Laura Harvey, the Seattle coach, was a former professional player from England who had coached the Arsenal women’s side and guided them to the FA Cup title. Instantly we had a great vibe. She’s a player’s coach, someone who is tough but supportive and, I sensed, would always have my back.

  The only downside was our new contracts. We would, as national team players, receive fifty thousand dollars a year for playing in the new league, but there would be no real raise on our national team salaries, and our bonus structure was still inferior to the men’s. The federation’s case—that setting up the new league represented a huge investment in us—didn’t hold water when our salaries were on ice, but after months of fruitless negotiation, we had been browbeaten into submission. Next time we wouldn’t be so forgiving.

  My new team played well that first season, clocking six undefeated games in a row before losing to the Portland Thorns—in front of 3,800 people—in the final game of the season. That crowd seemed tiny to me after six months in France; but when journalists asked whether I thought the new league was sustainable, I pointed out that while we should be as ambitious as we could, it was also important to be realistic. As players, we needed the NWSL to be a viable training environment for national team players and a way of growing the game in the US more locally. The NWSL didn’t have to be the English Premier League.

  In September, I flew back to France. The tiny amount of French I’d accumulated in the first half of the year had evaporated over the summer, but I was determined to make friends, and if not with the players, I’d look elsewhere. One day after a home match, two women came running after me and introduced themselves. They were Meg and Rach, an American couple living in the city with their small daughter, and big soccer fans who had read I was in the city. They gave me all their contact details and said, let’s hang out if you’re ever at a loose end. Was I ever. I called them almost immediately, and on that first meeting we hit it off, bonding over how we were all dying of loneliness—Meg spoke French and worked out of the house, so she was fine, but Rach was a stay-at-home mom and feeling totally isolated. The fall suddenly got more fun and we’re still friends to this day.

  Still, I was out of my element, and it didn’t help that the team had stalled on the field. In November, after a good start in the early rounds, we suffered a shocking exit from the Champions League before the quarterfinals, losing to Potsdam 2–1. That’s it; we were out, and the only thing keeping me in France—the dream of lifting the European trophy—evaporated. I’m certainly not sticking around for the fucking French league, I thought, and right after Christmas break, I quit and announced I was heading back to the US. This suited both sides—the team management got to cut my salary, and I got to go home. I have never been happier getting on a plane.

  Before the start of the new season, I would have to find a house in Seattle, and the original plan, made back in 2013, was that Sarah would join me. She had applied for her green card and we’d talked about moving in together, or at least spending more time together when she wasn’t playing in Australia. But in early 2014, I started looking at properties alone. Over the course of three years, we’d spent so much time apart that the idea of moving in together at this point seemed nonsensical. There was no big breakup, and although it was more me who ended it than her, it didn’t come as a big shock to Sarah. I was twenty-eight, back home, and suddenly—in a good way this time—alone.

  12

  THE FIGHT FOR EQUAL PAY

  There was one thing I’d missed out on by being in France, and that was being around for the negotiations over pay. In fact, none of the players had done much in the way of actual in-person negotiating, something we later realized was a mistake. After discussing among ourselves what kind of pay raises we wanted, we had left most of the bargaining to lawyers. This sometimes works for women. Studies have shown that when women ask for a pay raise it plays less favorably than when men do, and it can be beneficial to have an intermediary. But our circumstances were unusual, and we had missed a trick. Every year, the national team did better and better while the players became more publicly known. Celebrity is a powerful commodity and we had failed to deploy it. Next time, we vowed, we would walk into the boardroom ourselves.

  There was only one big sporting event in early 2014 and that was the Winter Olympics in Sochi, which I watched with more interest than usual. The anger around homophobia in Russia was once again in the news, and although the huge spotlight on the Winter Games probably allowed for more people to come out in that country, we all knew the brief change in attitude wouldn’t last. In February, I was asked to write an op-ed for The Advocate magazine, and I used Sochi as a springboard to talk more generally about homophobia and attitudes toward gay athletes in the West.
I didn’t think we had a whole lot to be smug about.

  There was something else I’d been wanting to say for a while. One of the absurd statements made about gay people in sports is that when it comes to the locker room, gay athletes—particularly gay male athletes—represent at best an embarrassment, at worst, a threat. “You hear guys say things like ‘Oh, what if he looks at me?’” I wrote. “Quite frankly, everyone looks at everyone else in the locker room, and if you try to say that you’ve never looked at anyone else’s junk in the locker room, you’re a liar! It’s human nature.”

  It’s the same ridiculous argument used by opponents of gays in the military—that they “undermine” morale—when the real menace in the locker room is the guy staring at everyone else trying to figure out if they’re gay. Who’s staring at whom in that scenario, and who represents the threat?! Not the gay guy; it’s the voyeur making homophobic remarks. The fact is, I wrote, if you can’t handle being on the same team as a gay person, “there are going to be a million things you can’t handle on the field.”

  * * *

  —

  With the exception of my dating life during my first year of college, I had never really dated anyone who wasn’t an athlete. Looking back at my twenties, I had barely dated anyone who wasn’t a soccer player. That summer of 2014, I turned twenty-nine and finally broke the pattern. For a while, the joke was that I only dated people with variants of the name Sarah—I’m a Sarah-monogamist—but the fact is that Sera Cahoone lived the sort of life I wasn’t remotely familiar with. A successful singer-songwriter I met in Seattle, we were instantly fascinated by each other. She knew nothing about training schedules, match replay, or future team lineups, and I knew nothing about writing or performing songs. And although both of us worked, broadly, in the entertainment business, it was refreshing to be with someone who had their own thing going on. Pretty soon, we were hanging out all the time. By the end of the year, we had moved in together.