“Rosie, this is NOT a gay thing”: New book spills all the tea on Rosie O’Donnell, Madonna & ‘A League of Their Own’
A post shared by Erin Carlson (@erinleighcarlson)Since its release in 1992, Penny Marshall’s A League of Their Own has been a beloved film by the queer community.
Not only does it star Madonna and Rosie O’Donnell, but many of the women featured on the baseball league were queer. Last summer’s TV adaptation effectively cemented – and furthered – the story’s place in queer cinema history.Journalist Erin Carlson’s latest book, , is a fly-on-the-wall adventure through the making of A League of Their Own, 30 years later, complete with interviews with the film’s lead herself, Geena Davis, and first-person accounts of on-set memories and captivating stories from the original creators. In one particular chapter, Rosie O’Donnell reveals that director Penny Marshall “made a choice not to deal with the women’s sexuality.
It was very interesting when we met [the players] and they all had partners . . . some absurd statistic percentages of those women were, in fact, lesbians.”Check out this exclusive excerpt from No Crying in Baseball: The Inside Story of A League of Their Own: Big Stars, Dugout Drama, and a Home Run for Hollywood, available everywhere September 5, 2023.While Rosie loved Penny, and vice versa, the two differed in their opinions of how Rosie should approach Doris’s short monologue revealing why she settled for her deadbeat boyfriend.
Rosie read a queer subtext between the lines.“None of the other boys ever, uh . . . always made me feel like I was wrong, you know?” Doris says. “Like I was some sort of a weird girl or a strange girl or not even a girl, just ’cause I could play.
