12
Talk
8.4.Below: Megan
Rapinoe at
age 11 or 12.
Top right: Rapinoe
after scoring
during the Women’s
World Cup final
in France on July 7.
Bottom right:
Rapinoe kneeling
before a match
during the playing
of the national
anthem in 2016.David Marchese
is the magazine’s Talk
columnist.In purely competitive terms, Megan Rapi-
noe and the United States national wom-
en’s soccer team achieved a monumental
victory at this summer’s World Cup — the
squad was never seriously threatened. Yet
what was happening off the fi eld was per-
haps even more signifi cant. Rapinoe, one
of the captains, and her teammates swept
through the tournament while in the midst
of suing their own country’s soccer federa-
tion over gender discrimination and while
taking on President Trump as a symbolic
opponent after it was revealed that Rapi-
noe said, before the games began, that she
would decline a White House visit should
the team win. (In reply, President Trump
ramped up the pressure by tweeting,
essentially, put up or shut up.) Rapinoe her-
self was awarded the tournament’s Golden
Boot as its top goal-scorer and the Golden
Ball as its best player, becoming an activ-
ist-athlete icon in the process. ‘‘For girls
now, it’s amazing to see diff erent types of
women come to power,’’ Rapinoe, who
recently signed a book deal with Penguin,
says. ‘‘I feel like I got there from the outside
because I’m an athlete.’’ She adds, grinning:
‘‘And now people are like, ‘Oh, gosh, she’s
in here and we can’t get her out.’ ’’
How much do you think your being
who you are — an unabashedly out gay
woman — contributed to the team’s
feeling like such a lightning rod during
the World Cup? If it had been another
player who rejected the White House,
the story might have been very diff er-
ent. I can’t imagine that for the people
who were upset, my being a pink-haired,
unapologetically fl aming gay lesbian was
sitting well. They were probably like, ‘‘Oh,
you’re so in our face!’’ Rather than being a
regular white girl in the 1 percent, I have
a totally diff erent perspective on things,
and it’s the basis for all the activism that
I do. I don’t feel like I’ve experienced a
lot of homophobia or people hanging out
of windows calling me a fag or anything,
but being gay has shaped my life’s view.
When it became clear that the conversa-
tion around the World Cup wasn’t just
about soccer or gender equality but also
had the added political element of your
confl ict with the president, were you
anxious about being at the center of that?
I made the choice to participate in the
political discourse^1 a long time ago. Obvi-
ously tweets from the president^2 ratch-
eted everything up by a million, but I feel
very comfortable talking about politics, so
I don’t think it was a conscious decision
of getting involved or not. I understood
the gravity of what was happening, and I
realized that it needed to be balanced with
performance and making sure the team
was good and not distracted.
Do you have any sympathy for the idea
that sports should be a nonpolitical
oasis? I don’t understand that argument
at all. You want us to be role models for
your kids. You want us to endorse your
products. You parade us around. It’s like,
we’re not just here to sit in the glass case
for you to look at. That’s not how this is
going to go. Yeah, I don’t [expletive] with
that concept at all.
I’m curious: Where did the arms-wide
goal celebration you were doing during
the World Cup come from? It was prob-
ably born out of a little arrogance. Like,
are you not entertained? What more
do you want? And it was sort of saying
to Trump — but more to detractors in
general — that you will not steal our
joy from us as a team, as the L.G.B.T.Q.
community, as America. It was kind of
a [expletive] you, but nice.
Have you always been so self-confi dent?
I started that way. Then in middle schooland high school it got really awkward.
Gender roles started to be a thing, and I
didn’t know that I was gay, frankly, until
I was in college.^3 Until then I was like,
Everything feels weird. I think being gay,
it’s like you’re not going to ever be nor-
mal, so you don’t have rules, and if you
don’t have to follow any rules, all bets are
off. A lot of my confi dence comes from
that, from not feeling societal pressure
to be anything other than what I want
to be. My natural disposition is to have
confi dence, but certainly, fi guring out that
I was gay, I was like, Oh, God! Looking
back, it’s embarrassing because, duh.
What was it about college that allowed
you to realize you were gay? Redding,^4
where I grew up, is quite homogeneous
racially, and sexuality-wise, and politi-
cally. It was all kind of the same thing.
I didn’t have a repressive or oppressive
childhood by any means, it was just ‘‘gay’’
was never spoken. Once I got to college
and these things started to be named and
there were other gay people, I was sort
of forced to think for myself. It was, Oh,
well, this is a thing, and that is a thing,
and this is why people are Democrats,
and this is what liberal means, you know?