The flood of color-coded T-shirts catches the eye first; then it’s the friendly cheers, welcoming smiles, and vibrant queer energy that light up the lanes at Midtown Bowling. The logo gives them away; they are the Atlanta chapter of Stonewall Sports, an LGBTQ sports league.
Though the league started in 2010 in D.C., the Atlanta branch of Stonewall Sports is now one of the fastest growing chapters in the country. Founded in 2021, Stonewall Sports Atlanta started with 216 kickball members. Since then, the board has diversified and the league has expanded into four other sports: sand and indoor volleyball, tennis, dodgeball, and bowling. Today, kickball has over 580 members, and the league overall now boasts more than 1,600 players.
Wednesday night, April 12, marked the second game of the new Remixx bowling season, where players registered as free agents and were sorted into random teams. Many of the players told Georgia Voice that they were roped into joining by their friends or discovered Stonewall Sports Atlanta through Facebook pages looking for team members. Bowling Director Laura Oudenaarden said she noticed a call for an all-women bowling team (which ultimately prompted the creation of the Queendom, a safe space for predominantly women, trans and nonbinary folks to come together in a cis male-dominated area that focuses on the community they create rather than any particular gender). Likewise, Anna Cole, a four-sport athlete in the league, discovered the organization through Queer Women’s Network, another Facebook group.
With the randomness of the teams came bonding and friendship. Oudenaarden emphasized this and the value of community, a word repeated constantly throughout the night.
“Especially with this season, I wanted people to be more social with each other,” she said.
“I feel like it’s a very welcoming place, and there’s also a very growing women and [nonbinary] and trans population here too,” Cole said. “It’s nice to have a space for social activities that’s also not entirely run by cis gay men.”
Adding diversity into leadership that had been largely dominated by cisgender white men was challenging. Commissioner Ronnie Few struggled to get under-represented groups behind their mission at first, but eventually, along with his co-founders, he tapped into bigger communities and groups to find more people to support and build the organization.
“I like being able to meet a lot of new people from different walks of life, and having sports where you can just connect,” Shaun Field, one of the bowlers, said. “LGBTQ nighttime spaces are diminishing, but if we can do things like this, that’s cool too.”
Before becoming commissioner, Few was the recruitment chair. When the national board came down for opening day, Few said, one of the directors told him that he would not realize the impact he was making until the first day that “all of your players go to an after spot in their shirts.”
The sea of rainbow-colored shirts with the Stonewall logo is not just a symbol of team unity and community, but also a reminder for Few that he and his team have accomplished something incredible.
“I fell in love with the league and what it stands for and the atmosphere it creates for people,” he said.
These success stories are Few’s favorite part of the league.
“I love when people tell me their story,” he said. “I had a player recently thank me because [of the league] they felt comfortable to come to terms with their sexuality and now identify as nonbinary.”
Few has felt humbled by the response he has received from people telling their stories and expressing how they felt that for the first time they belonged. Even straight allies who don’t feel comfortable in other leagues have expressed comfort playing with Stonewall.
Amy Langley, a new bowling member, is part of a heteronormative cornhole league and said that by comparison, Stonewall is much more comforting.
“The difference is walking into a space where you can just be your authentic self and not have to worry about what you say and how you act,” Langley said. “[You] can make friendships that last here. It puts these people in one space, and you can feel comfortable walking up to other people and introducing yourself to other people.”
One message that continued to echo in conversation was the importance of the community and the team effort. When the league wasn’t able to get a spot in the Atlanta Pride parade, one of the league’s sponsors gave up its spot so the team could walk. As a nonprofit, all the people who work to maintain and organize these spaces aren’t paid. They “volunteer and step up to help out because they see the values and the goals that Stonewall is trying to achieve,” Few said.
In light of antitrans and antigay bills getting passed around the country, the board is striving to work locally to diversify what Stonewall Atlanta offers. From partnering with sponsors to looking for spaces that are not necessarily bars so they can accommodate people who are sober or don’t enjoy drinking, they try to vet each space to ensure everyone is welcome. The board works to stay in touch with the trans community and to engage in continuous discussions on what Stonewall Sports can do to make them feel welcome, comfortable, and represented by the league. In the past six months, Stonewall Sports Atlanta has donated $6,000 to the Trans Housing Coalition, a grassroots crowdfunding project working to get Black trans women off the streets, and $10,000 to Georgia Equality.
In five years, Few hopes to see growth. He wants to see stronger and larger partnerships with big name sponsors and aims to get the chance to hold the national Stonewall Sports National Tournament and Summit in Atlanta one day. But most of all, Few hopes to see the day Stonewall Sports elects a trans commissioner in Atlanta.
“We are raised to believe that [heteronormative and gendered] is how it is, and this is how sports are and how they are meant to be,” Few said. “It was the same with women in sports for a long time. We need to fight for space.”
To learn more about Stonewall Sports Atlanta, visit stonewallsportsatlanta.org.