Larry eventually remarried, to Nancy Bolger, a wonderful woman who worked in publicity for the WTA/Virginia Slims tour. They’ve been together for three decades and raised two children, Sky and Katie King. Ilana and I are their godparents. Katie loves animals so much she got a degree in zoology. Sometimes Sky and I stay up late talking about ways we can fix the world, just like his dad and I used to do.
When I was coming out, few people talked about “families of origin” and “families of choice” like we do today. Ilana and I are blessed. Randy moved from Arizona back to Long Beach after our parents passed away, and his two daughters are both married—Alysha to James Gosse, and Miranda to Rusty Harrah. Their children are Byron and Derek Gosse and Evan and Cason Harrah. Ilana’s sister, Merle, and her husband, Richard Blackman, live near us in New York and their adult children, Lara and Josh, have developed friendships with Katie and Sky King. We love them all like our own. We also do our best to stay in touch with family and friends scattered around the world and our extended family in South Africa. Ilana remained close to Christinah Seema, her family’s housekeeper when she was a child, until Christinah’s death in 2021, and she continues to be close to Christinah’s family. Ilana has funded private school educations for Christinah’s daughter, Dipuo, and her grandson, Neo. Ingrid Löfdahl-Bentzer’s children, Jake and Helene, Melissa and Paul Keary’s son, Cameron, and Janet Young Langford’s kids, Anthony and Jennifer, are our godchildren as well.
We’ve shared great times and major life occasions with all of them. Openly acknowledging we’re a couple has allowed Ilana and me to give and receive love in measures beyond anything we’d have otherwise known.
Chapter 28
I didn’t know a great deal about being an activist when I started fighting for equality, but I picked up insights along the way that still govern my life. Marching in the streets is great—people feel good when they get to yell and scream and vent their frustrations and gather with like-minded people—but that’s not enough. Once you organize, you have to mobilize. You have to say: How are we going to actually get the change we really want? What concrete things have we accomplished? How do we get people to join us? Because that’s what a successful movement is.
You have to have a fire in your belly and put your ego on the shelf each day because it’s not about you, it’s about the change you’re seeking and everyone that is in the fight with you. Everyone has a role to play; everyone wants to be heard. You’re not going to get exactly what you want every time, so you have to learn to adapt and listen, recognize who has the power and cultivate allies, because those people in power—the same people you’re fighting—are often the ones who are going to make your dreams come true.
Ilana always tells me I have an amazing ability to avoid taking things personally—“You just start over and over again with people,” she says—and I think being able to forgive, forget, and keep moving has helped me throughout my life. It was that way with Jack Kramer and me, believe it or not. During the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, UCLA Chancellor Charles Young had seated Jack and me next to each other at a dinner party, not knowing about the many showdowns we had had. It turned out to be a terrific night. Jack and I made amends for some of the things we had said or done over the years and said how sorry we were that we had had to go through that. I told Jack how I had attended one of his pro tour events when I was twelve, and how deeply it affected me because I knew I was watching the best players in the world. I also liked the fact that he was a great businessman and promoter as well as a great champion. Jack told me, “I have a granddaughter now.” He shared some stories that inferred he finally understood why women were fighting so hard for change. Jack and I had a great relationship after that.
The years that Arthur Ashe and I worked at HBO were another gift. For the better part of a decade, the two of us spent a lot of time together at Wimbledon, working as commentators for the network starting in 1984. Being thrown together gave us a chance to get to know each other. That didn’t seem possible when I was pushing to help start the women’s tennis tour and Arthur and the male players wanted little to do with us.
Arthur suffered from a congenital heart condition that ended his tennis career in 1979 after he suffered a heart attack at the age of thirty-six. He underwent two cardiac bypass surgeries by 1983, and was stunned when he was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in September 1988 after experiencing sudden paralysis in his right arm. After extensive tests and exploratory brain surgery, doctors discovered that Arthur had toxoplasmosis, a parasitic disease that is commonly found in people infected with HIV. Scientists didn’t start screening donated blood until 1985, which was too late for Arthur. His doctors guessed that he probably picked up HIV/AIDS from a transfusion during his second heart surgery.
Arthur and his wife, Jeanne, decided to keep his HIV-positive diagnosis confidential to protect their privacy and that of their daughter, Camera, then two. HIV and AIDS had emerged as an epidemic a few years earlier, mainly affecting gays, hemophiliacs, and intravenous drug users. The hysteria that an AIDS diagnosis could generate then could turn you into a pariah overnight. The public didn’t know, for example, that Rock Hudson was gay until he was dying of AIDS, and three public figures I had met—Freddie Mercury, Halston, and Rudolf Nureyev—concealed that they had HIV/AIDS until the news appeared in their obituaries. It took a few years for the epidemic to spread to other populations and for science to unravel some of the disease’s mysteries. By the time Earvin “Magic” Johnson of the Los Angeles Lakers became the first active sports superstar to reveal he was HIV positive in 1991, we had learned that the virus doesn’t care if you’re gay or straight—any kind of unprotected sex can transmit HIV.
A few of us at HBO learned from Seth Abraham, the president of HBO Sports, about Arthur’s diagnosis soon after it had been made, but we swore ourselves to secrecy, not even telling Arthur that we knew. We all noticed times when Arthur was struggling. He sometimes had trouble writing with his weakened right arm. He lost weight. The “silent and generous conspiracy of silence” that protected him—Arthur’s words for it later—began to fall apart when Doug Smith, a tennis writer for USA Today and a lifelong friend of Arthur’s from Richmond, Virginia, visited Arthur with some devastating news for both of them. The newspaper was going to run a story reporting that Arthur had HIV/AIDS.
Arthur pleaded for privacy instead. When no such promise was forthcoming, he felt forced to call a press conference the next day in New York to tell the world the truth. Ilana and I had just flown from New York to Chicago that morning when someone at HBO called to tell me the news, and to ask if I could attend as a show of support. There wasn’t enough time to fly back, so I called and reached Arthur just minutes before he walked out to a microphone to face the media.
“Arthur, I am so sorry you were outed like this,” I said. “It’s horrible when you have your privacy invaded.”
I’ll never forget the sadness in his voice as he answered, “Ah, Billie, they’re such rats. I don’t want to do this. I can’t believe they’re doing this to me.” I listened to him and thought about the pain his family must be feeling as well. It sent me back to how raw and exposed I felt after Marilyn outed me.
Later that year, Arthur came to Wimbledon as always and we ate breakfast together every morning before going to the HBO studio. We talked about our sport, about race, and about how he had turned his research of the history of Black athletes into a three-volume set of books titled Hard Road to Glory. He told me about his recent trip to South Africa at the request of Nelson Mandela, who had finally been released from prison.
One day I asked him, “Arthur, what’s been the most difficult thing for you?”
“Being a Black man,” he said without hesitating.
Camera was five or six by then, old enough to understand what was happening. Arthur told me he was taking her to all the courts where he had played and telling her his stories. I hope she remembers how e
xtraordinary her father was.
In the final months of Arthur’s life, he and Jeanne put together a fund-raiser at the 1992 U.S. Open for the new Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS. (The event, which has since raised millions of dollars for the cause, is now called Arthur Ashe Kids’ Day.) Arthur took time during the tournament to travel to Washington, D.C., to protest our government’s treatment of Haitian refugees. He was also racing to finish his memoir.
Even after suffering another mild heart attack, Arthur was still making the rounds of every benefit and news show he could squeeze in to talk about athletes, education, apartheid, and AIDS. He made a speech on the floor of the United Nations on World AIDS Day on December 1, 1992. Two months after that, Arthur died of AIDS-related pneumonia. He was forty-nine.
It was my honor to be among the speakers at Arthur’s memorial service in New York, which was attended by more than five thousand people despite a February snowstorm. I’ve thought about Arthur a lot since then, including during the summer of 2020, in the midst of the Black Lives Matter protests that were sweeping the country. It felt like sweet justice when the statues of Confederate heroes along Monument Avenue in Arthur’s hometown of Richmond were taken down until only the statues of Arthur and Confederate General Robert E. Lee remained—and then Virginia Governor Ralph Northam ruled that the Lee statue must go, too, sparking a flurry of lawsuits to block its removal.
When Arthur’s statue was originally placed on that boulevard in 1996, opponents argued that he didn’t belong there amid the existing memorials of Confederate icons. Now look. Arthur may outlast them all.
* * *
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By the time Althea Gibson broke the color barrier for African Americans at the tennis majors in the 1950s, the Black-run Amateur Tennis Association had been giving African Americans places to play in segregated America since 1916. The ATA helped Althea launch her tennis career and later championed Arthur.
I was so motivated by Althea’s skill and example when I saw her as a junior player I made sure that Larry and I were among those who worked to make tennis an equal-opportunity sport, at first through the Tennis for Everyone clinics we started in under-resourced neighborhoods in the late 1960s, and then in our other ventures. Gladys Heldman always felt the same way about encouraging diversity.
At the start of the Virginia Slims tour, Gladys approached Dr. Clyde C. Freeman, president of the ATA, to ask for his help. That’s how Bonnie Logan became the first African American player to join our tour in 1971, and Ann Koger and Sylvia Hooks followed by 1973, continuing a lineage that stretched back to Althea and forward to other female players of color that came after them, such as Kim Sands, Renée Blount, Leslie Allen, Andrea Buchanan, Katrina Adams, Lori McNeil, Zina Garrison, Chanda Rubin, and, of course, Venus and Serena Williams.
Like Althea and the Original 9, the first African American players on the Slims tour were underappreciated pioneers. Bonnie was an amazing athlete who played five sports in college. She was also one of the first African Americans to play tennis in South Africa during apartheid. Ann competed with Bonnie on both the men’s and women’s teams at Morgan State University and they won collegiate titles. Sylvia had an academic scholarship to Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio, another historically Black school, and later got her master’s degree at Stanford.
When Gladys and Dr. Freeman held a press conference with Bonnie in New York in November 1972 to announce the collaboration between the ATA and the Slims tour, it was yet another case of Gladys finding a like-minded ally to work with while rattling the cage of the USLTA in a wonderfully progressive way. The next day’s New York Times story noted how our new working relationship put the USLTA “in a delicate position” because the USLTA had “little contact with the ATA despite similar objectives in junior development.” The insinuation was clear: The USLTA wasn’t doing all it could to serve the Black community.
I wish I could say it was always trouble-free for Bonnie, Ann, and Sylvia once they joined our tour. It wasn’t. They all said they had some terrific experiences. Our crowds in Philadelphia were filled with ATA members who gave them a warm reception. In Houston, Ann recalls how the Black staff at our tournament site came out to take a peek at them because, she says, “They told us they had never seen Black women professional tennis players before, and we made them proud.” But at our tour stop in Boca Raton, Florida, some staffers tried to direct Ann, Bonnie, and Sylvia to the club’s service entrance even though they arrived wearing their tennis gear. “We’re players—we don’t work here!” they said. At our tournament site at the Jockey Club in Miami, they were dismayed to see Confederate flags flying from every other flagpole around the top rim of the grandstand. Ann secretly climbed up there one night and took one of the flags down. When she saw Peachy Kellmeyer later, Ann motioned to the remaining Confederate flags and said, “You know they lost. That’s an insult to us, and every other American.” Someone got the message. “The next day,” Ann says, “all those Confederate flags were gone.”
Tournament housing could be another issue. Many players still stayed with host families in private homes to save money, but Bonnie, Ann, and Sylvia dryly noted how available rooms disappeared when they showed up at the tournament desk. They heard every excuse imaginable—suddenly, a child was sick, or there was a death in the family. I happened to run into Sylvia at the Jockey Club right after she had been informed that there was no lodging available for them with any host families. “Can you please wait right here?” I asked her. I went to the tournament check-in desk and said, calm but as direct as I could be, “You know, there must be some mistake. My friends here told me that you have no housing for them. And if that is true, I can assure you that I will not play in this tournament. And neither will anyone else. Understand? So, what are you going to do for them?”
They found Ann, Bonnie, and Sylvia rooms in a nice Holiday Inn.
“We were all trying to make it a better world,” Sylvia says now of those pioneering days, “and the world wasn’t always having it.”
* * *
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Arthur’s death touched Ilana and me so personally we wanted to get more involved in the fight against AIDS. Just weeks after his funeral, Ilana and I flew to Los Angeles to attend Elton’s first Oscar viewing party and fund-raiser for his AIDS foundation. Elton had started the effort after learning about Ryan White, an Indiana boy who was ostracized so badly after he was diagnosed with AIDS that he and his family eventually left their hometown of Kokomo to escape the personal attacks. One of the last straws was the day a bullet came flying through a window at the Whites’ house.
Elton was deeply affected by knowing that he had been given a second chance at life despite his addictions while Ryan, a hemophiliac, was dying of AIDS because of a tainted blood transfusion. Elton had befriended Ryan, given the White family money to help them move, and was at Ryan’s bedside when he passed away at the age of eighteen.
Elton and I had always talked about finding a way to put music and sports together in a program, and Ilana came up with the perfect idea. She mentioned to Elton that the twentieth anniversary of the Battle of the Sexes was approaching in September 1993, so why not use it to raise money for his AIDS foundation? That’s how the annual Smash Hits all-star fund-raisers started. We’ve raised millions of dollars since.
The first event featured a private concert by Elton and dinner at the Beverly Wilshire hotel. The next day we had a World TeamTennis match at the Forum featuring Jimmy Connors, Vitas Gerulaitis, and Martina. But the biggest stir was made by Bobby Riggs, who showed up wearing a pink sweater and finally got me to play a rematch—this time, fifteen minutes of mixed doubles. We were happy to see each other again. In some ways, Bobby hadn’t changed a bit. He told reporters that he and Martina would have beaten Elton and me had we played a full set. “I’d bet a thousand dollars on it!” Bobby crowed. He still had some nice shots for a seventy-five-ye
ar-old.
Over the years, Bobby and I went back and forth over the meaning of the Battle of the Sexes. I would always say, “It was about social change, Bobby. It wasn’t about a hustle, don’t you see? This was historical, what you and I did.”
A day or two before Bobby died from cancer in 1995 at the age of seventy-seven, I called to check on him. Lornie Kuhle, who remained a devoted friend of Bobby’s throughout his life, alerted Ilana and me that Bobby wasn’t doing well. His voice was very weak, but one of the last things he said to me was “We did make a difference, didn’t we?”
I said, “I love you, Bobby.” He said, “I love you.”
* * *
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I hit my fiftieth birthday a month after Elton’s first AIDS fund-raiser, and Charles Schulz surprised me by drawing the invitations. My parents and Randy and his wife, Pam, flew to New York for a surprise party in my honor. By then, Mom and Dad had moved from Long Beach to a place they built to fit their wishes in the forest above the town of Prescott, Arizona. Just down the hill was the Pine Cone Inn, where they could dance to swing music every Friday night. Mom took art classes at Yavapai College and spent her days painting. Dad had retired from the Long Beach fire department in 1977 after thirty-five years and worked for a while as a part-time scout for the Milwaukee Brewers baseball team.
I saw them as often as I could, which wasn’t enough. Usually I went by myself. Ilana felt awkward when we visited them because it still went unacknowledged that we were a couple. If we did go together, we slept in separate bedrooms. My mother hadn’t given up hope that I might wake up one morning and be straight. Sometimes she still asked, “Any new boyfriends, Sis?” Something had to give. I was fifty years old and still tiptoeing around my parents, trying not to upset my dad or disappoint my mom. All my life I wanted to be the “good girl.” Then one day I realized that always trying to be the good girl was making my life unbearable.
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