I planned to try to meet as many Russians as I could in my short time there. I had long ago learned that just because a nation’s government officials are bigots doesn’t mean that all its citizens are the same. When I landed in Sochi, I and others were whisked off in a bulletproof van. The vehicle was so heavy we nearly got stuck on one of the mountain roads that wound its way up to the bobsled track. There were security people around me everywhere I went, and I was feeling sad, jet-lagged, and a little on edge when I arrived at our hotel and gave a brief press conference about an hour later. I told reporters I supported the calls for sexual orientation to be added to the Olympic Charter’s anti-discrimination policy. I voiced my concern for LGBTQ+ people who were facing prejudice and violence in Russia.
As I spoke, I was aware of a thin teenage boy with light brown hair listening intently to what I was saying. Just as my handlers were trying to move me along to the next stop, the pale young man mustered the courage to step forward, trailed by a Canadian documentary crew that tipped me off that they had been interviewing him. I stopped in my tracks.
“Hi, I’m Vladislav, I’m gay, and I am born in Sochi,” he said in a rush of heavily accented English. “Every day I endure bullying, violence, fear. I’m seventeen years old, and everybody in school knows about my sexuality.”
He had a narrow face and frightened eyes. His whole body was shaking. I asked if I could hold his hands in mine, and when I took them, they kept quivering. I looked at him and said, “If we could do one thing for you—if I could—what would that be? What can I do to help you?”
“I don’t know who can help me in Russia, I think I need to go away from Russia—I’m afraid to stay,” he told me.
I turned to someone from the State Department and one of the staffers from the American Embassy who was part of our contingent and said, “What can we do for him?” As someone wrote down Vlad’s contact details, I turned to him and we hugged and I promised I would be in touch.
I couldn’t get that boy out of my mind the remaining two days of the trip.
Vlad was being bullied by his classmates, who had outed him after hacking his Facebook account. He was being persecuted by his schoolteachers, one of whom had walked past Vlad in the school hallway a few days before we met and whispered in his ear, “You will end up badly, homo.” He felt in danger for good reason. I found out that Vlad’s full name was Vladimir Slavskii, and the only reason he wasn’t in jail for being a gay activist was probably because, at seventeen, he was still underage. He described how he was spat on, hit, stoned, doused with bottles of urine, and nearly raped by thugs hiding in the bushes. His attackers had begun to undress, but he was able to escape. He knew another man who was tortured and managed to flee to Lithuania just before police arrived to arrest him. “It’s awful, it’s horrible, and police don’t want to help me,” Vlad said. “They say I need to hide my sexuality.”
After I asked our government staffers in Sochi to help Vlad get a visa to the United States, I followed up with calls to the State Department. The Canadian director and activist Noam Gonick, whose moving documentary that included Vlad was called To Russia with Love, also remained deeply involved in helping Vlad. Vlad was able to get an expedited visa through the Unaccompanied Refugee Minors program that’s run by the U.S. State Department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement.
Gonick’s extraordinary film provided a searing look at the impact of Russia’s anti-gay laws in the days leading up to the Sochi Games, and some of it had to be shot in secret. Several times, Noam and his film crew were nearly arrested.
I called Dan Bridges, then the athletic director at my alma mater, Cal State L.A. I asked him how Vlad might be able to remain in the U.S. once here. Dan was accustomed to dealing with international students and he told me Cal State L.A. could sponsor a student visa for Vlad so he could stay after he applied for asylum. Things were really coming together. Now he had a place to go. I said I would pay for Vlad’s travel, tuition, and room and board to go to Cal State L.A., which Vlad did.
When Vlad landed in New York that June, Ilana and I spent time with him before he traveled on to Los Angeles. He still seemed so wan and nervous, but we were greatly relieved that he was out of Russia. He said he was worried he would be arrested when he got to the Sochi airport, then at customs, then right up to the moment they closed the cabin door and his plane took off. He told us life had become so much worse for LGBTQ+ people in Russia once outside scrutiny faded after the Games. There had been more government crackdowns. He was grateful to be alive.
That same week in New York, Vlad went to the West Village to see his first Pride march and Noam captured that on film too. Vlad couldn’t stop smiling. “Oh my God, it is possible…There is free people! There is happy people!” Vlad says in the film, his mouth slightly open in wonder. After going to school for a while at Cal State L.A., Vlad fell in love with the man he would marry. He moved to Pennsylvania and continued his studies. He is applying for American citizenship. When asked before his last semester if he’s happy he left Russia, Vlad laughed and said, “Infinitely happy.”
My mother’s life ended just as a new one for someone else I know had begun.
Chapter 32
Today when I see LGBTQ+ teens who think it’s unremarkable to openly be who they are, I’m thrilled. Sometimes I’m so happy I laugh out loud. I love how they self-identify and have appropriated the word queer so it’s no longer a slur. I smiled when the U.S. National Team ice hockey captain Meghan Duggan appeared at the Women’s Sports Foundation gala a couple of years ago and spoke about her pregnancy and her wife without a whiff of self-consciousness. It’s gratifying because it means we’ve succeeded in making the world better for the next generations. But I always try to make sure people know history, because the more you know about history, the more you know about yourself and, most importantly, it helps you shape the future.
Who would’ve guessed, for example, that forty-four years after the King-Riggs match, a Hollywood film about it would give me another international platform to talk about equality and sexual identity? But when the Academy Award winner Danny Boyle, the director of Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire, approached Ilana and me with his business partner, Christian Colson, about doing a Battle of the Sexes movie with their team, it felt right.
Other people had suggested the idea over the years, but Danny had the funding in place. The script was going to be handled by Slumdog Millionaire screenwriter Simon Beaufoy, who also wrote The Full Monty, a hilarious movie with great heart. Danny wanted the wife-and-husband team of Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton to codirect the film. Their previous credits included the blockbuster Little Miss Sunshine. Emma Stone, the actress they chose to play me, had won the Oscar for her performance in La La Land by the time they started production, and Steve Carrell was an inspired choice to play Bobby Riggs. A subplot of the film dealt with my relationship with Marilyn Barnett. Though the filmmakers took some dramatic license—it was entertainment, not a documentary—I think the movie sent an empowering message.
Emma and I didn’t talk a great deal before filming because she had her own process of preparing for the role. Afterward, we became great friends. Emma was going on twenty-nine when we met, the same age I was when I played Bobby, and she’s a deep person. She said a question that I had texted her along the way—“Emma, what will your legacy be?”—stuck with her. Before portraying me, she had some awareness of how hard we had fought for equal rights and opportunities when I was her age. But she said once she did extended research, and then as she began to try to inhabit the role, something changed in her. She said the work of putting on ten to fifteen pounds of muscle changed her self-belief; she was stronger than she knew. She said she found the courage to trust her voice in her own life, and once the film was finished, she began to use that voice more.
The sexual abuse charges against the Hollywood studio chief Harvey Weinstein hit the news during ou
r promotional tour for the film, sparking a torrent of anguished stories from women around the world who suddenly felt freer to share their own abuse experiences—many of them on social media, under the hashtag #MeToo.
Emma joined more than three hundred entertainment industry workers in forming a new group called TIME’S UP, which was announced on New Year’s Day 2018 in collaboration with the Alianza Nacional de Campesinas. That’s a group of more than 700,000 female farmworkers that had published an open letter in Time magazine describing the workplace abuse they face and expressing solidarity with victims everywhere. TIME’S UP laid out an ambitious agenda to promote equality and confront systemic abuse and discrimination in blue-collar workplaces nationwide, not just in Hollywood. A legal defense fund administered by the National Women’s Law Center was also established and raised $22 million in the first year alone. By 2020, the fund had helped more than four thousand people.
In one of the joint interviews we did, Emma related our tennis fight for equal pay to her personal experiences in Hollywood. She told Out magazine she needed her male costars to take a pay cut so she could have parity with them. “That’s something that’s also not discussed, necessarily—that our getting equal pay is going to require people to selflessly say, ‘That’s what’s fair.’ ”
Then she highlighted the positive domino effect that follows when someone takes a principled stand. “If my male costar, who has a higher [salary] quote than me but believes we are equal, takes a pay cut so that I can match him, that changes my quote in the future and changes my life,” Emma said. “This is Billie Jean’s feminism, and I love it…It’s not about, ‘Women are this and men are that.’ It is, ‘We are all the same, we are all equal. We all deserve the same respect and rights.’ ”
Emma said she realized she couldn’t truly understand being a sports hero, “but I do know what it’s like to struggle and to be afraid and to be a public person, to feel like you can’t share all of yourself, to be afraid of saying the wrong thing or not furthering goodness in the world.” Referring to the impact of the Riggs match, Emma told another interviewer, “And to think, it all started with a young girl who had vulnerabilities and fears, and yet the courage to speak out. She taught me that you don’t have to be perfect to be great, and that you can push through your fears and still have a voice.
“I think that’s a great story to share with the world right now.”
* * *
—
The relentless attempts in the Trump years to eliminate hard-won protections for U.S. citizens and immigrants exceeded anything I’ve seen in America since police were using fire hoses and attack dogs on civil rights demonstrators in the 1960s. I never imagined I’d see a day when an American president would separate immigrant families and cage their children at our Mexican border, or callously allow tear gas and rubber bullets to be fired at peaceful protesters so he could walk from the White House to Lafayette Square for a photo op, and then hold up a Bible—upside down—in front of a landmark church. I never expected storefronts across the country to be boarded up in advance of an American election or a sitting president to exhort his supporters to march on our Capitol building, as Trump did, the day Congress met to certify his loss. It’s all a reminder that progress is often so painstakingly slow to achieve, democracy is fragile, and it can be undone so quickly if we’re not vigilant. We can’t relax. We still have work to do in every area.
And so, as much as I lament the deep need for the Black Lives Matter movement—which was started in 2013 by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman—I was encouraged by the enormous momentum the effort to combat systemic racism had gained by the summer of 2020. The massive public protests and responses to the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and the shotgun murder of jogger Ahmaud Arbery by a retired cop and his son, could not be ignored at any level of society, politics, or government. Even before Jacob Blake was later killed by a Kenosha, Wisconsin, officer who shot him seven times in the back as he walked to his car, we finally reached a critical mass where people in this country—and the world over—rose up and said, Enough.
The pain was hard to bear, but what encouraged me most were the spontaneous outpourings of compassion, the new legislation that was introduced, and the reassessment of the lens through which we’ve told history. For so many years all we’ve been taught is white history. The sight of protesters of all colors engaging in numbers we hadn’t seen since the 1960s was, to me, a reaffirmation of the good values that I believe truly define America as a country. When I looked at those crowds, the other thing I saw was voters. Voters who were tired of seeing so many ideals profaned and so many people hurting.
By the time the bitterly contested 2020 elections arrived in November, I was among those who believed our democracy was in danger. A record 158.4 million Americans voted in that presidential election. After four incredibly tense days, people poured into the streets to celebrate the moment the networks declared Joe Biden and Kamala Harris the winners by about seven million votes, and many of them were crying with joy and relief. But, as feared, President Trump refused to concede the election for the next two months, culminating with his rally speech just outside the White House that preceded the violent storming of the Capitol building. The results were horrific—five people died, including a police officer. And yet, what the disturbing chain of events ultimately affirmed was that our democracy still works. Trump and his supporters did not win any of the sixty-plus lawsuits they filed contesting the vote; judge after judge ruled that there was no proof of widespread fraud. Members of the House of Representatives and the Senate were shaken by the Capitol riot, but they returned to work in their ransacked chambers that same evening and stayed till 4 a.m. to finish certifying Biden and Harris as the winners. The pace of those two weeks was dizzying: We went from the Capitol insurrection on Wednesday, January 6, to Trump’s impeachment (for the second time) the following Wednesday to Biden and Harris’s inauguration the Wednesday after that, under unprecedented security that included twenty-five thousand National Guard troops.
I thought President Biden struck the perfect tone in his inaugural address when he emphasized unity. “I know the forces that divide us are deep and they are real, but I also know they are not new,” he said. “Our ‘better angels’ have always prevailed…And we can do so now.” Harris also stressed their intent to heal the country, and eloquently captured the emotion and import of becoming the first woman—and person of color—to ascend to the vice presidency. “I may be the first,” Harris said, “but I will not be the last.” And twenty-two-year-old Amanda Gorman, our national youth poet laureate, delivered a stirring reading of her sensational inaugural poem, “The Hill We Climb,” calling us “a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished…There is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re brave enough to be it.”
Harris is the daughter of an Indian American mother and a Jamaican American father, and she knows that she stands on the shoulders of pioneers and social justice advocates who came before her. Biden acknowledged that his election turned on the support of Black Americans, starting with his campaign-saving victory in the South Carolina primary that pivoted when James Clyburn, the state’s Democratic congressman, endorsed him.
As Ilana and I watched Harris give her victory speech, I thought back to a night three years earlier when we met her backstage at a Human Rights Campaign dinner in Washington, D.C., and we discussed if she intended to run for president. I thought, too, of pioneering women who preceded her: Eleanor Roosevelt, Shirley Chisholm, Barbara Jordan, Ann Richards, Geraldine Ferraro, Dolores Huerta, Madeline Albright, Maxine Waters, Hillary Clinton, Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan. Harris’s ascent validated all the work and fighting to get women this far. We knew we could be it. Now we see it.
* * *
There was something starkly different about the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests when compared to the civil rights actions of the 1960s. I had the same feeling watching the first Women’s March on Washington in January 2017, the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration. More than a million people participated in Washington alone that day, another 5 million Americans hit the streets in other women’s marches across the country, and a few million more marched around the world—all to protest policies and statements that targeted people of color, women, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, the poor, the sick, and the physically challenged. They were taking a stand for the most vulnerable among us.
These movements were visibly made up of far more diverse coalitions than I’ve ever seen come together in the U.S. No matter which cause it was—Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, TIME’S UP, get-out-the-vote efforts, or combating violence against Asian Americans—we saw women and men, people of all colors, ages, ethnicities, religions, and sexual orientations marching side by side in recognition of our shared humanity. Even majority-white communities where few Blacks live were taking to the streets and lying on the ground for eight minutes and forty-six seconds to show their disgust for how George Floyd died, and proclaim their solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. For the first time in my life, I thought we are getting close to unlocking how to make equality happen, because the effort has to be inclusive. It has to be achieved together. Otherwise it won’t work. As President John F. Kennedy once put it, “Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free.”
The Zulu tribe in South Africa has a term that beautifully expresses a similar thought: Sawubona. It’s a common greeting that literally means, “I see you, you are important to me, and I value you.” It’s meant to encourage each individual to see and respect people as they are, and to pay attention to their virtues and needs, sorrows and desires. When someone says Sawubona to you, a typical response is Shikoba—I exist for you. I value you too.
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