When people in the social justice world talk about “intersectionality,” our indivisibility is basically what they mean. We’re all part of one system. You can’t discuss equal opportunity or racism without acknowledging the core causes that contribute to people being left behind. You can’t achieve women’s liberation without addressing racism, sexism, reproductive rights, and gross disparities in wages and wealth distribution.
You can’t separate how the Arctic Circle is warming from what industrialized nations are doing to contribute to it. Today’s generation seems to know that more than previous generations did. The Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg has gained worldwide renown for speaking truth to power about the quality of the world we’ll be leaving her generation if we don’t ramp up our efforts to stem climate change.
In my lifetime, gun violence has become a human rights crisis in the United States that has awakened a new movement and inspired another crop of young leaders. Some of them were survivors of the shooting on February 14, 2018, by a gunman at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The gunman killed seventeen students and staff members and injured seventeen more. The tragedy was just another in the wave of massacres in the U.S. that we tend to recognize in shorthand by the names of the places where they happen rather than the names of the victims: Columbine. Virginia Tech. Sandy Hook. Las Vegas. The Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Parkland. Squirrel Hill. In almost every case, politicians send their thoughts and prayers, and then don’t do enough.
The Stoneman Douglas students refused to accept that. A group of them organized the March for Our Lives, one of the biggest youth-led protests since the Vietnam era. With help from large and small donors, and logistical assistance from seasoned advocacy groups, the student leaders David Hogg, Emma González, Cameron Kasky, Alex Wind, Alfonso Calderon, Sarah Chadwick, Jaclyn Corin, and Delaney Tarr were able to mobilize an estimated 800,000 people to march on Washington less than a month after the killings at their school. Hundreds of other March for Our Lives events took place across the country. When Hogg was later asked by Teen Vogue what he says when people remark that the Stoneman Douglas students got so much attention because they were predominantly white, he didn’t blink. He said, “I agree with them.”
The students recognized that they came from a privileged community where gunfire rarely erupts, so for the Washington march they had reached out in impressive fashion to include students from neighborhoods in Chicago and Washington, D.C., where gun violence is a devastating, everyday event. They’ve continued to do more coalition building with other youth groups. It is another assertion of how we’re all connected.
In all, there were about two dozen speakers at that first March for Our Lives in Washington, all of them students and young activists. The young were leading the old. Children were saying they were sick of seeing other children shot.
One of the most moving moments was provided by Emma González, then eighteen. She had been working at a table for the school’s gay-straight alliance the day of the killings, handing out valentines in the high school courtyard. She lost a close friend in the gunfire and had to hide with other students in the school gymnasium for two hours until police let them out.
When Emma took the podium in Washington, she read the names of all the victims to underscore that each was a human being, not a statistic. Then she stood in silence for a long while, and the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators looking on grew completely quiet themselves. Finally she said, “Since the time that I came out here, it has been six minutes and twenty seconds. The shooter has ceased shooting, and will soon abandon his rifle, blend in with the students as they escape, and walk free for an hour before arrest.
“Fight for your lives before it’s someone else’s job.”
Wow.
Her call to action was only nine words, yet it captured everything.
* * *
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While Emma was addressing the March for Our Lives crowd on the Washington Mall that day, Ilana and I had joined an estimated 175,000 marchers for the same cause in New York City. The staging area was on Central Park West, not far from where John Lennon was shot by a deranged fan.
The following year, I made a point to seek out Emma when we were both invited guests at the Pride March in New York City. The event is held on the last Sunday in June to commemorate the anniversary of the Stonewall riots that launched the gay rights movement. Ilana and I had never been to the march before because it always conflicted with Wimbledon. But in 2018, Wimbledon started later than usual, so I was able to accept an invitation to be one of the parade’s grand marshals.
Emma hadn’t been born when Hillary Clinton stood up at the Fourth United Nations Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 and declared, “Human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights.” But as we spoke, it was clear to me that Emma, like many of her generation, gets it. She and other student leaders from across the country kept pushing for more cultural change with their Vote for Our Lives effort in the months before the 2020 election, an expansion on their March for Our Lives theme. Young people backed the Biden-Harris ticket and Stacey Abrams’s efforts to help register voters in Georgia for two runoffs that decided control of the U.S. Senate through 2022. They continue to lobby state and national legislators for tighter gun control laws. They see the fight for equality and the fight against gun violence as all one thing. “The best way to get things done is to appeal to both sides and listen,” Emma told Yahoo News. “What we’ve really been focused on is inclusion and trying to really combine these communities spread around the United States. We’ve been trying to get everyone on the same page, to figure out what everybody’s asking for, and see if we can, as a giant movement, ask together.”
All of these movements—#NeverAgain, Black Lives Matter, TIME’S UP, #MeToo—are really about equality for every human being. As a gay woman, I know what the alternative is, and it’s no way to live. That’s why I’ve always said I don’t care where you come from, what religion, what color, what gender or sexuality you claim, everyone deserves to have the best that life has to offer. That’s why I’ve made working for equity my life’s calling.
After saying goodbye to Emma, Ilana and I climbed into an open convertible for the Pride parade down Seventh Avenue. As we moved along the route, it looked like a happiness factory had exploded and released all the joy in the world into the streets of New York. There were balloons and flags and costumes, singing and dancing. I smiled and waved to the cheering crowds lining the sidewalks and people waved back. It was so meaningful to experience that sense of community.
I believe that the global fight for LGBTQ+ rights will be as important as any civil rights issue we’re facing in the twenty-first century. And it’s important that America helps lead the way. In June 2020, the Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s attempts to roll back LGBTQ+ rights and ruled that transgender people are indeed protected in the workplace. Though that particular ruling focused on employment discrimination, legal scholars told The New York Times the decision could force expanded civil rights protections in education, health care, housing, and other areas of daily life. Once again, an opponent advanced us by trying to undermine us.
President Obama’s stance on gay issues evolved over time, but I always trusted that he would do the right thing. He did away with the awful “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in the military. He instructed the Justice Department to stop enforcing the hateful Defense of Marriage Act. He interpreted the Civil Rights Act as protecting LGBTQ+ persons from discrimination. In 2012, he announced his full support of same-sex marriage and declared it a civil right three years before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that the right of same-sex couples to marry was protected under the Constitution.
As the marriage laws changed, more and more of our friends were having weddings. Ilana and I were on a cruise with Rosie and Connie Spooner j
ust after they married in a beautiful ceremony in 2014 after being a couple for thirty-six years. Plenty of tears were flowing that day. Elton had run to the altar with David Furnish soon after same-sex marriage was legalized in the U.K., and he started nudging Ilana and me to consider it. He even offered to sing at our wedding if we’d take the plunge. John McEnroe saw me at Elton’s Smash Hit fund-raiser in Las Vegas and needled me: “C’mon, Billie Jean! Why not get married? Wrap it up and put a bow on it already!”
For me, it wasn’t that simple, and it had nothing to do with any reservations about Ilana, who is the love of my life. My hesitation didn’t have anything to do with finances and property, either. That’s all been taken care of between us. My problem was that marriage still evoked conflicted feelings for me. Besides, Ilana and I already considered ourselves partners for life. We had worn each other’s rings for years. Why change anything?
But in the fall of 2018, Ilana and I called our good friend David Dinkins, the former mayor of New York City, and told him we were ready to take him up on an offer he’d been making to us for years: “If you ever get married, I’m your guy!” After much discussion, Ilana and I had developed our own reasons for wanting to be married. We recognized that so many people had worked so hard to get the laws changed to give us the choice. Emotionally, we had arrived at a place where it became important to us to formalize our love for each other. As I said to Ilana as we were discussing it, “Years from now, I never want anyone to question how much I was committed to you.”
That’s how we secretly came to tie the knot at the mayor’s apartment on the Upper East Side of New York on October 18, 2018. We didn’t register at Bloomingdale’s. Nobody threw rice or smashed wedding cake in the other’s face. One of the brides wore jeans and a lovely red scarf and the other had on a black shirt, a comfortable warm-up suit, and pearls—ha!—a personal touch of glamour that Ilana still teases me about.
The only people who knew about our marriage until the writing of this book were the folks who processed our marriage license at city hall, David and his wife, Joyce, and an aide of theirs who acted as witnesses for the ceremony at the Dinkinses’ apartment. (David’s death in November 2020, at the age of ninety-three, came less than two months after Joyce passed away. She was eighty-nine.)
David loved to marry people and asked us to allow him to choose the vows. They were perfect: short, sweet, heartfelt. We said “I promise” instead of the traditional refrain, “I do.” Ilana and I had taken off our rings beforehand, and now we took turns slipping them back on each other’s finger. I loved that part. David popped open a bottle of champagne when we were done, and although Ilana and I are teetotalers, on that day we had a few sips.
“So much of our life has been public, keeping this private was something special that we could hold on to, just for us,” Ilana later told a friend. “We didn’t need the world to know. It was just about Billie and me and how we felt. There was something so nice about that, for both of us.”
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In the fall of 2019, I traveled to my hometown of Long Beach with a film crew and returned to many of the places that were touchstones in my life: my childhood home in Wrigley Heights; Houghton Park, where I met my dear coach Clyde Walker six decades earlier; the church where I asked Rev. Richards to baptize me and daydreamed about finding my mission in life; Charles Evan Hughes, my junior high school, and Los Cerritos, the elementary school where I used to race across the schoolyard and love the feeling of the wind in my hair.
The city had decided to name its new, state-of-the-art library after me and held a ceremony to dedicate the elegant 93,500-square-foot building. The Billie Jean King Main Library sits in the heart of Long Beach’s downtown civic center and was built as part of the area’s $520 million revitalization project that was championed by Long Beach’s visionary mayor, Robert Garcia. In addition to stacks of books, the library offers cutting-edge technology, computers, veterans’ programs, job search services, meeting space, children’s programs, and a “maker’s space” that includes art and 3-D printing studios—scads of things to help the community navigate the twenty-first century. I always say that Long Beach made me, and now I hope our library will be a place where people find needed support to create the future they want.
When I dropped by Los Cerritos on that trip, the fifth graders I visited with didn’t know I was coming. They were reading a book for young readers by Brad Metzler and the illustrator Christopher Eliopoulos called I Am Billie Jean King, which is part of the Ordinary People Change the World series. The students’ assignment that day was to come to class prepared to say what they wanted to be when they grew up, using the last line of the book—“I am Billie Jean King and I champion equality”—as an example. As I walked in, the teacher was calling on them and they were saying how they wanted to make a difference in the world:
“I want to protect the environment.”
“I want to be an activist against gun violence.”
“I want to be an anesthesiologist—”
“Whoa, that’s a really important job, anesthesiologist—get it right,” I joked. Heads turned. Eyes widened. The looks on their faces were priceless.
For the next thirty minutes or so, we talked. Those kids’ enthusiasm and innocence took me back to when I was their age and no dream seemed too big to me, either. I told them, “This is a pivotal three years that can catapult you into high school and college and the rest of your life. Enjoy this time. Pay attention to your teachers. And girls, boys, everyone—I want you to think of each other. Not by race, gender—none of that. Stick up for each other, not just yourselves. Keep doing the right thing. Not if it’s popular—if it’s right. Be kind and good to each other.”
Los Cerritos is a diverse school, and when I took the students’ questions, race and gender came up a lot. I told them how I was once a child in their shoes, wondering what my place in the world would be, and I found my calling when I went to a tennis tournament and noticed everyone was white. “That day, I promised myself I was going to work for equality for the rest of my life because I wanted everyone to be included. Because every single one of you matters. You count. I don’t care what other people tell you—you matter and you count. Don’t let others define you. You define yourself. You decide in your heart and mind.”
We resumed calling on the other children who hadn’t had a chance to declare their dreams—“I want to be a video game designer…I want to be a cardiovascular surgeon,” came the replies. The kids were impressive. As we neared the end, one boy raised his hand and volunteered, “I want to say that my parents support gay and lesbian rights. And I want to be an anti-bullying activist.”
“Have you been bullied?” I asked him.
“No, but I know friends who have,” he said. “I have two dads, and sometimes that’s treated like a bad thing. But they taught me that love is love, no matter who you love. And that I shouldn’t listen to bad things.”
“It’s about being yourself, right? Believing in yourself,” I told him. “It used to be very shame based but listen to yourself. You know who you are. This is your journey. You get to decide.”
Epilogue
I’m in such a happy place emotionally now. I wish I could have had this well-being when I was in my twenties, my thirties, and my forties. The journey has been so rewarding, even if sometimes a struggle. It’s just fascinating, life. I’ve told people if I die right now I’d be really ticked off because I’m not finished. Time is running out for real, and I’ve always had a sense of urgency. I wish I had nine lives.
When you read about history, you think it’s gone by very fast, but when you live it, it’s very slow. Progress is slow. Sometimes we have what seem like overnight revolutions, but these usually represent sudden tipping points after a long period of struggle. The road to success is filled with obstacles, the ebb and flow of measurable victories and setbacks; that’s the nature of
the change game. Winning is a process. It’s important to stay in the moment for each battle as it’s happening. Be clear about your goals. You must decide for yourself, What would define winning? And if you can come to see even failure as feedback, the information will help you plan your next step.
Sometimes I ask people to imagine themselves at the end of their life. I say, When you look at yourself in the mirror, when you’re older and wrinkled like I am, how will you want to remember yourself? How will you want others to remember you? What will you want to say that you stood for, and did with your life? I think it’s important to think about these things in a daily, intentional way. Each of us can be an influencer, whether it’s by running for office or operating in a space as intimate as our own home.
The time in my life leading up to the Original 9’s breakaway, the founding of the Women’s Tennis Association, and the Battle of the Sexes was particularly tumultuous. Even though we had fears, we still forged ahead. You never know whether you’re going to touch the hearts and minds of people unless you put yourself out there. You often hear people say that life is a marathon. Rather, I think life is a series of sprints—you get to start over and over and over again, always adapting to the long and winding road in front of you.
I’d give anything to be born again now. God, it would be great. When I look around at what’s still left to be done it makes me feel the way I did when I was twelve. Life goes so fast. I keep prodding the people I work with, “You know, in a few years I’ll be eighty. So what are we doing?”
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