In a candid interview Billie Jean King says she wasn’t comfortable with her sexual orientation until she was 51. “My poor parents were homophobic. I was homophobic” she stated in an interview with Phillip Zonkel.
King also explains that she felt she couldn’t have come out in the 1970s because it would have damaged the fledgling Women’s Professional Tennis Tour. “It was such a tenuous position,” she said. “We were labeled all the time ‘women’s libbers.’ We were just always under the gun from the media. When I played Bobby Riggs, there wasn’t one woman sports reporter (covering the match).”
She also talks about being outed by her ex-partner Marilyn Barnett in 1981 and her decision to call a press conference to turn it into a positive.
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