Rosie O’Donnell Defied The Director To Keep Her A League Of Their Own Character Gay – /Film

O’Donnell made a cameo appearance in the new “A League of Their Own” series as a bartender at a local gay bar, a role that she’s sure would have made Doris proud. In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, O’Donnell talked about the making of the original film, and her determination to portray Doris as gay even when no one else could see the obvious queer-coding of the character.

“When we did the movie, there was that one scene [where] I’m on the bus: ‘I never felt like a real girl or even a girl, but now I see there’s a lot of us, we’re all okay.’ To me, that was her saying she found her tribe, right? There were gay women or athletic women or women like her, and my character, I thought, was in love with Mae and didn’t maybe know how to express it. But it was 1991 when we shot it, or 1990, and the times were different. You don’t realize until you’re sort of faced with the new show what it could have been.”

The queerness of the All-American Girls Baseball League is not something Prime Video threw into the new series for “woke points” or whatever other garbage nonsense detractors are trying to claim, and O’Donnell confirmed this even when they made the film in the early 1990s. “When we met the real players, who were in their 70s—80s, some of them — they would say, ‘Oh, this is my roommate, Betsy,'” said Rosie. “I’m like, ‘Oh, how long have you been roommates?’ [and they’d say] ‘Oh, 27 years.'”