Book Review of autobiography by famous tennis player Martina Navratilova

“If you ever saw a girl get a crush on her teacher, this was it. I used to think to myself that if only I was older, I could have married him. It didn’t matter one iota that he already was married…I believed George Parma would have been the perfect husband, but that’s the way it goes when you’re ten.”

This ten-year-old girl also says of this man—her coach—that he was a: “..tall, handsome man with blond, wavy hair…and if I thought he was going to tell me something, I’d rush right up to the net and stare into his light blue eyes.”

Throughout her early adolescence this girl keeps her first-time romantic crush, even after her own father becomes her coach: “For a long time after that he could get me to do anything simply by saying, ‘This is how George wants it.’ I would think of those blue eyes sparkling across the net from me, and work doubly hard.”

Who is this obviously heterosexual girl? She is the world’s most famous lesbian, the tennis pro, Martina Navratilova! (Quotes are from her autobiography, Martina; New York: Ballantine, 1985, pgs. 31, 81)

But how did she change from a heterosexual to a lesbian? She gives us some important clues. First, perhaps due to her rigorous athletic training, Martina appears to have experienced a delayed onset of puberty—she does not develop like other girls: “I was very slow in reaching puberty, had no breasts and didn’t until I was fourteen or fifteen.” (Ibid., pg. 87)

Martina finds this deficiency such an important factor in her life that she begins her book on this theme: “I was used to people mistaking me for a boy. I was the last girl in my class to get her period, and as for a figure, forget it…I saw myself in a full-length mirror and started crying. Big calves. Big ears. Big feet. ‘I’m always going to look like a boy,’ I cried.” (Ibid., “Prologue”)

This vulnerable girl was traumatized by her “boyish” look: gender-identity confusion began early for Martina. When Martina eventually came to the U.S. to play tennis, she overate and gained 25 pounds in only eight weeks. But she thought she looked great: I thought I looked more like a woman because I wasn’t so muscular anymore. I felt more feminine. (Ibid., pg. 105).

But I was proud of my new-found femininity…” (Ibid., pg. 114) Martina was sixteen when she had her first boyfriend. Eventually, they had sex: “My first sex with him was painful, very painful…I hadn’t realized how painful it could be. I kept thinking: Who needs this? It hurts too much.” (Ibid., pg. 124)

Adolescence was especially confusing for Martina! So many things that were associated with heterosexuality seemed turned on its head. Thus, we can see an obvious process in Martina’s life. She was clearly heterosexual in her early years. But then she went through a severe crisis of female gender identity in her teens and had a very negative, unpleasant heterosexual experience. This set the stage for her first lesbian sexual encounter at age eighteen. She was visiting with a woman, “somebody older than me.” Finally,

“I was invited over to snuggle and it went on from there. She knew what she was doing…When it finally happened, I said this is easy and right. And the next morning—voila—I had an outright, head-over-heels case of infatuation with her.” (Ibid., pg. 154)

Martina clearly recognizes that she was “attracted to both men and women at different points in my life.” (Ibid., pg. 57) There is no “born gay,” sexual orientation here.