4.21.16 Editor’s Desk

I think I played soccer on a team once. I can vaguely remember wearing the shin guards and avoiding my hands and the fast approaching balls and whether they would ever touch or I would fall in love, weaving and winding my way into looking like I was doing something when I really wasn’t (it’s easy). My mother, likely, sat in the stands, doing her best ‘70s mom boosterism, rolling her eyes while I flailed then failed at my last known athletic endeavor.

Still, it’s a fond memory. As sports go, soccer is friendlier than its jacked-up cousins like football, basketball and hockey. The score is always low, but I like to think that the game is about more than succeeding numerically. That’s not true, of course. Scores are numbers that make stars and endorsement deals. We’re a society of quantities. We want to be the best.

When Orlando City Soccer founders Phil Rawlins and Flávio Augusto da Silva introduced the seemingly absurd notion of a professional soccer league in Orlando a few years ago, there were a lot of rolling eyes. Could the team get it together enough to join the major leagues? Would the team be able to get the city on board in order to carve out a regulation-sized stadium when the city was already taking heat for building venues throughout downtown? Would anyone even show up? Yep.

Well, despite the obstacles and their related controversies, the Orlando City Soccer Club turned out to be just the shot in the arm – or the shin – that a cynical city needed. Orlando City fans are a loyal bunch; there are even competing fan franchises. It’s both amazing and bonkers.

Last year we learned that the Orlando City folks were branching out into the female sports arena, launching the Orlando Pride, which played (and lost) its inaugural game in Portlandon April 17. The ladies who kick will reconfigure and try again on April 23 at their first home game at the Citrus Bowl.

Why am I talking about a sport I couldn’t even bother to clearly remember playing? Because our cover star this week is Lianne Sanderson, who, among other feats on her feet, is a proud lesbian who happens to be kicking for the Pride.

Interestingly enough, our story doesn’t focus too much on Sanderson’s sexuality, just as the sport won’t allow you to stop and contextualize yourself. She’s clearly open about it – even on social media – but it’s not her entire existence. In a way, she’s a new kind of LGBT hero, one who exists outside of the assimilationist norms but is clearly tried and tested for a major sports league. So she’s assimilating on her own terms.

Elsewhere in this issue, you’ll find other outsiders working the inside with aplomb. Poet Derrick Austin, who will be in Orlando for the Functionally Literate series on April 23, goes to the dark spaces of visceral reality, smiling through the sexual corners often unexplored. Similarly, St. Petersburg’s freeFall Theatre Company pushes the boundaries and breaks the mold on theatrical classics and lives to tell another day.

We have updates on Sarasota’s New College making trans-inclusive moves in the right direction, a wrap-up of this year’s Orlando AIDS Walk (along with some news from Hope and Help about its evolution), a deep look into how the state’s Department of Children and Families is now intentionally failing LGBT foster children and much, much more.

And if you thought our score couldn’t get any higher, we have dueling Republican viewpoints: one satire, one real. Does that make it a tie? Math is hard.

All sports metaphors aside, we’re obviously engaged in what is going on with the religious freedom bills plaguing our country – it’s called bigotry – so we’re raising our hackles in the only way we know how: a cacophony of words in a columnar fashion.

Mostly, though, we’re being good sports in what can be considered bad times (unless you’re married). If it sounds like we’re beating the same drum every other week, it’s because we are. Loyalty to the rights of our brothers and sisters in the LGBT movement is paramount, whether there’s a team name or not. The scoreboard is set. Our shoes are spit-shined. We’re aiming for the goal.

Now if only these bruises would leave my shins.