Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty
“How do I fit into this?” is one of the first questions Lea Robinson [pronounced “Lee”] asked themselves when their manager said they were submitting them for the new A League of Their Own reimagining. Reading the script, Robinson quickly realized Bertie Hart is “a role of a lifetime.” Bertie’s storyline in the second half of the season is part of the promise made by co-creator and star Abbi Jacobson that the show is “about queerness in a huge way.”
Amazon’s series reboot—an expansion, really—of Penny Marshall’s 1992 film, which premiered on the streamer earlier this month, has received deserved praise for its revelatory and nuanced portrayal of queer women, the players whose sexualities were never explored in the original movie. There’s an entire spectrum of queer experience depicted on the show, but perhaps the most surprising and progressive is that of Bertie, a Black, gender-nonconforming trans community leader who reveals an entire secret world of bliss lived by queer people of color behind closed doors.
Bertie was assigned female at birth and presents as transmasculine in this binary era, dressing in exquisite tailored suits. This was 1943. That’s monumental. As is Robinson’s casting itself.