A former Olympian recounts her experiences as a young gay athlete and coach in the 70s and 80s, turning discrimination into celebration.

When Betty Baxter was hired to coach the Canadian women’s volleyball team in 1980, she was met with a media frenzy as the first woman in the position. Then her career was cut short—Baxter was fired in January 1982 and tossed from volleyball at age twenty-nine because of rumours about her sexual orientation.

This personal memoir chronicles Baxter’s journey from a small-town prairie girl discovering her passion for sports, through the years of international success, including harsh coaches, excruciating training regimes and the inequities in the sports system, especially for a closeted gay athlete. After her abrupt dismissal, Baxter turned to activism, seeking equality for women, initiating a new coaching school and working for a healthy, visible LGBTQ+ community through the internationally recognized Gay Games.

Outspoken: A Journey from Olympic Athlete to Activist exposes the persistent flaws of elite sport in Canada. It lays bare a system so resistant to change that forty years later the same issues, particularly for women, remain under scrutiny. But it also highlights the resilience and perseverance required of marginalized athletes to survive. Most of all, it champions the capacity to succeed.

Available from Nightwood Editions

Betty Baxter was born in 1952 in Brooks, Alberta. Prior to turning thirty, she played Olympic volleyball and was one of the rare women to coach the sport internationally. She was a member of the National Advisory Council on Fitness and Amateur Sport for the federal government (1977–79) and a founder of Canadian Women & Sport (1981), and initiated the National Coaching School for Women (1987).

Following her expulsion as Canada’s national coach in 1982, she became an outspoken activist for LGBTQ+ community and human rights. In 1993, she was the first open lesbian to seek federal office in Vancouver Centre, and in 2011 she was elected to her local school board, serving two terms.

After many years as an educational and human rights consultant, she is grateful to live, write stories and care for her five horses and three dogs in xwésám (Roberts Creek, BC) on the unceded territories of the shíshálh and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh people.

About the Author

Bryen Dunn is a freelance journalist based in Toronto with a focus on tourism, lifestyle, entertainment and community issues. He has written several travel articles and has an extensive portfolio of celebrity interviews with musicians, actors and other public personalities. He’s willing to take on any assignments of interest, attend parties with free booze, listen to rants, and travel the world in search of the great unknown. He’s eager to discover the new, remember the past, and look into the future.