There has always been an alliance between lesbian bars and companies and women’s sports leagues, even if that collaboration was hidden or unspoken, according to Susan Cahn, professor emeritus of history at the University at Buffalo and the author of Coming On Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Women’s Sport. In the 1950s and ’60s, some of the most visible places to find lesbians were in rec softball leagues. Many of those leagues were either run out of local women’s bars, or quietly aided by them as they helped pay for shirts or equipment. In return, the players would go drink there after games. Such was the arrangement that a gay softball team in Chicago’s Horner Park league had in 1974 with Ms. Lounge, the predominantly Black lesbian bar that sponsored them, according to historian Finn Enke’s 2007 book, Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism.