Two WNBA players changed the game without ever making a big announcement about it
Glory Johnson and Brittney Griner were both already established in the WNBA when they started dating publicly around 2017. Johnson had been a first-round draft pick by the Phoenix Mercury and played for Tulsa Shock and Indiana Fever before that. Griner was a #1 overall pick who had already won two Olympic gold medals and multiple WNBA championships with the Phoenix Mercury by that point. They met through mutual friends in the league, and at the time, there were maybe four or five openly lesbian couples playing in the WNBA simultaneously. That was already notable, but the visibility they had together was different because both were high-profile players with significant media attention. What made their situation worth paying attention to wasn't just that they were a same-sex couple in professional sports. It was the timing. The mid-to-late 2010s were when the WNBA started seeing more players speak openly about their sexuality, and when the league began pushing harder on inclusion messaging. Johnson and Griner's relationship fell right into that shift, which meant it got noticed more than it might have five years earlier. The WNBA as an organization supported them publicly. That wasn't automatic, and it wasn't the case everywhere in professional sports. I remember watching them at games together around 2018. The coverage was normal in the sense that they were treated like any other couple in the stands. But I also noticed something that didn't get talked about much. When they went on talk shows or did interviews together, the questions were often framed differently than they would be for a straight couple. Reporters would ask about "the challenge" of being an openly gay couple in sports in a way that felt like they were testing whether the relationship was some kind of statement rather than just a relationship. It's a subtle distinction but one that adds up over time.
There's also the practical side that people rarely discuss. Being a visible couple in the league meant both of their schedules had to account for each other beyond what a typical player deals with. Travel is brutal in the WNBA. The season runs May through September, with games almost every other day, and teams often play back-to-back matches in different cities. When you're in a public relationship, your partner becomes a third party in your booking decisions. Johnson playing for Indiana while Griner was with Phoenix meant they weren't on the same team, which complicated things. I knew someone who tried coordinating travel logistics during that period and found that hotel bookings and flight times became a constant negotiation rather than a simple schedule match. The workaround that actually worked was booking flights through the league's team travel office with a shared itinerary sheet rather than trying to coordinate individual tickets. It sounds small, but the difference between a team-chartered flight and commercial travel when you're also managing press obligations is hours of lost time per trip. The barriers they broke aren't always the dramatic ones you hear about in headlines. The real work was in the routine visibility. Showing up together at Games 4 and 5 of a playoff series when your team is down 2-1. Sitting in the front row of a regular-season game in Atlanta or Chicago while the crowd decides whether to cheer or stay quiet. Doing both without making it a political act, which is what made it political in the first place. Griner has been very clear about her faith and identity in interviews, and Johnson has spoken about the pressure of being a Black woman in a league where both those identities come with their own set of expectations. Combining them while also being in a same-sex relationship layered on top of everything else. There's a common misconception that their relationship was purely about breaking barriers. It wasn't. They broke up in 2019. The split was handled quietly, which is probably the right call given how much attention both players already attracted. Johnson moved on to playing overseas and then coaching. Griner continued her career and dealt with far more serious issues, including her detention in Russia in 2022-2023, which is a whole different conversation entirely. The relationship itself lasted roughly two years of public visibility, which is actually pretty standard for athletes at that level. What mattered wasn't the duration. It was that it happened when it did, with two players who were already accomplished enough that their personal lives couldn't be ignored.
One thing people miss about this story is how much it reflects the broader structure of the WNBA. The league is small. Rosters are limited to 12 players per team. There are roughly twelve teams. That means the pool of openly LGBTQ+ players who are also high-profile is extremely narrow. When two of them date, the entire league notices because there simply aren't that many options for representation. It's not about the individuals being extraordinary in a way that separates them from their peers. It's about the math. The WNBA has more openly gay and lesbian players than any other major women's professional sport in the United States. That structural fact is what made Johnson and Griner's relationship carry more weight than it would have in, say, the NBA or MLB, where comparable visibility has historically been far rarer. If you're looking at this from a research angle, the primary sources are interviews Griner gave to outlets like Vogue and The Cut around 2019, plus Johnson's appearances on podcast circuits where she discussed the relationship without going into extensive detail. The WNBA's own social media channels from 2017 to 2019 document their public appearances together. There isn't a single definitive documentary or book that covers this specifically, which is probably why the story feels unspoken even though it was fairly visible at the time. The media coverage was there, but it was fragmented across entertainment outlets, sports sections, and Pride Month features rather than consolidated into one narrative.
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