Joanie Evans
Joanie Evans is a British footballer, coach and campaigner for LGBT inclusion in sport. A founder member of Hackney Women's Football Club, the first openly lesbian football team in Europe, she has been co-president of the Federation of Gay Games since 2014.
Early life and football
Evans grew up in Birmingham, where she ran for her school and for West Midlands County as a teenager, and moved to London in the 1980s. She came out at the age of twenty-five, and took a recreation and leisure course at Westminster College which included football training; through a friend she found her way to Hackney Women's Football Club, and after half a dozen training sessions became its coach.[1]
Hackney Women's Football Club, established in 1986, was the first out lesbian football team in Europe, and was outspoken about its identity at a time when players were warned that visibility would damage the women's game. Evans and her team-mates appeared in the 1991 documentary Running Gay, directed by Maya Chowdhry and broadcast on Channel 4's Out on Tuesday.[2]
In 1994 the club travelled to the Gay Games in New York as the first out team from Europe to take part. Evans has attended every Gay Games since, and won a gold medal at the 2002 Games in Sydney with the Amhurst Aztecs, a team drawn from players in Britain, Italy and New Zealand.[3]
Federation of Gay Games
Evans served as the Federation of Gay Games' director of diversity and inclusion and then as a board member, and in April 2014 was elected its female co-president. Until 2017 she was the only Black woman on a largely white board, and under her presidency the Federation's membership on the board widened to include representation from India, Mexico and Hong Kong alongside Europe and the United States.[3]
As co-president, with Kurt Dahl, she signed the Federation's statement of 3 March 2016 ending seven years of negotiations with the Gay and Lesbian International Sport Association over a proposed single combined event, the board having concluded that creating a new unified organisation carried too much risk.[4]
She served on the executive committee of the London 2018 bid to bring the Gay Games to London, and has since overseen the Games held in Paris in 2018 and, jointly, in Hong Kong and Guadalajara.
Other work and recognition
Evans has worked at Stonewall Housing and as a legal adviser at a London law centre. She is a regular speaker on inclusion in sport, and became an ambassador for the heritage organisation Sporting Heritage in 2022.[5]
She was among the top ten nominees for Outstanding Contribution to LGBT+ Life at the British LGBT Awards in 2019, and received the administration award from the Football Black List.[5] Aslie Pitter, a founder of Stonewall FC, has described her as one of my heroes
, adding that she should have been honoured long before he was.[6]
References
- ↑ Joanie from Hackney Women's Football Club and the Federation of Gay Games, Out For Sport.
- ↑ "I'm proud to be part of women's football history", Sports Media LGBT+, 2022.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Joanie Evans: levelling the playing field on and off the pitch, DIVA, 6 September 2023.
- ↑ Federation of Gay Games ends One World Event talks with GLISA, Out For Sport, 3 March 2016.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Joanie Evans, Sporting Heritage.
- ↑ Football in the time of 'It's A Sin', Sky Sports, February 2021.