Everybody has an image in their mind of what it means to be an athlete in our society. I paint my fingernails. I color my hair. I sometimes wear women’s clothes. I want to challenge people’s image of what an athlete is supposed to be. I like bringing out the feminine side of Dennis Rodman.
Dennis Rodman, from his bestselling 1996 memoir Bad As I Wanna Be
The year was 1996, and Leslie Feinberg had a hot new book and a press tour and a revelation: Her subtitle was wrong.
A self-described transgender butch lesbian and leading voice on the LGBTQ+ experience, Feinberg published Transgender Warriors: Making History From Joan of Arc to RuPaul in the spring. Changing your book subtitle for the paperback edition is not the norm.
But that was Dennis Rodman for you—he made you pay attention.
“I originally subtitled this book Making History from Joan of Arc to RuPaul in order to breathe recognizable meaning into the word transgender, and to convey the sweep of time and cultures in my work,” Feinberg wrote in her new afterword, dated September 1, 1996. “But that was before Dennis Rodman, the greatest rebounder in basketball history, proudly came out as a cross-dresser—and before millions of people of every age and nationality hailed a cross-dressed Dennis Rodman with love and respect.”
What happened in between Feinberg’s publication in early 1996 and her afterword and new subtitle, Making History From Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman, in the late summer of 1996 was the flowering of an icon unlike any in the popular culture. In his first season with the Chicago Bulls, Rodman reached the culmination of a four-year journey of self-actualization, one with a significant influence on queer culture that resonates today.
And his ability to be himself was aided in no small part by being in the city of Chicago—a pioneering city of gay advocacy—and playing for the cultural force that was the Bulls.
“When you move from one city to another, you have to feel wanted,” Rodman wrote in 1996. “I felt wanted in Chicago from the beginning from a basketball sense [because] they weren’t interested in taming me or keeping me in line. That’s the only feeling of comfort I needed.”
Rodman spent the late 80s and early 90s with the Detroit Pistons, where he began shaving words in his hair and tattooing his torso. In his first weeks with the San Antonio Spurs in 1993, he kicked his bodily expression to a new level when his new hairdresser set him up with the Demolition Man ’do: a bright-blonde mohawk. Over the next two seasons, Rodman added piercings, more tats, and a host of hair colors, and if he’d stopped there, he still would have been the most unusual player in the NBA.
But then: Sports Illustrated.
The magazine that dictated who and what mattered in sports pegged the Spurs forward for its May 29, 1995 cover and introduced the world to Rodman’s fluid sexual identity. On the cover, Rodman held a macaw and wore a tank top, hot pants, and a dog collar. Inside, he talked about his trips to San Antonio gay bars and his gay fantasies.
“Everybody visualizes being gay—they think, ‘Should I do it or not?’” he said. “The reason they can’t is because they think it’s unethical. They think it’s a sin. Hell, you’re not bad if you’re gay, and it doesn’t make you any less of a person.”
The story sent shockwaves through the NBA. When the Spurs failed to even reach the NBA Finals despite having the NBA’s best record and the league MVP, they effectively blamed Rodman and traded him to the Bulls. Despite Rodman’s personal dominance, he was never a clean fit on the Spurs like he was on the Bulls. It’s not that he didn’t act out here—you might recall his suspensions for headbutting a referee and kicking a cameraman—yet where the Spurs shamed, the Bulls kept an open mind.
“Dennis’s antics are not as important as his heyoka component,” Bulls head coach Phil Jackson told the Tribune during the Finals, referring to a shamanic figure for the Sioux nation’s Lakota peoples known as “the sacred clown.” Jackson explained it as, “A backwards-walker, a cross-dresser,” adding, “Dennis loves these comparisons.”
Bulls general manager Jerry Krause’s initial reluctance toward acquiring Rodman was based on his assessment that Rodman was not “OKP” (“Our Kind of Person”). Krause’s longtime assistant Jim Stack thought otherwise. Stack had studied Rodman during the Pistons’s “Bad Boys” era as part of his scouting duties, and his persistence with Krause, along with Krause’s and Jackson’s respective due diligence, eventually led the entire organization to push past Rodman’s image and see the player.
“Phil Jackson was cool,” Rodman wrote. “He said, ‘These are the rules, and if there’s anything here you don’t think you can handle, then let us know.’”
With Rodman, the Bulls flourished. With the Bulls, Rodman did too. He led the NBA in rebounding for the fifth straight year, made first team All-Defensive, and became a pop culture phenomenon. The 1995 Sports Illustrated article led to a book deal. Bad As I Wanna Be was released during the 1996 playoffs and included two of Rodman’s most memorable moments: a book signing in May at Borders on Michigan Avenue, to which he arrived in heavy makeup, silver hair, and a red feather boa; and another signing in New York in August, in which he announced on Late Show with David Letterman that he was going to get married the next day, only to show up as a bride in a full wedding gown and yellow bangs.
“We all live through Dennis,” Michael Jordan said after the ’96 Finals. “How many times have you ever wanted to wake up and change your hair four or five times in a week? I’m pretty sure people have, and they live that moment through Dennis.”
Parker Molloy was one of them. A trans journalist, Molloy, 39, writes The Present Age, a newsletter on media criticism, culture, and politics. She transitioned in her late twenties. Sixteen years earlier, she was a ten-year-old sports fan in Manhattan, Illinois, meaning she was exactly where we all were: in the midst of a Bulls frenzy that took a booster shot in the form of the wildest, most thrilling, most nervous player acquisition ever. I think a lot of kids found Rodman exhilarating. I know I did. I bought every piece of Rodman merchandise on the market, even his here-today, illegal-tomorrow tattoo shirt.
“I asked my mom if I could dye my hair,” Molloy says. When her mother asked why, Molloy pointed to a picture of Rodman. “He did it!”
Rodman’s approach to basketball had always been paradoxically unique: He created on-court independence by being deeply subservient to the team mission. Now, his individuality as a person served as a sales tool for his on-court unselfishness. Rodman made it cool to do nothing but board, bail out loose balls, and play D.
“I was like, ‘I’m gonna be like Rodman. I’m gonna get all the rebounds,’ because I wasn’t good at shooting,” Molloy says. “I really respected his game and general attitude. I thought it was cool to see a player who didn’t care about what he was ‘supposed to do’ and did his own thing.”
Molloy had a second reaction. By eight or nine years old, she was “figuring out that I was different from the other kids in class.” At ten, she sensed a deeper kinship with this new Bull.
“As a young, closeted trans person, seeing someone who was very fully himself, dressing up in a wedding dress to marry himself, pushing the boundaries of gender and presentation—I didn’t know what words to put to that at the time, but that was definitely a big moment growing up,” she says.
Otis Richardson was older, not a basketball fan—and equally enthralled. In 1996, he was a 32-year-old artist and illustrator living in Uptown. He identified as a Black, gay male—“and [I] still do”—and came to Rodman through just the daily experience of simply, you know, being awake in the 90s.
The magazine BLACKlines launched in Chicago in 1996, with Richardson as a contributing illustrator. For the publication’s Pride issue, Richardson was inspired: He drew Rodman in a pinup style, underwear only, with nipple rings connected by chain, among other touches.
“He was just so over-the-top and so outrageous that I was like, ‘I gotta draw this guy. He’s too fun,’” says Richardson, who today is the owner of Lavenderpop Greeting Cards. “He was never in those thigh-high boots, but it just seemed very appropriate.”
Rodman brought that out in people. His impact was palpable, including in Chicago’s gay club scene. His venue of choice: Crobar, on Kingsbury, where he hosted his birthday party in 1996 and was known for his regular appearances.
“This is Dennis Rodman’s second home,” as one bartender told Knight Ridder reporter Gerry Volgenau in 1998.
What also stood out about Rodman was his other major fanbase: kids. My generation gravitated toward him. As Bulls teammate and former Pistons teammate John Salley noted, “They think, ‘My mother said not to go there. Let’s see why not.’”
“The youth in my neighborhood—they have jackets with his name,” Feinberg told the PBS news series In the Life in 1996. “They wear his number proudly and a lot of them have even dyed their hair his color. He’s given great freedom to youths growing up to express themselves.”
The kids saw Rodman’s freedom of expression. The Bulls saw his dedication to craft. In Jordan’s press conference after the 1997 Finals, a reporter asked if MJ wanted the team to re-sign the free agent Rodman.
“Sure. His dresses doesn’t bother me. His hair doesn’t bother me,” Jordan said. “He’s going to go wacko every now and then. We’ve come to live with that. We’ve come to accept that. But you can’t find another player on the basketball court who works just as hard as Dennis Rodman. Gives 110 percent. Dives at loose balls even if he can’t get them. That’s Dennis Rodman.”
In March of 1996, Sports Illustrated ran another Rodman cover story, this time on his rebounding genius. The piece included a scene of Rodman studying film while wearing a shirt reading “I DON’T MIND STRAIGHT PEOPLE, AS LONG AS THEY ACT GAY IN PUBLIC.” In game one of the 1996 Finals, Rodman dyed an AIDS ribbon into his hair. He had done it in the ’95 playoffs with the Spurs, too, but the spotlight of this Bulls team brought greater attention.
“I went to my hairdresser, who is gay, and told him to dye my hair green and dye the red AIDS ribbon into the back of my head,” Rodman wrote. “I figured, let’s put it on TV and recognize it. Let all the AIDS victims know they’re recognized and respected by Dennis Rodman.”
“I thought he was pushing back at a lot of societal norms—to be in full makeup and wearing the boa and a wedding dress at a book signing: That’s some over-the-top stuff,” Richardson says. “I think he did it for the shock value of it and the fun of it, but I don’t think it was, ‘I’m going to be disrespectful of the LGBTQ community as I do this.’ I felt he did it out of a genuine respect for the community.”
For a player who did everything differently, and had an eye for image, these questions around sincerity were natural. In June 1996, San Francisco Chronicle writer Joan Ryan brought the topic into a gay sports bar in the Castro area, asking patrons about Rodman while they watched him and the Bulls play in the Finals.
“What Rodman is doing helps us,” one said. “He’s saying you don’t have to be a stereotype to succeed, that you can wear a boa and dye your hair and still excel. I think it’ll make it easier for the next athlete to come out.”
Added another: “Gay kids thinking about suicide, he can change the way they look at themselves. When someone in the public eye comes out, especially an athlete, it helps kids not feel ashamed of what they’re feeling.”
At the beginning of 1997, The Advocate put Rodman on its year-in-review cover, explaining that Rodman had “created so much awareness for gay people.” They talked about his sex life and his thoughts on sex with men, but Rodman also focused simply on the challenges that gay people faced in the 1990s.
“Athletes are very scared to come out and say ‘I’m gay’ unless they come down with AIDS. Then they’re accepted because people feel sorry for them,” Rodman said. “God, I think that’s wrong. So I go out and support the idea that an athlete can be gay. People think that I actually am gay or bisexual, but they still accept me. So I’m opening the door.”
“Growing up being trans, especially around that time, the onscreen culture representation of trans people was so horrible,” Molloy says. “It would be like, Ace Ventura, episodes of The Jerry Springer Show, episodes of The Maury [Povich] Show where they’d have ten women and say, ‘Which five are secretly men?’ Stuff like that, that was super insulting. Then you have other things that are not necessarily trans but are kind of a gateway to looking at the possibilities of being who you can be. Dennis Rodman is a great example of that.”
Acceptance of Rodman wasn’t solely because he was winning championships. The “Chicago” in “Chicago Bulls” mattered too. We have a rich history of gay culture. In 1924, Chicago was home to what’s considered the country’s first gay rights organization, the Society for Human Rights. In 1970, the year anniversary of the Stonewall riots, Chicago held what is considered by some to be the nation’s first Pride Parade.
And in the late summer of 1997, Chicago became the first city in the country to officially sanction a gay district with the Northalsted neighborhood.
“You also had LGBTQ bars on the south side,” Richardson says. “There were Black gay bars—Jeffery Pub may have been one of the oldest Black gay clubs not only in Chicago but in the United States. . . . Everything that people were doing, whether it’s the drag queens or the gay clubs, the gay businesses, entrepreneurs, creative people—I think all of that inspired Dennis to be as open and as bold as he was.”
And vice versa.
“In some of the tough Chicago neighborhoods, Dennis Rodman has done more than anyone to change the image of sexual identity,” Chicagoan Don Rose said during the launch of Northalsted.
During the Bulls’s 1996 playoff run, Feinberg’s book tour brought her to Chicago. In her appearances both live and on local radio, she spoke of “how important it was to defend Dennis Rodman’s courage.”
“Transgender Warriors puts Dennis Rodman into the context of a history of transgender people who have helped alter the course of humanity,” Feinberg wrote in her afterword. “This book answers the bigoted charges that Dennis Rodman’s self-expression—as well as my own—is ‘not natural.’ And this book reveals why Rodman, or anyone who is transgender, is a target of reaction.”
Rodman’s influence on gay acceptance in the NBA is tough to pin down. More than a decade after Rodman joined the Bulls, John Amaechi became the first former NBA player to come out. Rodman’s influence didn’t stop future Hall of Famer Tim Hardaway from exclaiming that he wouldn’t want a gay teammate, nor can we really credit Rodman for Hardaway’s transformation and his subsequent support of Jason Collins, who in 2014 became the first active NBA player to come out.
What is clear is that 30 years after joining the Bulls, Rodman remains a supporter of the LGBTQ+ community, including in Chicago, where just two years ago he attended a drag show at Roscoe’s Tavern and tipped a drag queen $100.
“I feel like the city in general gives people the chance to explore who they are, just being in a more accepting city,” Molloy says. “When I first came out as trans, it was scary. Every day going to work, it was like, ‘Am I going to get yelled at by random people? Will people at work be weird to me?’ You have to get into this mindset of, ‘I’m just being me and there’s nothing wrong with that.’ And that is something that ties back to Rodman: He was just himself. I don’t think he was trying to influence the world as much as he was just 100 percent being himself.”
Jack M Silverstein is Chicago’s Sports Historian and author of Why We Root: Mad Obsessions of a Chicago Sports Fan. Research and interviews for his forthcoming 1990s Bulls book 6 Rings are at readjack.substack.com.
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