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WOMEN ON DECK: SKATEBOARDING’S UNTOLD GENDER-INCLUSIVE HISTORY  
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Deborah Stoll
July 16, 2024
Yes!
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_ As skateboarding becomes an Olympic event, “Drop In” chronicles
the women, nonbinary, and queer skaters who have made the sport more
equitable. _

, Leo Patrizi/Getty Images

 

History, it is said, is written by the victors. And so it is that the
male-dominated history of skateboarding has been written by men, is
about men, and celebrates men, with a few delightful women popping up
hither and yon.

This story is about skateboarders who identify as anything but men.
Which isn’t to say that men who skateboard are bad. Many are good.
Super, even. Fantastic! But it’s time to tell some different
stories. To set some records straight. To recognize and historicize
the female, queer, bi, and nonbinary humans responsible for today’s
more equitable skate culture.

Nothing exists in a vacuum; societies and political constructs are
reflections of their respective eras. It’s what Olivia Laing
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calls the “immense entanglement of everything”—the idea that
everything affects everything affects everything else. Even rebel
things like skateboarding have long reflected, and been a reflection
of, the world around them: In the ’70s it personified the punk-rock,
lock-up-your-daughters, middle-finger-to-the-Man ethos.

In the ’80s it was fingerless gloves, parachute pants, neon
graphics, and synthetic beats. In the ’90s it channeled New York
City—graffiti, hip-hop, and a high-low street style personified by
the Supreme shop on Lafayette, where hip-hop and incense wafted out
the open doors onto the sidewalk, erasing the division between public
and private space.

And in all those decades, skateboarding mirrored/reflected not only
pop culture, but the sexist, homophobic framework surrounding it.
Women were excluded entirely or welcomed to get paid mind-numbingly
less for skating the same contests as men, just as women in corporate
America got paid less than their male peers and were barred from the
C-suite.

Rarely did you see a woman’s name in a skate video—either on a
deck or behind the lens—the same way a woman’s name rarely graced
the top line of a Hollywood film under the title “producer” or
“director.” And there were no gay skaters. At least, no out gay
skaters. Like the rest of the world, skateboarding considered anyone
who wasn’t straight an aberration.

Sometime within the past decade, though, skateboarding stopped moving
in lockstep with the world around it and started resembling the
dissenters it had long professed to rep, rejecting the stupid status
quo to include whoever, and dress however, they wanted. It’s these
genuine outcasts who are at the heart of this story, their collective
story anchored by the personal experiences of four skaters, each with
a vastly different relationship to skate culture:

Alana Smith [[link removed]] fell in
love with skateboarding at the age of 8, a precocious phenom breaking
records and taking names, until their talent threatened to destroy
their life. 

Marbie Miller [[link removed]] grew
up skating in a tiny town in Iowa. She liked how she didn’t have to
pretend to be someone else when she skated. She had zero designs on
fame. When it happened, she was more surprised than you.

Victoria Taylor [[link removed]] was
raised to look hot, nab a husband, have kids, and live happily ever
after. At the age of 21, she stepped onto a skateboard and found a
more inspired happily ever after. That is, until, as in all fairy
tales, the wolves showed up at her door.

And then there’s Vanessa Torres
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teen heroine with a lapful of gold medallions, getting into catfights,
crying in secret; misunderstood. All she wanted to do, forever, was
skate with her friends. She’d like it if her sponsors liked her, but
in 2003, no one in the skate industry knew what to do with a rebel
girl. If you’re one today, you owe Vanessa a thank-you card.

But for all their differences, every one of these skaters fell in love
with the same thing: a piece of wood with four wheels, two trucks,
some kingpins, nuts, and bolts. They all loved that thing so badly
that even when it didn’t love them back they kept returning to it.
And that’s how they broke the mold. By refusing to slot neatly into
a nebulous collection of preordained boxes, and instead, fighting for
their space in the world—which, contrary to popular belief,
there’s enough of to go around.

_The first rule of fight club is you do not talk about fight club_.

When I started writing about this topic in the summer of 2020, I
didn’t know the club existed. And then my niece skateboarded down to
meet me at the surf break. The world was in lockdown, and everything
was the worst. But that day, after teaching her to turtle roll against
the cold, crashy waves, she showed me how to tic tac across the
pebble-pocketed road, and everything was the best(ish). 

We’d never bonded over anything before and suddenly were
inseparable, pushing each other to try things that scared us on
boards. Things that left us breathless and bruised, smiling bigger
than ever.

I said,_ Let’s have a sleepover!_

The night she showed up at my place we decided to only watch movies
that featured girls surfing and girls skating.

Skateboarding has recently weathered a number of significant changes.
Most controversial was the one-time fringe subculture being catapulted
onto the world stage as a result of being in the Olympics. In
response, a new era of skateboarding sprung up—one too young to know
its past, much less the parts that have seldom been told.

So before things go any further and the history of skateboarding is
forever cemented in myopia, here are some stories that tell a
different tale. And sometimes the same tale, from a different
perspective, with the same rapturous fervor.

“Often, if you want to write about women in history, you have to
distort history to do it, or substitute fantasy for facts,” said
historical novelist Hilary Mantel. This story is meant to avoid future
historians having to make shit up.

_This excerpt, adapted from _Drop In: The Gender Rebels Who Changed
the Face of Skateboarding
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Deborah Stoll (Dey Street Books, 2024), appears by permission of the
publisher._

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Deborah Stoll [[link removed]] is a
journalist, lyricist, writer and animator. Her work has appeared in
_The Economist, Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Portland Mercury, San
Francisco Chronicle, Punch Drink, Buzz Bands, Ignite_ and _White Hot
Magazine_. Her short stories have appeared in _Slake, Swivel,_ and
_Fresh Yarn_. Her band, Hot As Sun, has opened for Phantogram, Gotye,
and Foster the People, been featured on TV shows like _Vampire
Diaries, Pretty Little Liars, Glee_, and _CSI: Miami_, and in the
movie _For a Good Time, Call_ and the forthcoming _Space Cadet_. Her
first book, _Unvarnished_, was co-written with Eric Alperin. _Drop In_
is her first book as a solo author.

_Support stories that are silenced elsewhere. __Donate
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* Skateboarding; Equitable Skateboarding;
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