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The Amy Morris Homans Cotillion, held annually from 1982 to 2014, was a safe space for lesbian professionals in kinesiology, as well as a challenge and a disruption to the misogyny, homophobia, and heterosexism that pervaded the field in the mid- and late 20th century. In this article, we highlight the lived experiences of the broader Cotillion community. We conducted oral-history interviews with American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance (AAPHERD) convention attendees about their memories of the Cotillion and Pre-Cotillion. Through these stories, we convey the significance of these events for the women and lesbians in kinesiology/physical education departments who attended them. The article begins with descriptions of interviewees’ lives within the field, progresses to how attendees discovered and experienced the Cotillion and/or Pre-Cotillion, and then explores the impact of the Cotillion, both at AAPHERD and beyond the convention.

The Amy Morris Homans Cotillion and Pre-Cotillion created unique and liberatory spaces for many lesbian and allied women attending the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance (AAHPERD) convention between 1982 and 2014. In this article, we draw on feminist and queer theories to consider the multiple meanings embedded in Cotillion goers’ lived experiences. Memories of planning and participating in these events linger for attendees decades later. The impact of attending ranged from lighthearted appreciation to profound gratitude. The Cotillion events disrupted the oppressive status quo at the AAHPERD convention and within kinesiology in favor of community building, joy, and the celebration of lesbian identities. We explore the disruption of heteropatriarchal norms and the creation of alternative community spaces to learn better from the past and to help create liberatory futures for practitioners and scholars in kinesiology.

The story of the Amy Morris Homans Cotillion is little known outside the circles of those who founded and attended the event. In this article, we detail the origins of the Cotillion from its inception in 1982 to its final iteration in 2014. This underground social event provided a safe space for women to connect and create a lesbian community of joyful sisterhood with long-lasting professional and personal relationships. At its peak, the Cotillion gathered hundreds of women, inviting them to drink, dance, and dream of a better world. We place the Cotillion in the context of the historical development of women’s physical education and the field of kinesiology and use oral-history interviews with women who founded, organized, and regularly attended the Cotillion to create a narrative of the origins of this event.

In this article, I reflect on the presence of ableism in the discourse surrounding physical education in Chile. The purpose of this article was to highlight three areas where ableism is ingrained. First, I examined historical actions within the Chilean physical education system that prioritize White ideals and able-bodied individuals. Second, I examined curriculum and evaluation recommendations that overlook the unique needs of disabled students. Finally, I critique pedagogical practices that, under the guise of inclusion, implicitly strive to meet normative levels of functionality. In conclusion, ableism intersects with colonialism in the Global South, specifically Latin America, leading to unreasonable expectations for all students, including disabled students, in the realm of physical education.

Whole-of-school approaches to physical activity and health promotion have the potential to promote physical literacy. However, for a variety of reasons there has not been widespread adoption of component whole-of-school frameworks to guide schools, such as the Comprehensive School Physical Activity Program. We argue that component frameworks have shortcomings and do not necessarily assist or support schools to take an approach that is consistent with how successful whole-of-school models or programs are created and built over time. In this paper, we argue that we need to apply guidance that resonates with stakeholders and stimulates schools to design their own unique whole-of-school physical activity model to provide equitable programming opportunities. We also present an argument on the need to incorporate improvement science and the use of social–ecological models to investigate the efficacy of this guidance model.