Under the Cover: Validating the History of Women and Non-Binary Skateboarders in Girl Gangs, Zines, and Powerslides

Validating the History of Women and Non-Binary Skateboarders: A Skater Librarian’s Literary Mission

by Natalie Porter

Librarians are a mysterious coven. We often have secret lives and unexpected passions beyond the reference desk, and for me, that’s been my pursuit of skateboarding and archiving the history of women and non-binary skateboarders.

To progress in skateboarding, one needs to be persistent and resilient, and in many ways, a librarian’s mission to promote access to information and unearth the perfect resource through obsessive research requires the same traits. My upcoming book, Girl Gangs, Zines, and Powerslides: A History of Badass Women Skateboarders (September 16, 2025) with ECW Press is a demonstration of how I’ve merged my skillset as a librarian with my role in the skateboarding community, acting as a kind of knowledge keeper and matriarch.

I began skateboarding in 1995 at age 17 and then wrote the first academic thesis in 2003 on the topic of female skateboarders and their negotiation of space and identity in a male-dominated subculture. Since then, I’ve continued to write articles on this theme and actively returned to skateboarding in my early 40s after a break of 12 years.

I noticed in the lead-up to both the Tokyo and Paris Olympics, which included skateboarding as a competitive sport, that there was a media fascination with the very young female skateboard prodigies on this global stage, but no context around who came before them. Women have relentlessly participated in skateboarding from the beginning, and I have visual proof of this as early as 1959. Unfortunately, there’s been a myth around skateboarding as a pursuit for boys only, especially in the 1980s and 1990s when skateboarding was re-branded as a realm to promote and sell masculinity. And yet, rejection from the broader community has never stopped girls from going for it and creating their own scene!

Knowing how many pioneering women there were and how many of them had to battle the skateboarding industry to be accepted, to have their own contest division and earn equal contest pay, or to be seen as worthy of sponsorship and represented in skateboarding media, I decided to act.

On International Women’s Day, March 2022, I launched my skateboarding archive, where I could consolidate all the articles, DIY zines, photos, and research I could find, and seek out individuals via social media whom no one had bothered to interview. I wanted to elevate the experiences of senior women, who should be revered as icons (several of whom were their country’s first female national champion) but have been largely ignored by the industry. I composed individual biography webpages (currently 300 and counting) and organized the names into decades, and this research became the foundation of my book. Plus, I utilized Instagram, which is the preferred social media venue for skateboarders who share their skateboarding clips and photos, and are inspired by visual content, to celebrate my findings and connect with like-minded skateboarders, zine collectors, and feminists.

When researching a topic that involves “righting a wrong,” where it is evident that a particular group of people have been excluded and even shunned from the media outlets of their era and the history books of today, there are times when one is motivated by rage and frustration. I often found that rage could be a catalyst to forge on, like the time I was scouring the popular magazine TransWorld Skateboarding in the early 1990s and plowed through 29 issues without a single photo of a female skater, even though the first all-girl skateboard video called SK8HERS (1992) had just been released, including 14 talented women. Not a single magazine noted the existence of this breakthrough video. The preference was to present girls within tedious “sex sells” ad campaigns rather than active participants of the subculture. I was livid.

But rage only gets you so far. And as I got to know individual women through my interviews and email correspondence, I was surprised to discover that the process of creating this archive and writing this book was a healing journey for me. Even better, I learned that I was capable of offering grace to individual men whom I might have dismissed as among the culprits who made things especially difficult for female and non-binary skateboarders, while they were part of the industry in their youth. In a sense, this book is also about men, and how social pressures can shape them to be either fearful or accepting of diversity.

Girl Gangs, Zines, and Powerslides is personal. Historians and archivists often distance themselves from their work, but because many of the skateboarders I met truly impacted me, I inserted myself into the text and discovered that I now have a network of badass senior skateboarders. Some of these individuals still skate today, and I regard them as heroes and mentors because they demonstrate how to live with integrity and joy as we get older.

Researching women in history still has its own unique difficulties, for example, the reality that many change their name through marriage and are effectively disconnected from their youthful feats and legacy. And, on occasion there have been name and pronoun changes related to chosen gender. And yet, for a librarian, I have loved the challenge and the level of fulfillment when I connect the dots and pinpoint a match. The response has been overwhelmingly positive and joyful because the person realizes that they haven’t been forgotten and their story has value. The collaborative process of hashing out these narratives and discovering how a person’s life has unfolded has been worth the effort.

Girl Gangs, Zines, and Powerslides is not a “who’s who” directory of skateboarders or a tidy timeline. Instead, it’s a tapestry of bios about inspiring individuals and their place in skateboarding history alongside the backstory of creating the archive and my own transformation. I’ve come to recognize that writing history is activism and combatting archival silence is a communal effort. I have met so many incredible people, including old-school skateboarding nerds and collectors, who were excited to contribute to the project and help re-write history. It’s been a privilege, and I am eternally grateful to ECW Press for accepting the manuscript pitch and supporting me in this rogue endeavour.