MARTINA NAVRATILOVA.

A winner at more than tennis, she has raised $1 million for gay causes with the Rainbow credit card

It may surprise some people to know that the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Rights was the first gay event Martina Navratilova had ever attended. "I had been to a few bars," says the lesbian sports hero over a recent breakfast in New York City. "I think I'd been to [Clit Club] once, Meow Mix once, Henrietta Hudson twice. Then one place in D.C. and maybe two or three times in L.A. That's it in my lifetime--except for Dallas in the '70s, when I went out maybe three times total." She laughs. "Playing tennis made me pretty boring."

As a top-ranked professional athlete for some 20 years, Navratilova was simply consumed by tennis. But in 1993 she knew she was coming to the end of her sports career. So when she heard about plans for the largest gathering of lesbians and gay men in the history of the nation's capital, she says, she decided "it was just time to be out there. And I really wanted to experience being in the majority for once."

Even with her enormous popularity and success, Navratilova says, she still craved a different kind of validation. "No matter how great the support I had playing tennis--when they introduced me [at tournaments] there would be big cheers, but I'd always hear those few people who were whistling and booing. Maybe it was only one person, but there was always at least one, and Chris [Evert, Navratilova's best-known rival] never had them. There was always this undercurrent of not being accepted, and of course it bothers you."

As it turns out, Navratilova had plans to attend the 1993 march before she was asked to be a keynote speaker--an opportunity she couldn't pass up but one that filled her with anxiety. Even after playing tennis in front of thousands of fans and on television, she says, "I was petrified. If I were playing tennis onstage, I would have been fine, but giving a speech that I wrote?" She shakes her head. "When it finally came time for me to speak and I got up onstage, I was like, Whoa, there are a lot of people here! I didn't know if anything would come out."

But Navratilova gave her speech, addressing the importance of being out, and as she finished, the passionate cheering of the crowd hit her--a wave of love and approval unlike anything else in her lifetime. She was transformed.

"We were driving home from D.C.," Navratilova remembers, "and usually I don't like when people recognize me. But I was waving back at everybody, and I felt so good. I said to my friends [life partners Pam Derderian and Nancy Becker, now Navratilova's business partners], `How can we make this feeling last?'"

Their discussion inspired the idea for the Rainbow Card, an affinity Visa card that would raise funds to benefit nonprofit organizations relevant to gay and lesbian causes. Two years later, in 1995, the Rainbow Card and the Rainbow Endowment were launched through the Travelers Bank in Delaware with founding sponsors Subaru and British Airways.

In its first year the card raised $50,000. And, Navratilova says with great pride, on the eve of the Millennium March on Washington, the Rainbow Card program has raised more than $1 million for lesbian and gay issues. "The idea came in '93," she says. "It's 2000 now, and I feel we're just getting started."

Navratilova, Derderian, and Becker would like to expand the program to include a whole portfolio of financial products and services that would raise money. "This is my passion," she says, "my number 1 cause."

Navratilova will once again be a keynote speaker at this year's march, but her life has changed dramatically since 1993. Having been retired from professional sports since 1994, she observes, she feels like she's on a "permanent vacation. I didn't realize what strain I was under at all times, and it just kept growing and growing--the cumulative effect of 23 years. Then suddenly it's not there anymore. Every day I wake up and I thank my lucky stars. I made my money, and I'm free, personally and professionally, to do whatever I want."

And what does Navratilova want? She has recently earned her pilot's license and has been flying around Aspen, Colo., where she lives with two female companions: a 4-year-old seven-pound toy fox terrier and a 2 1/2-year-old 85-pound Rhodesian Ridgeback.

Navratilova's love of animals, she says, has also inspired her to travel often to Kenya, where she photographs creatures in the wild. As a result of these trips, she's begun studying Swahili ("a very, very gentle, very logical language") and says she's progressing slowly but surely.

But the Millennium March coincides with another landmark in Navratilova's life, a crowning achievement that comes 20 years after she first became the number 1 woman tennis player in the world. Navratilova will be starring in her first national advertising campaign--a first for an out lesbian--as the new spokeswoman for Subaru, and she's thrilled at the idea of having her image in national magazines and on television, transit posters, and billboards. "This acceptance from Madison Avenue is shocking because before, whenever I'd ask my agent about endorsements, he would tell me that whenever he brought up my name, people just went silent." For Navratilova, this is another homophobic injustice made right.

Although at press time Navratilova hadn't quite figured out her speech for the march ("No doubt I'll end up changing it the night before anyway"), she says her message from the stage will be clear: Be out and be proud. And she adds, "If you really want to feel good about yourself, show up there. It's a life-changing experience. It was for me, and I've been through a lot. And my God! Even if you can't go, there's no excuse for not being involved. You can always contribute, so find a way."

Che is a contributing editor at Time Out New York.