An Accidental Sportswriter

by Robert Lipsyte

  Chapter Thirteen

  Queer Studies

  In the summer of 1999, a Times marketing executive, Tom Kulaga, called me with a hot tip off the gay grapevine. In a lifestyle piece about a new restaurant, the Miami Herald had outed one of the owners, Billy Bean, a former major-league outfielder. Kulaga thought Bean would be an excellent guest for a series of panels on gay athletes that I was moderating for the Times. I’d been back at the paper since 1991.

  I called Bean on August 19. He was pleasant but hesitant at becoming a public spokesman while he was barely out of the closet. He had allowed a gay reporter to include his sexual orientation in her story because he could no longer live a furtive life. A former college teammate had recently died in a car crash, and none of their mutual friends had been able to call Billy in time for the funeral. No one had his telephone number or e-mail address. He had pulled away from them to preserve his secret.

  We talked about his baseball career. “The whole nine years,” he said, “I had one foot in the major leagues and one on a banana peel.” We made a date to talk some more.

  Two days later, I called again. We agreed that a panel discussion might not be the best next stage of his coming out. I suggested a big Times story first. Lay out his life so that when he did appear in a public forum—on that Times panel, of course—he wouldn’t have to explain himself. He sounded interested, but he wasn’t sure, he needed to think about it. We agreed to a third telephone call in a few more days in which we’d talk about the possibility of meeting face-to-face.

  I wanted that story. I’d been leading up to it for years. I thought about my bully Willie and the Halsey Junior High hoods kicking our “fag bags” out of our hands, about all the coaches using words like “pussy” and “sissy” to keep straight boys in line. A major-league ballplayer! This would be a chance to crack open the cynical homophobia of Jock Culture.

  Ever since the publication in 1977 of The David Kopay Story, the autobiography of an NFL running back, I’d thought that gay athletes could provide fascinating insights into masculinity in Jock Culture. An aggressive player nicknamed “Psych” for his ferocious running and blocking, Kopay had written movingly about the terrible shame of homoerotic thoughts in a sport outwardly contemptuous of homosexuals; the emotional isolation; the need to prove “manliness” through heterosexuality, drinking, and reckless play; and the awareness that football itself was a sexual release.

  Not only did the Times not review the book, but Pulitzer Prize winner Dave Anderson’s thoughtful sports column about it was killed. The incumbent editor, Abe Rosenthal, and the publisher, Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger, were considered homophobic. Gay Times editors and reporters were deep in the closet.

  Kopay’s book became an underground bible for gay athletes, who had few confidants who could understand their two worlds. As eye-opening as the book was for nongays, the book had little early traction; sportswriters enjoyed gossiping about suspected gay sports stars but shied away from writing about homophobia and homoeroticism in the locker room. I was freelancing when Kopay’s book was published, and I pitched my agent a book called Gay like Me, playing off John Howard Griffin’s best seller Black like Me, for which he had temporarily darkened his skin and traveled through the Deep South. I would “come out” and observe the response. My agent thought that not only would my book make no money, it might darken the rest of my career. Soon afterward, I was diagnosed with testicular cancer, a manliness test of its own. I didn’t get back to gay athletes until 1986, when I did an NBC News piece on the unconquerable Tom Waddell, a decathlete on the 1968 Olympic team. Before he died of AIDS, Waddell created the Gay Games (until the Olympic Committee sued, it was called the Gay Olympics), a sports and cultural festival with no qualifying restrictions. You didn’t have to be gay to play.

  In 1988, during the lead-up to the Seoul Olympics, I hung out with Greg Louganis, the world’s best diver. I use “hung out” advisedly; it was in a restaurant bathroom, away from my producer and crew, that I asked him about his sexual orientation. There were constant rumors, and the man he was living with in Malibu was gay. Greg seemed to enjoy being playfully evasive, neither answering my question nor shutting me down.

  Louganis had spent his life fighting slurs; he’d been called “retard” (he had a learning disability) and “nigger” (he was part Samoan). He didn’t need “fag.” And what more did we need than his courageous performance? At the 1988 Seoul Olympics, I watched him crack open his head on the diving board, then come back a few minutes later, bloody and stitched, to nail a gold-medal dive.

  Five years later, now back at the Times, I went to see him in an off-Broadway play, Jeffrey, in which he played a chorus boy dying of AIDS. I returned the next day before showtime to tell him how much I had liked his performance. “So does this mean you’re out?” I asked.

  Louganis laughed and recalled our last conversation. Then he said, “You know, the way I deal with my feelings is that if I’m afraid of something, I’ll face it. When I was growing up, I had nightmares about snakes biting me. So when I was around ten, I got a boa constrictor. The pet shop guy said it was a girl. We named her Rosie. She was only about four feet long. She lived in my room. And my sister was really terrible about this. She would come in and bother Rosie, and Rosie would start biting me. So I’ve been bitten, oh, countless times by a snake, my worst nightmare.”

  “Is this some kind of metaphor for me to figure out?”

  “I guess you could also say this play is my Rosie.”

  The Times held the column for a few days, concerned that I was outing Louganis against his wishes. The climate at the paper had changed radically; Punch Sulzberger’s son, Arthur, Jr., was a champion of gay rights (as was Abe’s son, Andrew, later the editorial page editor). Editors eventually decided to run the column, figuring that Louganis was outing himself, which he confirmed to me several years later and in his autobiography. As usual, my subject was at least a beat ahead of me. Though I thought Louganis was finally declaring himself gay in my column, in fact he was also declaring himself HIV positive. (Which created a brief, retroactive controversy: what right did he have to dive into that Olympic pool with a bleeding wound and endanger others?)

  Despite my interest in the subject, particularly as a tool to pry deeper into Jock Culture, it was difficult to write about male homosexual athletes; other than Kopay, no members of a big-league sports team had come out. Then I met Ed Gallagher, who at twenty-seven, in despair over his homosexuality, had rolled his body off the highest point of the Kensico Dam in Westchester, a New York suburb.

  Gallagher had presented himself to the world as “meat man,” a six-foot, six-inch, 275-pound former offensive lineman who loved to hit hard, drive drunk, and use women like Kleenex. He’d been all-state in high school, gone to the University of Pittsburgh on a football scholarship, and had a tryout with the New York Jets. After he was cut, it got harder and harder to maintain his identity to himself.

  “I was a sports hero, but please don’t look beneath the surface, I can’t handle it,” he told me. “No one ever got close. I was moody, sometimes I lashed out. I was so confused: Who am I? What am I supposed to do? I’ve got these thoughts and feelings a jock isn’t supposed to have and these sexual fantasies about men as well as women.”

  In early 1985, “tanked up on wine,” he cruised Greenwich Village bars until he found a man who “coaxed” him into his first homosexual experience. He liked it. But the next morning he felt “filthy.” Twelve days later, at the dam, he attempted suicide, two miles from his high school football field. At the bottom of his 110-foot “fall from grace,” Gallagher broke his neck.

  Later, he would say that in losing his body he gained his soul. He felt liberated as a quadriplegic in a wheelchair. “I used to be emotionally paralyzed, Joe Macho, John Wayne. I tried to match my image to the beer commercials. The jock.

  “I feel sorrier for the person I was than for me now. If I could reach back, I’d hug me and say, ‘Kid, you’r
e a human being of which there’s a wide variety. So just go find people you can share your feelings with and love.’”

  By the time I met Ed in 1992, he was thirty-four years old, loud, handsome, bearded, driving his wheelchair like Ben-Hur’s chariot. He lived on full disability in a subsidized housing project. In the seven years since his suicide attempt, he had become a local resource for suicide prevention groups, giving talks at schools, producing and hosting a weekly cable show, and directing a nonprofit self-help group, Alive to Thrive.

  “Don’t tell me that life stinks,” he’d tell a high school audience. “Tell me what part of your life stinks. You don’t throw away an apple because it has a bruise. You cut out the bruise and eat the rest of the apple, right? I tried to throw all of myself away.”

  Ed was smart and open, and his insights into Jock Culture led me deeper into the homosociality (the latest preferred academic phrase) of the locker room, the meaning of all that naked horseplay, dick grabbing, ass slapping I’d seen even in the big leagues. Were these guys so sure of their hetero masculinity that they could mock it, or were they exciting themselves with homoeroticism?

  “Both at the same time,” said Ed, laughing.

  By the time Billy Bean arrived in 1999, I was ready with my questions and comfortable asking them.

  For that third phone call, the one in which we were going to discuss a face-to-face meeting, I flew to Miami and told him I was around the corner. There was a slight pause, he laughed, and we made a date to have dinner that night. I knew I had my story.

  Bean was simply one of the most charming and engaging people I’ve ever interviewed, boyishly model handsome, funny, warm. I could easily believe one of his big-league teammates who later told me, “Billy could have been a great player, but he tried too hard to make everyone happy, wanted everyone to like him, he put too much pressure on himself.”

  Bean’s story of isolation and subterfuge may have been familiar to countless gay men and lesbians, and his passion to play big-league ball was shared by countless high school and college baseball players, but, as I wrote in a front-page story, “the combination of those two struggles offers a rare window into the fiercely competitive and hyper-masculinized arena of major team sports.”

  “I never dated another major leaguer, and I have no idea whether or not there are other gay ballplayers,” said Bean. “One would think so, but if they were as deeply closeted as I was, who would know? I went to Hooters, laughed at the jokes, lied about dates because I loved baseball. I still do. I’d go back in a minute. I only wish I hadn’t felt so alone, that I could have told someone, and that I hadn’t always felt God was going to strike me dead.”

  High school quarterback, point guard, valedictorian, college baseball all-American, handsome, thoughtful, and a celebrated “babe magnet,” Billy Bean was his family’s golden child. Yet he was nagged by the feeling that something was missing, that there was an emotional hole at the center of his life. His mother would later describe it to me as “a sadness in him I couldn’t reach.” Bean had long suspected that he was homosexual despite being heterosexually active since high school. He was married for three years. He didn’t have his first homosexual experience until he was twenty-eight.

  By that time, the pattern of his baseball career was set. In nine years of bouncing onto and off major-, minor-, winter-, and Japanese-league rosters, Bean logged less than four years of major-league pension time for three different teams. Six feet tall and 200 pounds, he was not considered fast enough to be an everyday center fielder. Left-handed, he was a sound defensive player in the outfield and at first base, but he didn’t have enough power to start in those positions. His career big-league batting average was .226 in 272 games. He hit only five home runs. He rarely played three major-league games in a row.

  He described himself as one of those “scrappy scrubs who will do anything to stick in the Show,” from running extra wind sprints to cheerleading from the bench, even giving teammates free clubhouse haircuts (sixties-style astronaut cuts called “beanies”) to boost camaraderie and morale.

  His Dodgers experience overwhelmed him. With most of his friends and family in southern California, he was barraged with requests for tickets, for inside baseball gossip, to show up at parties. His parents remember him trying to please everyone. He was thrilled when the Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully acknowledged his existence by dubbing him “Guillermo Frijoles” on air, then crushed by the avalanche of phone messages he felt he had to answer.

  The chilly Dodgers culture was particularly tough on a backup player with a secret fear. Manager Tommy Lasorda considered himself the only true star of the team and was not the warm father figure of his publicity. Bean was told that young players had to knock on the manager’s door, and then only when it was open. Bean regarded the nameplaces over the lockers as symbolic—they were erasable chalkboards. He batted .197 in fifty-one games.

  When Bean’s biological father died suddenly of a heart attack in 1991 at forty-four, Bean says, he felt a sense of mortality that motivated him to deal with his sexual feelings. Within a year, he had left his wife and had his first homosexual experience. He says he still regrets not having told her the truth at the time.

  “Something was just drawing me to that other side. I’ve had good sex with women and good relationships, but something was missing, even with my wife. I wasn’t fulfilled, I had a fear of not being understood, not being totally accepted. I was looking for a soul mate, someone I could let my guard down with. I only found that with men.”

  Interviewing Bean over several days, I felt the excitement I remembered from the early years at the paper, when every story was a new experience, a window opening on a new world. No question this guy was a jock, and a successful one. He’d made it to the top. Yet he was a “fag.”

  There were midnight walks on road trips to get away from his tomcatting teammates, to work off the stress of being a spy in his own life. There were anonymous sexual encounters after which he’d come back hoping God would forgive him. There were a great deal of guilt and self-hate until he began living with Sam, an Iranian he met at a health club. But he kept the relationship a secret, even refusing to let his brothers stay at his Del Mar house. Sam hid in the car when teammates dropped by.

  Then, for the second time, sudden death became a catalyst. On April 23, 1995, Bean returned from an exhibition night game to find Sam semiconscious with a mysterious fever. He died of cardiac arrest in the emergency room the next morning, eight years to the day of Bean’s major-league debut. Because Sam’s family barred him from the hospital, he never found out what had killed Sam.

  Bean remembers calling his mother, crying, “Not fair, not fair,” and her urging him to take a shower and go to the ballpark. She had no idea that Sam was more than just a buddy. He felt confused. How could he explain to the club he needed a day off to grieve? Bean got a hit that day. After the game, he was called in for an announcement he knew too well: he was being sent back down to the minors.

  “I swore to myself I would never again let baseball take precedence over my life,” said Bean. “If I ever fell in love again, that relationship would come ahead of my career.”

  Later that season, in Florida to play the Marlins, he met the owner of a popular Miami Beach restaurant. In town again four months later, Billy called him up.

  At Thanksgiving, Bean went home and told his mother.

  “While he was trying to get the words out, I said it: ‘You’re gay,’” Mrs. Kovac told me. “We left the house and drank coffee in the car, and we both cried. I wondered what it would mean to him.”

  With dread, Bean went back inside to wake up his stepdad. The tough old homicide cop opened his eyes, listened, nodded, hugged and kissed his son, and said, “Okay, now it’s official. Can I go back to sleep?”

  Bean did not return to baseball in 1996. He assumes he would have been assigned to a minor-league team. He knew he could no longer live so furtively. To come out while still playing, he thought, w
ould mean lurid headlines and talk shows, and then baseball would find a way “to kick me out.” He moved to Miami Beach and worked in radio and television as his relationship with the restaurant owner became professional as well as personal. Precise and methodical, a leader, he began taking over more and more operational duties at the restaurant. Then they opened one together.

  It was the third sudden death, of his old college teammate Tim Layana, a former Yankees pitcher, that pushed Bean out to a more public platform. He missed Layana’s funeral because none of their mutual friends had his contact information. He had become estranged from his own life. A month later, he succumbed to Miami Herald writer Lydia Martin’s entreaties and allowed her to make him a public gay figure.

  He called another college teammate, Jim Bruske.

  “I kinda suspected,” Bruske told me. “I wouldn’t say anything till he did, no one knew for sure, but he kept shying away from us. I’d come to Miami to play the Marlins, and he always had some reason we couldn’t get together and he’d be short and change the subject when it got personal.

  “He was right to keep it a secret. The guys would have been brutal. I’m glad it’s out. I told him it would have no impact on our friendship.”

  After the story appeared, Billy had a flurry of TV interviews. He wrote a memoir, Going the Other Way. He joined human rights groups and spoke to college and high school students. He was taken up as a hunky poster boy by gay publications. But there was little follow-up or commentary in the mainstream sports media. I was surprised and disappointed that the story didn’t have more legs. Billy was no star, but he was a major-league baseball player. There had to be others, and if not there had to be a reason.

  I called gay sportswriters around the country. They were disappointed, too, but not surprised. They thought that each coming-out story was incremental progression toward understanding and acceptance. The dream of a major superstar coming out at the height of his popularity was not realistic, they said. What would be more likely and probably more helpful would be sports fans following a gay high school superstar who had gone on to brilliant college and pro careers.