Kevin McClatchy, who for almost a dozen years was the owner and CEO of the Pittsburgh Pirates, has just come out as gay, and says that frequent homophobic language in the world of baseball convinced him to stay in the closet. When he and a team of investors bought the Pirates in 1996, McClatchy, who is now CEO of The McClatchy Company, the newspaper business his family owns, he was the youngest owner in the history of baseball, just 33 years old. Ironically, McClatchy credits a staffer from Rick Santorum’s senate office for introducing him to his partner of four years.
McClatchy seems to have reached out to one of the New York Times’ top op-ed writers, Frank Bruni, who is also gay, to tell his story. In a Sunday Times opinion piece, and a related blog post, Bruni explains that McClatchy, who is still involved in the baseball world, hopes his coming out will “start a dialogue” in baseball, and says “with everybody, there’s a time that feels right,” to come out, “and for me this was a time.”
My hope is that it’s going to be able to help younger kids that want to get into professional sports and feel there are still great barriers. But I think, more important than that, it needs to create a dialogue about major league sports and sort of the void obviously that exists . . . Things have changed in a positive way, but there’s still a lot more change to go. So I’m speaking up. And I’m sure people will criticize me because I came out later, and I should have come out while I was in baseball and in the thick of it. But you don’t understand what it’s like in somebody’s else’s footsteps. You don’t understand the pressures that they’re facing at that point.
“Way too dangerous” is the reason McClatchy gives for never going to a gay bar in Pittsburgh:
I never went to—I never have been to a gay bar in Pittsburgh. Once, when I was in London, I went to a gay bar, and somebody said they saw me.
Somebody back in Pittsburgh?
I think it was on OutSports.com, on a bulletin board. I typed my name in once, and somebody said, ‘Yeah, I saw him at a gay bar in London.’ I was like: Wow, you really can’t go anywhere.
Sure enough:
Bruni also adds this:
McClatchy said, “I’m sure people will criticize me because I came out later, and I should have come out while I was in baseball and in the thick of it.â€
And:
He once did some arithmetic. Over the last four decades, he said: “Tens of thousands of people have played either professional minor league baseball or major league baseball. Not one has come out and said that they’re gay while they’re playing.†Nor has any active player in the principal leagues of football, basketball or hockey, America’s three other major professional sports. That silence is a sobering, crucial reminder that for all the recent progress toward same-sex marriage and all the gay and lesbian characters popping up on television, there remains, in some quarters, a powerful stigma attached to homosexuality.
…
McClatchy, 49, said that his took a toll. “I think I was more paranoid, for sure, about people,†he said. “And suspicious, definitely. And angry.†His serious romantic relationships with men were few and strained until he left sports, and his partner of the last four years, Jack Basilone, who shares his home here, told me that McClatchy remains guarded, wary.
“He’s like when you go to Pottery Barn and get the floor model — they have some nicks and scrapes,†joked Basilone, 31. For their contentment they have Rick Santorum, the former senator from Pennsylvania, to thank. They were fixed up by someone who worked for Santorum and whom McClatchy first got to know through his professional interactions, when he owned the Pirates, with Santorum’s Senate office.
Finally, it can be said Rick Santorum did something for the LGBT community.