Out, Gay, Black, Pro-Baseball Player?

There was one. Only one. Glenn Burke, who played for the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Oakland Athletics, from 1976 to 1979. He died at the age of forty-two in 1995 from AIDS-related causes, but before he did, he said, “They can’t ever say now that a gay man can’t play in the majors, because I’m a gay man and I made it.”

“Out. The Glenn Burke Story” premieres Wednesday in San Francisco and on Comcast’s SportsNet channel. Take a lookm at the site – they have over a dozen clips from the film.

Via Sports Illustrated:

“The documentary is a stark look at the last taboo in professional male team sports. Drugs? Gambling? Domestic abuse? Dog fighting? Almost anything can and has been forgiven.

“But 33 years after Burke led an openly gay lifestyle on the L.A. Dodgers, no active player on a professional men’s sports team has come out.

“I hope that at least we can provoke some discussion,” said the film’s executive producer Ted Griggs, who is also the general manager of Comcast SportsNet Bay Area.

“Griggs grew up on the east side of the San Francisco Bay and heard about Burke’s athletic prowess, as both a basketball and baseball star at Berkeley High. When Griggs played pickup basketball in East Bay playgrounds, he would hear players say, “that’s a Glenn Burke move.”

“The name kind of stuck in my head,” Griggs said. “And when he passed away, I thought, that’s a story I’d like to explore. And I stuck his obituary in a manila folder.”

“Griggs and his producers got Burke’s former teammates to open up. Former Dodgers players like Dusty Baker, Reggie Smith and Davey Lopes make it clear on film that they knew exactly who Burke was. And while they were surprised and at times uncomfortable, their acceptance of him as a teammate comes across on film.

“You can tell they loved him,” Griggs said. “There’s a look in their eyes. A kind of pleading for understanding. That you don’t know what it was like in 1977.”

Burke’s former teammates knew that his lifestyle was trouble.

“At that time period it was the kiss of death for a ballplayer,” Smith says on camera.