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’re 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, would 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.

That’s what made Corey Johnson’s story so appealing. He was no superstar, but he was that masculine icon, the high school football captain. A linebacker, yet.

Less than a year after the Billy Bean story, again following up on a gay writer’s local piece—this one by Peter Cassels in Bay Windows—I met Corey, who had revealed his sexuality in a series of meetings orchestrated by his school and a Massachusetts gay rights group, while he was still playing. It was a textbook model of how to peel the coming-out onion in a nonconfrontational way. It turned out well; after one big victory in which Corey starred, his Masconomet High teammates gave him the game ball and sang the unofficial gay anthem “YMCA” to him on the bus ride home. It was a feel-good story but hardly typical. A few miles away, a high school football player had been beaten by teammates when he came out. His family was driven out of town.

I thought that because of Corey’s age and the iconography of high school football, this story was advancing the stories of Gallagher and Billy Bean. But it would not have been on page one without a fortuitous news peg. The Sunday it appeared, Corey, who had just turned eighteen, was a speaker at the Millennium March for Equality, a gay and lesbian rally in Washington.

For gay activists trying to shatter stereotypes, Corey Johnson was a rare find, a bright, vivacious quick study who also wrestled and played lacrosse and baseball as he won three varsity letters on a winning football team. He was also conscious of his role.

“Someday I want to get beyond being ‘that gay football captain,’” said Corey, “but for now I need to get out there and show these machismo athletes who run high schools that you don’t have to do drama or be a drum major to be gay. It could be someone who looks just like them.”

At five feet, eight inches and 180 pounds, Corey had to make up for his drama club size with the speed and brutality of his blocking and tackling. He suspected his homosexuality by sixth grade but suppressed further thoughts about it. He did not feel part of what he called “the elite jock mix” of heterosexual innuendo and bravado. He didn’t go out with girls, he told me, because he didn’t want to waste their time. It wouldn’t be fair.

In the very first game of his varsity career, as a sophomore starting at both right guard and middle linebacker, his blocking was so effective and he made so many sacks that the line coach awarded him the game ball. Yet he was so afraid that everyone would hate him when his secret was revealed that he was often unable to sleep at night or get out of bed in the morning. He would reach out on the Internet, finding other gay youngsters, even other gay football players. For years, he exchanged e-mails with a gay right guard in Chicago.

Corey’s decision to come out began taking shape during his family’s 1998 Super Bowl party. One of his uncles pointed at the comedian Jerry Seinfeld in a commercial and called him a fag. He said that such “sick” people needed to be “put into institutions.” Another uncle laughed. Corey’s mother, unaware at the time of Corey’s orientation, chided her brothers and asked them not to use such language.

Corey went into the bathroom and cried. A month later, he told his guidance counselor and biology teacher that he was bisexual. He was a virgin at the time. Later, he told his lacrosse coach that he was gay. All three were supportive. They also began to understand his moodiness and mediocre grades.

He told no one else during that summer and the football season of his junior year. He joined the school’s Gay Straight Alliance, which was made up mostly of straight girls. Since he was known for defending kids who were being hazed or bullied, no one found this remarkable. The team voted him cocaptain.

After Christmas vacation, he decided to tell his parents.

His father already knew. He had read an e-mail exchange. For months he had held the secret; he didn’t want to burden his wife, who was absorbed in ministering to her dying mother.

“I dropped the ball,” he told me. “What if Corey had done something to himself?”

Corey told his teammates that he was gay, that he hoped for their support, and not to worry: “I didn’t come on to you last year in the locker room, and I’m not going to do it now. Who says you’re good enough, anyhow?”

That lightly dropped remark had been scripted in the preliminary meetings with his teachers and the state’s Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.

Corey remembered, “At first the team was meek about it, people didn’t talk to me, and when they saw it was still just me they asked all kinds of questions. They wanted intimate details. They thought it would be cool to know more about the subculture. When they heard about a gay bar called the Ramrod, they asked me to get them T-shirts.”

There were incidents, quickly shut down. The president of the school’s booster club, the father of four past, present, and future players, demanded that Corey be removed as captain to preserve “unit cohesiveness.” Coach Jim Pugh told him that he was the divisive one and that it was not an issue. When younger players complained to another cocaptain about having to shower with a gay teammate, he would growl, as he would to most complainants, “You’re a football player, toughen up.” But then Masconomet football players traditionally never showered at school; they went home from games and practices filthy and smelly. I couldn’t figure out how much of that was teenage self-consciousness and how much the nasty condition of a rusty old high school locker room.

After the story ran, Ed Gallagher called me, ecstatic. “This Corey is a pioneer, a leader, but he’s up against the hypocritical right-wing hate mongers who want to punish people for being human. I say there are no straights or gays, just ‘strays.’”

We both thought the dialogue would begin now. This one was the Big Story, a high school football captain rallying the jocks, smashing the stereotypes. High school was the heart and soul of Jock Culture; it was where the values and definitions of American manhood were imprinted. Sports columnists, talk radio hosts, the latest phenomenon of Internet chatterers (this was 2000) would be all over this story.

It never happened. They didn’t want to hear about gay players. It was off message, it complicated the mainstream fantasy. Rumors of gay stars tended to be floated by gay fans who wanted to claim them and antigay fans who wanted to put them down.

My third and final Big Story about an athlete coming out was again about a popular hard worker who tried to fit in, but this time it was a 300-pound NFL defensive lineman, a veteran of nine years in the trench warfare zone of sports. How could you discount this symbolism? Pro football players have been promoted as supermasculine warriors, no women or sissies allowed. So how do you explain Esera Tuaolo living in a suburban house with his adopted twenty-three-month-old twins and the man he described as his husband?

Tuaolo had been a star at high schools in Hawaii and California, and at Oregon State. He’d had a successful rookie year with the Green Bay Packers in 1991 that included thirty solo tackles and the singing of the national anthem at Lambeau Field before a game.

“I knew when I was young that I was attracted to men,” Tuaolo told me. “But once I could give a name to it, I backed off. I had girlfriends as a cover-up, and I made sure I was seen leaving strip clubs. I drank a lot. I was always anxious, always in pain. I was afraid if I was too much of a star I’d be exposed. Once you learn the system, you can play just hard enough to make the team. That’s pretty sad. I didn’t want to call attention to myself. If I had a sack I’d have a sleepless night, wondering if now they would catch me.”

In the locker room he was the jolly “Mr. Aloha.” He says he never suspected that there were other gay football players. (“His gaydar must have gone dead,” says Dave Kopay.) Tuaolo’s social life playing for Green Bay, Minneapolis, and Jacksonville was limited except during the off-seasons, when he returned to Hawaii and to friends who knew he was gay. In 1997, concerned about Tuaolo’s suicidal depression, a friend gave him a copy of The Dave Kopay Story. The book had just been reissued. It was the first book he’d read since college.

“It confirmed everything, it was eye-opening, I wasn’t alone,” he said. “It forced me to make choices. I decided I was going to be open to a real relationship.”

A segment about Tuaolo on the HBO show Real Sports underscored the rationale for his secrecy. A former teammate and current ESPN broadcaster, Sterling Sharpe, said that any player who declared himself gay would be driven off the team. Sharpe implied that players would feel threatened; a gay teammate would cast doubts in fans’ minds about all players’ masculinity and sexual orientation. Sharpe’s hostility extended the shelf life of the Tuaolo story, giving commentators a chance to expound on the unit cohesiveness theory used to discriminate against gays in the military.

My story ran in the back of the sports section. Old news. I was disgusted by Sharpe and by the mainstream sports media’s refusal to take these stories seriously. Maybe they too were afraid of being called fags.

Once again, I wanted too much. Kopay was thrilled. He said that Tuaolo’s coming out had an enormous impact on him. The two men hugged and cried when they met at our “Brokeback Locker Room” panel at the 2006 Chicago Gay Games. By that time, Bean was heading into a big-league real estate career (Alex Rodriguez was a client), Tuaolo was a successful singer, and Corey Johnson was a political operative in New York. They were all out in the world with thousands of Facebook friends.

But progress was still agonizingly incremental, I thought. Bean was disappointed, too. “I talk to too many kids who decide not to go out for the baseball team or the football team, they’ll be found out,” he told me in 2009. “They’re aware of the ramifications, they hear the gay slurs from the stands, and those are mostly straight guys yelling at other straight guys. I’ve spoken at thirty schools—mostly Division III colleges—and I’ve met one out person in baseball. A lot of guys still go out for cross-country instead.”