50 years after Glenn Burke’s MLB debut, a gay fan remembers his courage and joy

Welcome back to Talkin’ Gaysball where we’re spending this Thursday giving out 50 high fives…

This April 9th is the 50th anniversary of Glenn Burke’s major league debut. On that day, though, there won’t be much in the way of fanfare from MLB — no pregame ceremonies or jersey patches or promotional giveaways are on the books that we know of.

The Los Angeles Dodgers aren’t even scheduled to be playing that night.

Get off the sidelines and into the game

Our weekly playbook is packed with everything from locker room chatter to pressing LGBTQ sports issues.
Subscribe to our Newsletter today

Instead, what we’ll have are reminders of just how brave Burke was to live as authentically as he could in the world of pro sports and refuse to hide his true self.

Just recently, we’ve seen former Chicago Bulls guard Jaden Ivey become a cause célèbre for anti-gay zealots when he posted a rant to Instagram attacking the NBA’s Pride initiatives with the phrase “Join us for Pride Month to celebrate unrighteousness.”

It wasn’t as if anyone needed a reminder that homophobia is still pervasive in the sports world. But Ivey’s post underscored that in a time where a greater number of LGBTQ athletes are finding acceptance in sports than ever before, it still takes immense courage for every one of them to live their truths.

Now imagine how much more suffocating the homophobia of the sports world must have felt when Burke took his first at bat as a Dodger in 1976.

Related

It was an honor to speak about Glenn Burke at his Legacy Walk induction
Glenn Burke earned his Legacy Walk plaque as baseball’s gay barrier breaker. As a gay baseball fan, speaking about the love his teammates had for him at the ceremony was the thrill of my year.

As biographer Andrew Maraniss described Burke’s mindset in his excellent book “Singled Out,” “Part of him wanted to hit .300 and become a superstar…so that if his secret ever got out, he could tell the haters to ‘go to hell.’ But another part of him — unlike anyone else on the roster — yearned for mediocrity. If he hit .250, he could remain relatively anonymous and guard his privacy.”

Imagine getting the call to the big leagues, stepping in against the most fearsome pitchers in the world, and having to process that part of your mind is aspiring to be replacement level so no one asks any questions about who you are or where you’re going after the game ends.

That Burke was able to put together any kind of career at all with that battle raging in his head — let alone one where he brought the high five to baseball and started Game One of the 1977 World Series — was testament to the mental fortitude he had as a player and a person.

During his playing career, Burke never came out publicly the way we think of it today. But he also didn’t hide who he was and when he kept going out by himself after games to visit neighborhoods like The Castro, several of his teammates put two and two together.

Incredibly for the baseball world of the late-70s, he made it work — for a brief time.

It worked largely because Burke was a joyful force of nature to be around as a person and as a teammate. He brought a boombox into the Dodgers locker room and blared disco for everyone to hear, while cracking teammates up by quoting Richard Pryor bits and stuffing a pillow into his jersey to do an impression of bloviating manager Tommy Lasorda.

Indeed, Burke’s personality was such that he could befriend teammates who ran the personality spectrum from Miles Davis quoting hipster Dusty Baker, who epitomized cool and was on the other end of MLB’s first high five, to future GOP Senate candidate Steve Garvey, who cultivated his public life to look and sound exactly like Pryor’s impression of a white guy.

Of course in Burke’s era, there were many players who held homophobic views similar to Ivey’s. But thanks to Burke’s courage and popularity, many of his teammates who figured out that he was gay accepted him in their clubhouse, largely due to the influence of his friendship with leaders like Baker.

Considering the era, that was borderline miraculous.

Unfortunately, the baseball life Burke created for himself didn’t last long, in large part because team management in the 1970s was actively hostile to the idea of a gay player.

Burke’s managers for most of his career were Lasorda and Billy Martin. It was the equivalent of asking, “Would you prefer your homophobia from a diet shake huckster or a drunken rageaholic?”

Related

Dodger Stadium’s new trumpeter has played with some of pop’s biggest gay icons
Talkin’ Gaysball: The Dodgers needed a way to welcome new closer Edwin Díaz. So they invited Tatiana Tate to play his trumpet entrance live.

These 2 steamy gay baseball novels belong in your Opening Day lineup
Looking for a hardball Shane and Ilya? Open these romance books and get ready to swoon.

Even worse, when Dodgers execs found out Burke was gay, team management called him in to a meeting and offered him a $75,000 if he would marry a woman.

Think about what it must have felt like for Burke to fight his way onto a major league roster and establish himself while living as much his truth as his era allowed—only to find out that the Dodgers would pay him more money for going back in the closet than they would for playing in the World Series.

Today, we live in a time when a homophobe like Ivey faces consequences for anti-gay bigotry. In Burke’s day, those kind of views were coming from the most powerful people in sports.

Despite Burke’s bravery, he never had a chance.

Yet he still chose to be himself. It’s why we remember him as a gay trailblazer in the sports world and why baseball now honors his memory, with the Cubs sponsoring his plaque on Chicago’s Legacy Walk.

Almost no one was aware of it at the time but baseball got a little bit better 50 years ago when Glenn Burke debuted with the Dodgers.

While he never received the honors he deserved in his lifetime, his greatest legacy can be seen today in every LGBTQ athlete who competes joyfully and authentically, in spite of those who try to silence them.

Subscribe to the Outsports newsletter to keep up with your favorite out athletes, inspiring LGBTQ sports stories, and more.

The post 50 years after Glenn Burke’s MLB debut, a gay fan remembers his courage and joy appeared first on Outsports.