Interview: Andrew Maraniss, Author of Singled Out: The True Story of Glenn Burke
In this episode, Brenda Elsey interviews Andrew Maraniss about his new book Singled Out: The True Story of Glenn Burke. Burke was the first openly gay player in MLB, playing for the L.A. Dodgers and the Oakland Athletics in the 1970s. Brenda and Andrew discuss the histories of racism, the AIDS crisis and the incredible obstacles that Burke faced.
This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.
Transcript
Brenda: I am so excited today to be interviewing Andrew Maraniss, the special projects manager at Vanderbilt athletics, which includes the Sports & Society initiative – a big, big fan of that initiative, we are here at Burn It All Down – and the author of three books on sports and social justice, including the latest, which is Singled Out: the true story of Glenn Burke. That has just come out this month at Philomel Books, but really available everywhere. I got mine digitally, actually. So, easy to get. You should definitely go out and get it as soon as possible because it's fantastic, and we're going to talk about it right now. Andrew, a lot of what you've done in this book is to try to keep a really clear narrative of Glenn Burke and his life while also providing a lot of context for the gay rights movement in the 1970s and the culture of baseball, drug culture. It takes us through some really difficult times particularly in California during the 1970s and 80s for African-Americans. The HIV crisis, it’s really a tumultuous time. Why did you think Glenn Burke story was the right one to pull these things together?
Andrew: Thank you, Brenda. Thanks for having me on the show. I'm a big fan of your show and was so excited to meet all of you when you came to Nashville last year. But yeah, this book was a labor of love for me as all of my books have been, and my niche that I'm trying to carve out is writing books that are sports non-fiction history with a social justice message to them, both for young readers and for adults. I'm a huge baseball fan. Baseball has always been my sport. I was born in 1970, so the seventies or the first decade, you know, that I remember as baseball fan and just as a kid, you know? And so in Glenn’s story, like you said, I saw an opportunity to tell a relatively unknown baseball story, you know, the story of the first openly gay Major League Baseball player, but that that story offered a chance to tell a bigger picture story, you know, about gay rights movement, especially during that decade and and the backlash to it.
I think one thing that makes the book relevant, someone was asking about this yesterday, is a lot of the same issues that Glenn was facing back then in the 1970s, you know, we're still dealing with today, whether it relates to sports and the fact that we really haven't had many if any openly gay male athletes in the major sports in the US. We’ve seen a little bit of a different story in women's sports, but also just you know, in this polarized country that we live in, you can point to a lot of advancements made in LGBTQ areas, but you can also see incredible backlash. You know, here in Tennessee where I live, there's a bill in the legislature that is passed out of committee that would ban books in schools that deal with LGBTQ characters or themes, which is just disgusting. We had the slate of anti-transgender athlete bills in state houses around the country. That's making it through here in Tennessee also. And so I think to have the chance to write a story about a gay baseball player really opens up that discussion maybe for people that wouldn't ordinarily even want to engage in it.
Brenda: And though, like you said, this is a book that everyone can read and I enjoyed it immensely, it is targeted to a young adult audience, which is really important probably to given what you're talking about. Exactly. Like, that's an audience you really want to grasp. So, can you tell us a little bit about Glenn Burke then and why it was so powerful as a story for you?
Andrew: Yeah. Well, Glenn is a guy that grew up in the Bay Area, east bay Oakland and Berkeley. He was an outstanding basketball player – first of all, he always considered himself more of a basketball player than a baseball player. Rupert Jones, you know, who went on to the major leagues, also attended Berkeley high as Glenn did. And Rupert told me that Glenn Burke was the best athlete that he ever saw. And I think that in the 1970s, when Glenn's making his way through the minor leagues, the stereotypes about gay men in the United States, no one would say that they would never suspect that the best athlete that they ever saw was gay. Right? So that's one interesting aspect of his story. He's dropped by the Dodgers. He works his way up through the Dodgers' minor league system. There's this whole thing about “the Dodger way” of doing things, passed down from LA all the way through the minor league system.
It's kind of a conservative, you know, promoting this wholesome All-American image in the, in the organization. And Glenn is rebelling against that constantly, not just related to his sexuality, but just not listening to coaches. You know, type of guy that'll steal third base with two outs when his third base coach will go nuts. When he's called up to the major leagues and he's playing his last minor league game, and he knows he's about to head up to LA, the last out of the game is a fly ball, hit his direction in the outfield. He switches the glove from his left hand to his right hand, catches it with the wrong hand and runs back in the dugout and tells his manager, “Now you'll have something to remember me by.” So, he's kind of a character in the Dodgers system before that everyone even knows that he's gay, you know, and he's kind of looked at differently.
It doesn't quite fit the mold. His teammates in the minor leagues are starting suspect that he's gay when he has, you know boyfriends arriving from California or he's not going out to the same bars as the rest of the guys. They'll try to introduce them to women and he'll say, oh, I've got to go shopping. And it's 11:30 at night, you know, and his teammates are like, “Where are you going to go shopping now?” And so it becomes kind of an open secret within the Dodger organization and eventually a not so open secret, and he's traded. We can talk more about that story with the Dodgers. Once management finds out that he's gay, they want nothing to do with him.
Brenda: And it has a particular twist to it because of the history of Tommy Lasorda and him as a figure in that period and also his son. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?
Andrew: Sure. So, Tommy Lasorda is such an iconic figure in baseball and the Dodger organization, a larger than life figure in some ways. I think a lot of myth and PR in Tommy Lasorda’s image as well. But at Tommy's son, Tommy Jr was gay. His nickname was Spunky Lasorda. Tommy Sr never publicly acknowledged that about his son, even though everyone knew it. When Lasorda Jr died of AIDS, Tommy senior never acknowledged that that was even the actual cause of death. But Glenn Burke and Tommy Jr became friends. They both were into disco music. They both were into clothes. Tommy Jr was a tailor. He would come on a lot of road trips. They would spend time together on these trips. And at one point they hatched this plan that they would show up at Lasorda Sr’s house as if they were on a date, you know, with Spunky dressed in pigtails.
They said if they had gone through with this, that when they knocked on the door Lasorda would have shot them and then had our heart attack, you know? And so they enjoyed kind of needling him in that way, and there's some funny aspects to that story, but it really shows the depth of homophobia in major league baseball at that time. Glenn starts two games in the playoffs in 1977. He starts game one of the world series, and he's been called the potential of the next Willie Mays by Junior Gilliam, a respected Dodger coach. And so after that ’77 season where Glenn's had a great rookie year, you know, he's been a key member of a real veteran team, a successful team, Al Campanis the general manager schedules a meeting with Glenn in the offseason. Glenn thinks it's to talk about his role on the team for the next year.
Instead, it's a, it's essentially a bribe and they say, Glenn, we'd like you to get married. And Glenn says, “To a woman?” And when Campanis says yes, he says no, I'm not going to do that. They offer him $75,000, which is a lot now. This is supposedly for a “honeymoon.” You could go on a pretty good honeymoon for $75,000 let alone in 1977! And so, that's really a bribe that they offer Glenn to cover up the fact that he's gay and when Glenn doesn't go along with it he knows his days with the Dodgers are numbered and he's traded early in the ’78 season.
Brenda: And how do you think then…So, there's the one thing that the bribe, which is a real clear way in which we can understand that he is being discriminated against on the basis of his sexuality, but what other ways is baseball really shutting the doors to him?
Andrew: I think you could say that, I mean, this kind of gets at a question that a lot of people ask when they look at his statistics. Glenn didn't put up great numbers during his stint in the major leagues yet I don't think it's fair to say that he played his way out of the game. You know, that's what some critics will say – oh, it wasn't that he was gay, that he couldn't pursue his passion as a baseball player. He had his chance and he just didn't make it. Well, here's a guy who hit over 300 five times in the minor leagues. He set stolen base records at two levels of the minor leagues. As a rookie, he's playing significant time in the postseason. And yet he's constantly looking over his shoulder, you know? His teammates though largely supportive are also…There’s elements or pockets of teammates that aren't, you know, that are making jokes homophobic jokes in the clubhouse about him.
Obviously his manager didn't want him there. And so, baseball being such a mental game, I guess you could call these almost microaggressions that he's facing on a daily basis that you can't become the very best player you can be when you feel that lack of support around you. When he's traded to the A's he's hoping that this is a chance for a rebirth. This is where he's grown up. Billy Martin's named the manager of the Oakland. A's, he's a Berkeley high graduate also, nd Billy Martin says he's not going to let a gay player “contaminate” his team. He introduces Glenn as you know, the f-word on the team, sends them to the minor leagues. Glenn knows he's never going to get a shot to be called back up to the A’s.
So, you can point to these specific events like the Dodgers trading him, Billy Martin, sending him down, as an obvious examples of homophobia. But it was that general day to day lack of support from the people around him, not necessarily told directly that you're not welcome here but feeling it every day that has, I think, a much more profound impact on him. And that's something that, you know, it's an illustration of what a closeted gay people are having to deal with every day, whether they're baseball players or not.
Brenda: Right. I mean, one of the fascinating things about him is it's really clear he has tremendous talent and athleticism. But he, almost like most of us if we had that, might imagine really being singularly dedicated to, you know, playing professional sports. And yet he has a really ambivalent relationship with baseball. He goes in and out. I mean, it's something you would never really see today, I don't feel like. He just sometimes decides that he's going to go play basketball again and go back to college. [laughs] What do you think that tells us about the culture of baseball in the 1970s and early 80s as well?
Andrew: Yeah. Glenn’s a complex person, you know, he doesn't always make the decisions that you would think are the right decisions to make, but that just makes him human. You're right. He did quit the A's at one point and then come back, but that was because of the atmosphere in the clubhouse where he felt he wasn't welcome, especially with his second team where guys hadn't gone through the minor leagues with him, they didn't have that history of friendship. At one point while he's in the Dodgers system, he starts playing basketball at Nevada Reno, which actually was a pretty innovative thing. So not only was Glenn the first openly gay player, he was the first minor league baseball player to also play college basketball at the same time. When the NCAA changed its rules in the 70s, he was the first major league player to wear Nikes in a game.
So, you know, he was someone that did things differently, and you could see the benefit of having someone who does things differently in an organization. But in terms of what that says about a baseball, I mean, it's such a conservative sport. I think it always has been. And one thing that Glenn wasn't even able to take advantage of – there were more Black players in the major leagues then than there are now, I think literally, maybe certainly proportionally, you know, there's expansion teams. But Glenn wasn't even able to fully take advantage of that social network of other Black ball players. I mean, Dusty Baker was a key leader on those Dodgers team. When I interviewed him he talks about the role that Hank Aaron had played in Dusty's life when he was a young player with the Braves, about how guys from different teams, Black players would get together for lunch, you know, before games, or sort of share and compare notes about where are the safe places to go, especially as they're coming up through the minor leagues and they're playing in the south and the Midwest.
So this was an important sort of safety net for Black ballplayers. Glenn wasn't able to take full advantage of that either because he was gay. He didn't want to go to the same clubs as they did. He couldn't share exactly what was on his mind and ask for support because he wasn't sure what the reaction would be if these guys found out that he was gay. And so, you know, he sorta was facing so many obstacles that no one was aware of. And even in cases where you might've had some friendships he wasn't able to fully pursue them.
Brenda: That's one of the really fascinating and tragic parts of the book. And then at the same time, it seems that many in his gay circle didn't seem to fully grasp either the racial discrimination that he may have felt, but also baseball didn’t… [laughs] The precarity of his job and what it required.
Andrew: Yeah. He had a lover named Michael Smith that was interested in Glenn coming out for political and attention type of reasons. And Glenn always felt that he had an off again on again relationship with Michael and he felt like he was being used in certain ways – and he was taken advantage of financially. Michael would see Glenn playing in the World Series, you know, he's sitting right behind home plate and would start shouting out in the crowd about his relationship with Glenn. Glenn had some other friends there that knew that this wasn't a good thing for Glenn. You know, you can't let this out right now. And they would tell Michael to shut up. Michael Smith shows up at a minor leagues game with a busload of gay men from San Francisco. And Glenn is not sure how to handle that either, you know? That it was clear that these were his friends and his lover.
He was concerned that if this got out in that franchise that he would lose his spot in the major leagues. Finally after Glenn was driven from the game, it's two years later in 1982 when he really comes out to the world through an article in Inside Sports magazine and a Today Show interview, and it's Michael Smith who was behind that Inside Sports magazine article, he writes it and tells Glenn that they'll split the money that he's receiving for writing this, money for the article, and never shares the money with him, you know? And so it's interesting thinking about, now, why haven't any other major league baseball players come out as active players? And here's an example you can see of just what a precarious idea that is and what all the different factors that go into it and what different motivations people have for wanting you to come out. But Glenn was really the only one that understood that as good of a story this might be, as beneficial as it might be for other especially young people to see this example of a gay player, that it might cost him his career – and it did cost him his career. So, he was always hesitant to do it.
Brenda: And I think it's such an important reminder because there's mounting pressure on players who are very visible athletes – “when is the next one going to come, when is the next one going to come?” And I think the story is probably very important for people to read and understand that being yanked out into the open with your sexuality is not just, you know, it's not just for everyone. [laughs] That’s not something we can demand of every person.
Andrew: Right. Every LGBTQ person I interviewed for this book talked so much about how that decision to come out has to be a very personal choice, it's not anyone else's choice to make. When is the right time, what's the right way to do it? For all sorts of reasons. I interviewed Billy Bean, who's the second openly gay major league baseball player to come out – again, after his playing days. He's now a vice president with major league baseball. You just talked about the pressures of the short window that you have as a professional athlete, any athlete, you know, and the incredible money that is there, that can be life-changing not just for athlete themselves but for generations possibly. And so, not knowing what the reaction will be from your teammates, from your manager, from the general manager, from the owner, the fans and the particular city that you happen to play in, that there's a lot of those factors that might prevent someone from coming out.
It just might seem not worth it. You know, just wait a couple of years, you'll be done with the game. If you choose to do it, then it could be perceived as safer in a lot of ways. On the other hand, I think that if someone were to do it, I think that they would be…Again, talk about polarization. I think at once they would probably be the most popular player in major league baseball and the most abused player in major league baseball, especially thinking about social media and fans at the ballpark. But I wouldn't be surprised if they had the best-selling jersey, just like Colin Kaepernick blackballed from the game, but also immensely popular at the same time, I think you'd see the same type of polarization
Brenda: So in essence, a lot of the book, it starts out by laying a foundation. So, right now we're talking about his kind of peak and beginning of his decline in baseball. But the beginning of the book really anchors him in a family history that stays with him, particularly his sister, through his death. Do you want to describe a little bit about what that tells us why you spent so much time on that?
Andrew: Yeah, well, I felt like it was important to build that family history in the beginning of the book because, like you said, it becomes so important at the end. Particularly his relationship with his sister Lutha when Glenn is dying of AIDS in the mid 90s, he's living homeless on the streets of San Francisco, you know, and it's his sister Lutha that finally takes him in and nurses him and loves him and rubs his feet and sing songs with him and tell stories about their childhood together. And so, he is able to die with some measure of peace, thanks to his sister Lutha, who was described to me as an angel before I met her and interviewed her and certainly lived up to that, just in my experience with her. And she kind of played that role with her brother Glenn, but growing up in Oakland and Berkeley, Glenn was part of a really close family, primarily women.
His dad had left a family. He had a number of older sisters who were kind of protectors of Glenn. Lutha was there the day that Glenn was drafted by the Dodgers. He was playing basketball at the park and she came to tell him the Dodgers were there to see him, and he said, “I don't want to play for the Dodgers, you know? We live in the Bay Area, we're Giants fans in this family.” And finally she was able to bring them back home and he signs that contract. And, you know, so many gay men of the 1970s, they were essentially driven out of their families, and Glenn's living in the Castro district of San Francisco, surrounded by thousands of men who have come from other parts of the country where they were disowned, essentially, by their families.
And so, to show that Glenn did have that strong love from his family that was always there, I thought was an important aspect of his life. And yet he wasn't always willing to count on that family. There were times where he's really struggling post-baseball. What he going to do with his life? You mentioned earlier that he was someone that really put all of his eggs in the sports basket. You know, it's kind of a cautionary tale in that regard. His identity was completely as a basketball player, as a baseball player. When he wasn't able to pursue that anymore he really had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. And he's really struggling, but it doesn't want to be a burden on his family. And so that's why a big reason why he ends up experiencing homelessness for such long stretches in his life before finally Lutha finds out and takes him back in.
Brenda: Do you think for people reading this story, what would you like us to think about our responsibility for people – maybe, maybe not just athletes, but you know, the homelessness in the midst of, you know, crack cocaine epidemic…What would you want the takeaway for a young adult reading this to be at that point, as they're watching the unraveling and the AIDS crisis happen as a really, really sad part of the story and as a reader you're really affected.
Andrew: Yeah. I mean, think with all three of my books the takeaway I hope is for people to actually do something. My book about Perry Wallace, he talked about the bystanders that surrounded him. It was actually the hardest part of his experience as the first Black player in the SEC. It wasn't going down to Mississippi where he thought he might get shot and killed in a basketball game, which…Imagine saying that wasn't the toughest part of your experience? He said it was on his own campus here at Vanderbilt where he was ignored in isolated and lonely for four years, you know, by bystanders, who would say, “Well, I wasn't the one calling him the n-word. And I wasn't the one that kicked him out of a church because he was Black. I wasn't the one throwing stones at him…” You know, “I didn't do anything.” That's true. They didn't do anything to help him either.
With the second book, which takes place in 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany, the message of that book comes from Elie Wiesel, who said he swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endured suffering and humiliation, you know, that neutrality is always on the side of the oppressor, never the oppressed. And so he talked again about the danger of neutrality, you know, and I think that you can see that in Glenn Burke’s story also where it's not just the Tommy Lasordas or Al Campanises or Billy Martins of the world and the people who are doing obviously homophobic things that are detrimental to Glenn. It’s people that walk by a homeless person on the street, right? It's people that are telling those jokes in the locker room, you know? It’s people who aren't standing up for someone who's different. That's really what it gets down to is to keep an eye out for those types of people and actually do something to help their lives.
Brenda: So in the aftermath of Glenn's death – which we should say is from complications due to AIDS in the mid 90s, 1995 – do you see major league baseball having changed? Do you do see a difference today?
Andrew: I don't think you could say you see a difference too much. I mean, there's not a visible change in terms of there being 10 out gay baseball players in the major leagues. I think having Billy Bean as part of the administration at major league baseball is important. I thought that when Thom Brennaman made the homophobic remarks on the air during a Reds game last year, there are players like Amir Garrett and others that spoke out. Sean Doolittle on Twitter that night said that this is unacceptable, and I don't know that we've ever seen major league baseball players make any sort of comments like that before. So, I think that there are signs that attitudes might be changing in clubhouses. I interviewed Tony Kemp who now plays for the Oakland A's and he said, you know, in the teams he's been on, he felt like a gay player would be welcomed if they came out.
I interviewed Tim Corbin, who's the coach of the Vanderbilt baseball team here – number one team in the country! And he said he would celebrate a gay player on his team. So, you know, maybe just because culturally things are changing, that's making its way into clubhouses. Also, I think the lesson that I'm curious to see is something that goes back to Perry Wallace again when he was coming along in the 1960s at Vanderbilt and telling the truth about the racism he was encountering, people didn't want to hear it. He gave a landmark interview to the paper the day after his last game, and people canceled their subscriptions to the newspaper. They canceled their season tickets. They drove them out of town. It wasn't until 40 years later that they were listening to the same things he was saying and finally wanted to hear it and were willing to hear it, and honored Perry and loved Perry the way they should have all along.
And so I asked Perry about that phenomenon and he said, well, reconciliation without the truth is just acting, you know? A lot of times sports organizations or universities, companies, families, when I put this photo op out there, you know, they say, ah, look at us, things are better now, they've changed. But have they really dealt with the truth of how they got into that situation in the first place? If they haven't, that moment of reconciliation is just for show, just acting. If the truth is present, then it's for real. So Glenn Burke I think is kind of in the zeitgeist right now. Even aside from my book, he's being talked about again. MLB tweeted about him last year during pride month. Oakland, A's put out a video about him just a couple weeks ago. But in both cases kind of surface level, you know, the “here is the first openly player, he invented the high five,” but not really dealing with any of their real issues that were present.
And so, if Glenn is sort of coming back and people are talking about him again and these franchises want to acknowledge that they were part of history, let's make sure that the whole story is part of that so that we can learn from it and not just celebrate the trivia about Glenn but really get into the depth of his story so that it can be easier for gay players that come along now and in the future.
Brenda: This question comes from my co-hosts and they wanted to know if any one particular interview has stuck with you that you just can't get out of your head.
Andrew: That's a good question.
Brenda: There are much better interviewers than I. [laughter]
Andrew: I think there were two interviews that have stuck with me. Well, let me say three. They're not necessarily they were the most profound, but they were the most interesting interviews. The first one was profound, I would say. It was Dusty Baker. Everybody told me how great Dusty Baker is. And I had been trying to get in touch with him, find a time where we could talk, and he kept getting canceled, or it just wasn't going to work out. And then finally he told me he was in Asheville, North Carolina to scout a game for the Giants just before he was the Astros manager. And I live in Nashville, Tennessee, so that's the only about like a four and a half hour drive. So I just got in the car and drove over there and met him and spent about three hours with him after he had told me he had an hour, you know? He just kept going.
He loved Glenn, you know, and was distraught when Glenn was traded from the Dodgers. He was really open and honest about what it was like in that clubhouse, how popular Glenn was, how devastating it was when he was traded, seeing Glenn later when Dusty became manager of the Giants and Glenn's dying of AIDS and what a profound scene that was for Dusty. So, that was cool. I also was in the Oakland A's clubhouse interviewing their clubhouse managers. Steve Vucinich who's been there for since Glenn was a player. And he said, well, you know, about Glenn being the first to wear Nikes, right? And I was like, no, I'd never heard that before! And he hooked me up with Bill Frechette, who was a vendor at Dodger Stadium, also working at a shoe store in Santa Monica back in the 70s, who goes on to become the top baseball executive at Nike, thanks to a relationship with Glenn Burke.
He met him at the stadium as a vendor, brought Glenn down to the store and gave him some shoes. Glenn liked them. They were soccer shoes for artificial turf. Glenn dyed them blue and wore them in the playoffs that year and was the first player to wear Nikes. So, that was just kind of a fun detail that I never would have heard otherwise. And then I was able to track down one of Glenn's former lovers, a guy who's now retired in Hawaii named Cloy Jenkins, and they had known each other in San Francisco. Cloy owned a bed and breakfast outside of San Francisco. And he was able to shed a lot of light on Glenn's experience coming out on the Today Show and in the Inside Sports article, what it was like as AIDS was arriving in San Francisco and they're just learning about this new disease, what they're seeing in that neighborhood. And so Cloy’s level of detail and being able to tie those stories that everybody knows about AIDS down to how to Glenn perceive it at the time was just…It made the book so much better. And I never knew if I would find him, you know, and finding him retired in Hawaii was a thrill when he emailed back.
Brenda: So before I let you go, I want to ask what are you working on now?
Andrew: Yeah, I'm really excited about this. I'm working on a book on the first US women's Olympic basketball team, which played at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal. It'll come out at the end of next year, 2022, which will be the 50th anniversary of Title IX. And so, the book tells the story of this team in the context of the women's rights movement of the 70s and of Title IX. This team won the silver medal and that was an enormous accomplishment for the US women's team at that time. You know, now we would be disappointed in anything but a gold, but the Soviets dominated going back to the 50s at that time. We weren't even supposed to qualify for the Olympics. No one thought we were even gonna make it to Montreal. And so this team had iconic players like Nancy Lieberman and Pat Head and Ann Meyers coached by Billie Moore. I've finished the research outlining chapter one, hoping to finish writing chapter one this weekend. So, I'm just getting started and can't wait for that book to come out next year.
Brenda: Well, We can't wait either, so you'll have to be back.
Andrew: I'd love to, I'd love to thank you,
Brenda: Andrew Maraniss. Thank you once again for being on Burn It All Down, we are so excited about this work and your future work and appreciate your time and support.
Andrew: Oh, thank you so much, Brenda. I really admire everything that all of you do, and it's an honor to be on this show. So thank you so much.