Review: New Documentary "Out: The Glenn Burke Story" Tells of Baseball's Gay Pioneer

Gay pioneers get screwed.

I don't mean today's pioneers, like Neil Patrick Harris, who definitely still deserve credit for their courage and vision. No, I mean the early early pioneers: the gay folks were often the very first to be out and proud in their particular field.

Think about it: Harvey Milk was assassinated, pioneering film director Christopher Larkin killed himself, and pioneering pop singer Steven Grossman and Gay Games founder Tom Waddell died of AIDS.

Add to that list of gay pioneers another name: Glenn Burke, the first openly gay Major League baseball player who came out in 1982 after basically being hounded out of his profession, only to see his life descend into a nightmare of prison and AIDS.

It's very small consolation, but at least Burke is now the subject of a fascinating new documentary Out: The Glenn Burke Story that tells his story and finally recognizes his incredible achievements. It airs this week on Comcast SportsNet Bay Area, a regional sports television network based in San Francisco. (For viewers outside Northern California, the documentary will be available on DirecTV’s Sports Pack Channel 696 and Dish Network’s Multi-Sports Package Channel 419.)

As important as Burke's story is, it's also a little difficult to watch, because of the way it ends.

A natural athlete from a young age, Burke excelled in two sports, basketball and baseball, and received professional recruitment offers for both. He chose baseball and quickly worked his way up from the minors to the Major League, where he landed a spot on the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Burke was a funny, gregarious guy with an "outrageous" personality. He made friends easily; everyone loved him. According to the documentary, he may literally have invented one of the most popular gestures in all of sports: the "high five."

But because Burke was so outspoken, it soon became clear to his teammates that he was gay. Burke was not "out" exactly, but he did unconventional things, like wear a red jock strap, that raised eyebrows in the lockerroom. And mostly, when directly confronted, he refused to lie.

The documentary mixes an actual audio interview with Burke with "talking head" interviews with the important figures from his life, and it's absolutely fascinating to hear these players now: with deep regret, they honestly admit, "We just didn't understand. The world was so different then."

The documentary also includes the very interesting perspective of Billy Bean, another former Major League player who came out in 1999.

In the macho world of 1970s sports, it wasn't so much about the fact that Glenn Burke was gay as it was the fact that, when confronted, he didn't deny it. The issue then became one of guilt-by-association: if Burke is gay, what did that say about his teammates, and baseball in general?

Indeed, as bad as the players were, management was much worse. Burke was told outright he needed to get married to a woman.

Burke's response? Not only did he refuse to marry a woman, he started dating the estranged gay son of famed Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda. It would be funny if the results weren't so tragic.

Lasorda responded by trading Burke off to a losing team in Oakland. (Lasorda, AfterElton.com has learned, was contacted to be interviewed by the producers of the documentary, but did not respond to the request.)

Of course, the gay rumors followed Burke to Oakland, and he found himself subjected to yet another blatantly homophobic manager: Billy Martin. Burke's career trajectory went even more furiously downhill from there.

Soon out of the professional game entirely, Burke turned to gay leagues, and became a celebrity in the Castro in San Francisco. In 1982, several years out of the Majors, he officially came out in an article in Inside Sports, which subsequently inspired an episode of Cheers where a former player of Sam's comes out as gay.

But with his income seriously diminished and a growing drug and alcohol problem, Burke soon ran into financial troubles. He turned to theft, was imprisoned for a time, and later died of HIV/AIDS.

Billy Bean interviewed in Out: The Glenn Burke Story

Out: The Glenn Burke Story is one of those documentaries that works because it's telling two stories at once. It tells the specific story of one interesting person, Glenn Burke, but it also tells a greater story: that of homophobia in professional sports in the 1970s and beyond.

The former story ended tragically, and the latter story is still unfinished, a point the documentary makes extremely well: incredibly, even today, you can count the number of out Major League players, active or retired, on less than one hand — despite the fact, the documentary tells us, that a grand total of 6552 men have played in the Major Leagues since Burke joined them.

Christians, of course, believe that Jesus, the Son of God, had to be sacrificed so that everyone else could live. Apparently, that's true of gay politics as well: brave, important people like Glenn Burke basically had to be sacrificed so that the rest of us could come to know the social changes that happened in their wake.

Maybe this is the way things have to be. There's always a price to be paid when you break the rules or go outside the expected parameters — and pioneers, by their very definition, always go too far.

Maybe it's the way things have to be, but when it comes to gay progress, I still think it really, really sucks.