Film examines struggle of gay athlete Glenn Burke
Berkeley native Glenn Burke played for the A's in the 1970s.
There are moments when Glenn Burke's story flows with sporting achievement and playful exuberance. Friends and former teammates rave about his athletic ability and reminisce about his gregarious demeanor (a cross between Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor, as one friend puts it).
But the tale soon turns tumultuous - and reaches a sad, premature ending. Burke's journey as major-league baseball's first openly gay player still makes for a compelling narrative in "Out. The Glenn Burke Story," a documentary to air at 8 p.m. Wednesday on Comcast SportsNet Bay Area. Also Wednesday, the documentary will screen at 7:30 p.m. as part of a fundraiser at the Castro Theatre, with doors opening at 6:30 p.m. At 9:15 p.m., a live town-hall meeting at the Castro will be telecast on CSNBA.
Burke made little secret of his sexuality during his time with the Dodgers and A's in the late 1970s. Several former teammates contend this bothered management of both clubs, to the point where the Dodgers traded Burke to Oakland and then-A's manager Billy Martin later ridiculed him in front of his teammates.
He abruptly retired from baseball in 1980, publicly revealed his homosexuality two years later and landed in San Francisco's Castro district, where he initially was welcomed warmly. But his life there eventually spun out of control, sending him spiraling toward drug use, prison time and AIDS.
He died of complications from the disease in May 1995, at age 42.
Doug Harris, an independent Bay Area filmmaker, co-produced the documentary with Sean Maddison of Comcast. Harris brought a unique perspective to the project: He grew up in Berkeley, as Burke did, and befriended him during summertime pickup basketball games at Cal's Harmon Gym in the 1970s.
Harris sat down with The Chronicle on Friday to talk about Burke and the documentary.
Q: What do you remember about the first time you met Glenn?
A: The first time I saw him was at Harmon, and Glenn was on the side waiting for winners. He took the ball, triple-pumped and slammed it backward - and he wasn't that tall. I was like, "Oh, my God!" I'd never seen anyone do something like that. Then when I started watching him play, he was the best, hands down.
Q: One thing highlighted in the documentary is his outsize personality - how evident was that during those games at Harmon?
A: Glenn had a dominant personality, but it was so much fun watching him play basketball. We called the trash talk "hoo-rah," and the hoo-rah on the court made you smile. There was nothing about him that made you sullen or mad. Shooty (Babitt) said it best in the film: Glenn was the kind of guy who would beat you up on the court, then take you out to get a soda or chips. He motivated and inspired a group of athletes who came along behind him at Berkeley High. He was like an icon in Berkeley, for all of us.
Q: As Glenn moved along through professional baseball, how aware were you of his lifestyle and the difficulty it caused him in that world?
A: I didn't find out Glenn was gay until I read about it in Inside Sports magazine, and by that time (1982) I was a senior in college at Central Washington. I remember catching hell from a lot of my classmates and teammates. They were ragging on me - "You're from Berkeley, too; you must be gay," all that kind of stuff. It was really a trip.
Q: Did these people know you were friends with him?
A: No, they didn't know. They may have heard me talking about the great players from Berkeley, and it turns out all of a sudden one of them is gay.
Q: Why do you think Dusty Baker, Reggie Smith and others interviewed in the film were so candid about Glenn's lifestyle and how it impacted his career?
A: They loved Glenn. But the thing about those guys is, they're still working in baseball.
Q: So they were still trying to be careful about what they said?
http://www.sfgate.com
But the tale soon turns tumultuous - and reaches a sad, premature ending. Burke's journey as major-league baseball's first openly gay player still makes for a compelling narrative in "Out. The Glenn Burke Story," a documentary to air at 8 p.m. Wednesday on Comcast SportsNet Bay Area. Also Wednesday, the documentary will screen at 7:30 p.m. as part of a fundraiser at the Castro Theatre, with doors opening at 6:30 p.m. At 9:15 p.m., a live town-hall meeting at the Castro will be telecast on CSNBA.
Burke made little secret of his sexuality during his time with the Dodgers and A's in the late 1970s. Several former teammates contend this bothered management of both clubs, to the point where the Dodgers traded Burke to Oakland and then-A's manager Billy Martin later ridiculed him in front of his teammates.
He abruptly retired from baseball in 1980, publicly revealed his homosexuality two years later and landed in San Francisco's Castro district, where he initially was welcomed warmly. But his life there eventually spun out of control, sending him spiraling toward drug use, prison time and AIDS.
He died of complications from the disease in May 1995, at age 42.
Doug Harris, an independent Bay Area filmmaker, co-produced the documentary with Sean Maddison of Comcast. Harris brought a unique perspective to the project: He grew up in Berkeley, as Burke did, and befriended him during summertime pickup basketball games at Cal's Harmon Gym in the 1970s.
Harris sat down with The Chronicle on Friday to talk about Burke and the documentary.
Q: What do you remember about the first time you met Glenn?
A: The first time I saw him was at Harmon, and Glenn was on the side waiting for winners. He took the ball, triple-pumped and slammed it backward - and he wasn't that tall. I was like, "Oh, my God!" I'd never seen anyone do something like that. Then when I started watching him play, he was the best, hands down.
Q: One thing highlighted in the documentary is his outsize personality - how evident was that during those games at Harmon?
A: Glenn had a dominant personality, but it was so much fun watching him play basketball. We called the trash talk "hoo-rah," and the hoo-rah on the court made you smile. There was nothing about him that made you sullen or mad. Shooty (Babitt) said it best in the film: Glenn was the kind of guy who would beat you up on the court, then take you out to get a soda or chips. He motivated and inspired a group of athletes who came along behind him at Berkeley High. He was like an icon in Berkeley, for all of us.
Q: As Glenn moved along through professional baseball, how aware were you of his lifestyle and the difficulty it caused him in that world?
A: I didn't find out Glenn was gay until I read about it in Inside Sports magazine, and by that time (1982) I was a senior in college at Central Washington. I remember catching hell from a lot of my classmates and teammates. They were ragging on me - "You're from Berkeley, too; you must be gay," all that kind of stuff. It was really a trip.
Q: Did these people know you were friends with him?
A: No, they didn't know. They may have heard me talking about the great players from Berkeley, and it turns out all of a sudden one of them is gay.
Q: Why do you think Dusty Baker, Reggie Smith and others interviewed in the film were so candid about Glenn's lifestyle and how it impacted his career?
A: They loved Glenn. But the thing about those guys is, they're still working in baseball.
Q: So they were still trying to be careful about what they said?
A: The people who didn't agree to interviews were the ones trying to toe the line, like Don Sutton. We had two opportunities to talk to him and he declined - and he was a teammate of Glenn's and supposedly they were real tight.
IMAGES
Q: You talked about being hassled just because you were from the same place as Glenn. Before making this documentary, what was your sense of what his life was like in baseball? And how did your view change in the wake of talking to all these people about him?
A: I never really gave it much thought at the time, because I wasn't in baseball's inner circles. But after doing this film, I think Glenn could have been a much better player if he didn't have the stress, this weight on his chest of constantly dealing with who he was. ... The players talk about it in the film. He wouldn't go with them after games; he would always disappear and do his own thing. But he never hid who he was in the clubhouse. Everybody knew this guy was gay. He wasn't sugarcoating anything.
Q: What was the most compelling example for you of the challenges he faced?
A: To me, the heaviest part of the film didn't even deal with baseball. It was probably the part where Glenn is here in San Francisco, and he's in a car accident. He was an icon in the gay community, and once he has this car accident - and he can't run, jump and dunk a basketball anymore - then he's not an icon anymore. ... Once he got hit by that car and he couldn't perform, they kind of shoved him to the side. To me, that spiraled into his heavy drug use and his crash and burn. So that's the part that really grabbed my heart. People have to realize the gay community turned on him just as much as baseball did, if you really look at it.
Q: The macho culture of professional sports does not exactly encourage a gay athlete to "come out," even in 2010. Could a pro athlete today acknowledge his homosexuality publicly, as an active player?
A: This is just my opinion: What Glenn went through could not happen today. Why? Because of gay rights and powerful attorneys. So if you're a player and you choose to be openly gay - but not necessarily come out, like if you were in Glenn's situation today - you could argue discrimination. Can you imagine a lawsuit against a professional sports team, if they did anything today like what they did to Glenn Burke?
Q: In a practical sense, though, would any player take that risk?
A: I think there are a lot of gay players in pro sports today. They're gay, but they're in the closet. The question is: Would somebody ever come out? We asked everyone we interviewed, and they were all pretty much in line in saying it would have to be a megastar, a superstar player who would be extraordinarily valuable to the team. Glenn was only a few years into his career and he was working his way up. So would it have been different if he was hitting .315 with 25 home runs? Would the Dodgers have gone along with it then? Maybe.
A: I never really gave it much thought at the time, because I wasn't in baseball's inner circles. But after doing this film, I think Glenn could have been a much better player if he didn't have the stress, this weight on his chest of constantly dealing with who he was. ... The players talk about it in the film. He wouldn't go with them after games; he would always disappear and do his own thing. But he never hid who he was in the clubhouse. Everybody knew this guy was gay. He wasn't sugarcoating anything.
Q: What was the most compelling example for you of the challenges he faced?
A: To me, the heaviest part of the film didn't even deal with baseball. It was probably the part where Glenn is here in San Francisco, and he's in a car accident. He was an icon in the gay community, and once he has this car accident - and he can't run, jump and dunk a basketball anymore - then he's not an icon anymore. ... Once he got hit by that car and he couldn't perform, they kind of shoved him to the side. To me, that spiraled into his heavy drug use and his crash and burn. So that's the part that really grabbed my heart. People have to realize the gay community turned on him just as much as baseball did, if you really look at it.
Q: The macho culture of professional sports does not exactly encourage a gay athlete to "come out," even in 2010. Could a pro athlete today acknowledge his homosexuality publicly, as an active player?
A: This is just my opinion: What Glenn went through could not happen today. Why? Because of gay rights and powerful attorneys. So if you're a player and you choose to be openly gay - but not necessarily come out, like if you were in Glenn's situation today - you could argue discrimination. Can you imagine a lawsuit against a professional sports team, if they did anything today like what they did to Glenn Burke?
Q: In a practical sense, though, would any player take that risk?
A: I think there are a lot of gay players in pro sports today. They're gay, but they're in the closet. The question is: Would somebody ever come out? We asked everyone we interviewed, and they were all pretty much in line in saying it would have to be a megastar, a superstar player who would be extraordinarily valuable to the team. Glenn was only a few years into his career and he was working his way up. So would it have been different if he was hitting .315 with 25 home runs? Would the Dodgers have gone along with it then? Maybe.
http://www.sfgate.com
Comments