CANADA: A Straight Talker For Gay Sports
Patrick Burke, a scout for the Philadelphia Flyers, son of Brian Burke, the general manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs, and brother of the late Brendan Burke, speaks at The 519 Church Street Community Centre as the keynote speaker for Outsports Toronto 2011 Scrum.
Photograph by: Matthew Sherwood, National Post vancouversun.com
Patrick Burke picks up a glass of water. He is three-quarters of the way through his 20-minute speech, and the water is behind the lectern for this moment. He takes a long drink, puts the glass down, and gets to the hard part.
“On Feb. 5, 2010,” he begins.
Burke is a scout for the Philadelphia Flyers, and he is in law school, and yet the reason for this speech consumes him as much as anything. He is going grey at the temples already and, as he cracks, “I’m 28 and single for a reason. I’ve got things to do.”
Yes, he does. Day classes Monday through Thursday, night classes Monday and Wednesday, scouting hockey games in the New England area the other five nights of the week. And, of course, his brother Brendan’s legacy. That is why he volunteered to give the keynote speech at the Church Street Community Centre, where OutSport Toronto is holding its 11th annual conference on gay issues in sports.
Beforehand, Burke sits with a few members of the OutSport executive in a sunlit room and talks about what he has learned. He and his father Brian, the general manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs, have taken on the challenge of fighting homophobia in hockey since Patrick’s openly gay brother Brendan died in a car accident on Feb. 5, 2010. And Burkes tend to go all in.
“I want to always be informed,” Patrick Burke says. “I don’t ever want to be asked a question and not know the answer.”
So in the last 19 months he has immersed himself, from books to psychology journals to religious textbooks to current events. He can summon the results of studies on NCAA athletes who came out (since 2006, backlash appears to have virtually disappeared). He can cite the American statistics on gay bullying, where 66 per cent of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) high school students feel physically unsafe in their own school, and the most common place for gay bullying to occur is a locker-room. He knows all about gay suicide rates. He knows about Jamie Hubley.
And being a good Catholic boy, he can cite chapter and verse; ask him about Leviticus and Romans sometime. When Halton region Catholic schools banned gay-straight alliances earlier this year, he sent them a letter with a link to the Catechism, which among other things states homosexuals should be treated with respect and dignity. The school board did not get back to him.
The Flyers, meanwhile, have approved all his speaking engagements, which are focused on the GForce Sports Invisible Athlete Forums, a talk given to various schools about coming out organized by an all-gay hockey team based in Denver. Burke lauds the NHL’s statement made after Philadelphia’s Wayne Simmonds was caught on tape appearing to call Sean Avery of the New York Rangers a faggot. The NHL stated that, in future, homophobic slurs would be considered akin to racial ones, but did not fine Simmonds because it has a policy that it doesn’t read lips. OutSports chair Shawn Sheridan, sitting beside Burke, says, “The NHL doesn’t read lips, but we do.”
“Gay people like sports,” says Sheridan, whose organization includes gay groups and leagues in everything from hockey to rock climbing to rodeo.
“They’ve just felt excluded from sports for a long time. We in LGBT amateur sport, we look, just as anybody does, to the professional leagues for inspiration. And having a fantastic straight ally in Patrick and in his father is amazing to us.”
Burke, for his part, thinks there will be an openly gay athlete “in the next couple of years,” and he thinks that, while it will require enormous courage, that athlete will have a statue built in his honour somewhere and will literally save lives. And he thinks hockey is just about ready. Since he and his father began this work, “No one (in hockey) ever said stop it. No one’s ever told me I’m wrong.”
There are about 100 people listening to him, mostly league organizers.
Halfway through his speech, a support group in the next room breaks up and Patrick has to raise his voice over the sound of dishes being cleared and people chatting away, but he carries on.
He talks about the casual homophobia of locker-rooms, and his own contribution to them; he talks about Brendan, and what kind of kid he was.
He wonders aloud whether he could have done more to stop gay slurs at his high school before Brendan arrived a few years later, only to quit the hockey team his senior year. He talks about asking his brother to swear on the Stanley Cup that he was gay, which was their preferred blood oath. He talks about apologizing to Brendan a few weeks later for any casual homophobia he ever tossed around.
And when it comes time to talk about how Brendan died, he stops and reaches for the water.
“It gives me a second to gear myself up,” he said.
And then he says it — “On Feb. 5, 2010, my brother, then 21 and a senior at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and a friend, 18-year-old Mark Reedy of Michigan State University, were killed in a car accident in winter weather conditions” — and his voice, so similar in cadence and tone to his father’s, trembles for the next few sentences until he gains his footing again.
He closes with an invocation, telling of 16th century explorer Hernan Cortes’ famous decision to burn his boats. “Let the gay community burn the boats of fear, of guilt, of hesitation and of shame,” he says. And in a nod to his father’s support of Brendan in a TSN interview in 2009, he says, “let the straight community stand beside them with an axe.”
And when he is done, he answers questions comfortably. He is ready for anything. He makes people laugh. He gets a standing ovation. He picks up the glass again.
“It’s never going to be easy to give the speech,” he says afterwards. “It’s important to give the speech. And I hope I’m never not emotional when I talk about Brendan.
“If I didn’t miss him, that would be worse than missing him.”
“On Feb. 5, 2010,” he begins.
Burke is a scout for the Philadelphia Flyers, and he is in law school, and yet the reason for this speech consumes him as much as anything. He is going grey at the temples already and, as he cracks, “I’m 28 and single for a reason. I’ve got things to do.”
Yes, he does. Day classes Monday through Thursday, night classes Monday and Wednesday, scouting hockey games in the New England area the other five nights of the week. And, of course, his brother Brendan’s legacy. That is why he volunteered to give the keynote speech at the Church Street Community Centre, where OutSport Toronto is holding its 11th annual conference on gay issues in sports.
Beforehand, Burke sits with a few members of the OutSport executive in a sunlit room and talks about what he has learned. He and his father Brian, the general manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs, have taken on the challenge of fighting homophobia in hockey since Patrick’s openly gay brother Brendan died in a car accident on Feb. 5, 2010. And Burkes tend to go all in.
“I want to always be informed,” Patrick Burke says. “I don’t ever want to be asked a question and not know the answer.”
So in the last 19 months he has immersed himself, from books to psychology journals to religious textbooks to current events. He can summon the results of studies on NCAA athletes who came out (since 2006, backlash appears to have virtually disappeared). He can cite the American statistics on gay bullying, where 66 per cent of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) high school students feel physically unsafe in their own school, and the most common place for gay bullying to occur is a locker-room. He knows all about gay suicide rates. He knows about Jamie Hubley.
And being a good Catholic boy, he can cite chapter and verse; ask him about Leviticus and Romans sometime. When Halton region Catholic schools banned gay-straight alliances earlier this year, he sent them a letter with a link to the Catechism, which among other things states homosexuals should be treated with respect and dignity. The school board did not get back to him.
The Flyers, meanwhile, have approved all his speaking engagements, which are focused on the GForce Sports Invisible Athlete Forums, a talk given to various schools about coming out organized by an all-gay hockey team based in Denver. Burke lauds the NHL’s statement made after Philadelphia’s Wayne Simmonds was caught on tape appearing to call Sean Avery of the New York Rangers a faggot. The NHL stated that, in future, homophobic slurs would be considered akin to racial ones, but did not fine Simmonds because it has a policy that it doesn’t read lips. OutSports chair Shawn Sheridan, sitting beside Burke, says, “The NHL doesn’t read lips, but we do.”
“Gay people like sports,” says Sheridan, whose organization includes gay groups and leagues in everything from hockey to rock climbing to rodeo.
“They’ve just felt excluded from sports for a long time. We in LGBT amateur sport, we look, just as anybody does, to the professional leagues for inspiration. And having a fantastic straight ally in Patrick and in his father is amazing to us.”
Burke, for his part, thinks there will be an openly gay athlete “in the next couple of years,” and he thinks that, while it will require enormous courage, that athlete will have a statue built in his honour somewhere and will literally save lives. And he thinks hockey is just about ready. Since he and his father began this work, “No one (in hockey) ever said stop it. No one’s ever told me I’m wrong.”
There are about 100 people listening to him, mostly league organizers.
Halfway through his speech, a support group in the next room breaks up and Patrick has to raise his voice over the sound of dishes being cleared and people chatting away, but he carries on.
He talks about the casual homophobia of locker-rooms, and his own contribution to them; he talks about Brendan, and what kind of kid he was.
He wonders aloud whether he could have done more to stop gay slurs at his high school before Brendan arrived a few years later, only to quit the hockey team his senior year. He talks about asking his brother to swear on the Stanley Cup that he was gay, which was their preferred blood oath. He talks about apologizing to Brendan a few weeks later for any casual homophobia he ever tossed around.
And when it comes time to talk about how Brendan died, he stops and reaches for the water.
“It gives me a second to gear myself up,” he said.
And then he says it — “On Feb. 5, 2010, my brother, then 21 and a senior at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and a friend, 18-year-old Mark Reedy of Michigan State University, were killed in a car accident in winter weather conditions” — and his voice, so similar in cadence and tone to his father’s, trembles for the next few sentences until he gains his footing again.
He closes with an invocation, telling of 16th century explorer Hernan Cortes’ famous decision to burn his boats. “Let the gay community burn the boats of fear, of guilt, of hesitation and of shame,” he says. And in a nod to his father’s support of Brendan in a TSN interview in 2009, he says, “let the straight community stand beside them with an axe.”
And when he is done, he answers questions comfortably. He is ready for anything. He makes people laugh. He gets a standing ovation. He picks up the glass again.
“It’s never going to be easy to give the speech,” he says afterwards. “It’s important to give the speech. And I hope I’m never not emotional when I talk about Brendan.
“If I didn’t miss him, that would be worse than missing him.”
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