An Accidental Sportswriter (15 page)

Interviewing Bean over several days, I felt the excitement I remembered from the early years at the paper, when every story was a new experience, a window opening on a new world. No question this guy was a jock, and a successful one. He'd made it to the top. Yet he was a “fag.”

There were midnight walks on road trips to get away from his tomcatting teammates, to work off the stress of being a spy in his own life. There were anonymous sexual encounters after which he'd come back hoping God would forgive him. There were a great deal of guilt and self-hate until he began living with Sam, an Iranian he met at a health club. But he kept the relationship a secret, even refusing to let his brothers stay at his Del Mar house. Sam hid in the car when teammates dropped by.

Then, for the second time, sudden death became a catalyst. On April 23, 1995, Bean returned from an exhibition night game to find Sam semiconscious with a mysterious fever. He died of cardiac arrest in the emergency room the next morning, eight years to the day of Bean's major-league debut. Because Sam's family barred him from the hospital, he never found out what had killed Sam.

Bean remembers calling his mother, crying, “Not fair, not fair,” and her urging him to take a shower and go to the ballpark. She had no idea that Sam was more than just a buddy. He felt confused. How could he explain to the club he needed a day off to grieve? Bean got a hit that day. After the game, he was called in for an announcement he knew too well: he was being sent back down to the minors.

“I swore to myself I would never again let baseball take precedence over my life,” said Bean. “If I ever fell in love again, that relationship would come ahead of my career.”

Later that season, in Florida to play the Marlins, he met the owner of a popular Miami Beach restaurant. In town again four months later, Billy called him up.

At Thanksgiving, Bean went home and told his mother.

“While he was trying to get the words out, I said it: ‘You're gay,'” Mrs. Kovac told me. “We left the house and drank coffee in the car, and we both cried. I wondered what it would mean to him.”

With dread, Bean went back inside to wake up his stepdad. The tough old homicide cop opened his eyes, listened, nodded, hugged and kissed his son, and said, “Okay, now it's official. Can I go back to sleep?”

Bean did not return to baseball in 1996. He assumes he would have been assigned to a minor-league team. He knew he could no longer live so furtively. To come out while still playing, he thought, would mean lurid headlines and talk shows, and then baseball would find a way “to kick me out.” He moved to Miami Beach and worked in radio and television as his relationship with the restaurant owner became professional as well as personal. Precise and methodical, a leader, he began taking over more and more operational duties at the restaurant. Then they opened one together.

It was the third sudden death, of his old college teammate Tim Layana, a former Yankees pitcher, that pushed Bean out to a more public platform. He missed Layana's funeral because none of their mutual friends had his contact information. He had become estranged from his own life. A month later, he succumbed to
Miami Herald
writer Lydia Martin's entreaties and allowed her to make him a public gay figure.

He called another college teammate, Jim Bruske.

“I kinda suspected,” Bruske told me. “I wouldn't say anything till he did, no one knew for sure, but he kept shying away from us. I'd come to Miami to play the Marlins, and he always had some reason we couldn't get together and he'd be short and change the subject when it got personal.

“He was right to keep it a secret. The guys would have been brutal. I'm glad it's out. I told him it would have no impact on our friendship.”

After the story appeared, Billy had a flurry of TV interviews. He wrote a memoir,
Going the Other Way
. He joined human rights groups and spoke to college and high school students. He was taken up as a hunky poster boy by gay publications. But there was little follow-up or commentary in the mainstream sports media. I was surprised and disappointed that the story didn't have more legs. Billy was no star, but he was a major-league baseball player. There had to be others, and if not there had to be a reason.

I called gay sportswriters around the country. They were disappointed, too, but not surprised. They thought that each coming-out story was incremental progression toward understanding and acceptance. The dream of a major superstar coming out at the height of his popularity was not realistic, they said. What would be more likely and probably more helpful would be sports fans following a gay high school superstar who had gone on to brilliant college and pro careers.

That's what made Corey Johnson's story so appealing. He was no superstar, but he was that masculine icon, the high school football captain. A linebacker, yet.

Less than a year after the Billy Bean story, again following up on a gay writer's local piece—this one by Peter Cassels in
Bay Windows
—I met Corey, who had revealed his sexuality in a series of meetings orchestrated by his school and a Massachusetts gay rights group, while he was still playing. It was a textbook model of how to peel the coming-out onion in a nonconfrontational way. It turned out well; after one big victory in which Corey starred, his Masconomet High teammates gave him the game ball and sang the unofficial gay anthem “YMCA” to him on the bus ride home. It was a feel-good story but hardly typical. A few miles away, a high school football player had been beaten by teammates when he came out. His family was driven out of town.

I thought that because of Corey's age and the iconography of high school football, this story was advancing the stories of Gallagher and Billy Bean. But it would not have been on page one without a fortuitous news peg. The Sunday it appeared, Corey, who had just turned eighteen, was a speaker at the Millennium March for Equality, a gay and lesbian rally in Washington.

For gay activists trying to shatter stereotypes, Corey Johnson was a rare find, a bright, vivacious quick study who also wrestled and played lacrosse and baseball as he won three varsity letters on a winning football team. He was also conscious of his role.

“Someday I want to get beyond being ‘that gay football captain,'” said Corey, “but for now I need to get out there and show these machismo athletes who run high schools that you don't have to do drama or be a drum major to be gay. It could be someone who looks just like them.”

At five feet, eight inches and 180 pounds, Corey had to make up for his drama club size with the speed and brutality of his blocking and tackling. He suspected his homosexuality by sixth grade but suppressed further thoughts about it. He did not feel part of what he called “the elite jock mix” of heterosexual innuendo and bravado. He didn't go out with girls, he told me, because he didn't want to waste their time. It wouldn't be fair.

In the very first game of his varsity career, as a sophomore starting at both right guard and middle linebacker, his blocking was so effective and he made so many sacks that the line coach awarded him the game ball. Yet he was so afraid that everyone would hate him when his secret was revealed that he was often unable to sleep at night or get out of bed in the morning. He would reach out on the Internet, finding other gay youngsters, even other gay football players. For years, he exchanged e-mails with a gay right guard in Chicago.

Corey's decision to come out began taking shape during his family's 1998 Super Bowl party. One of his uncles pointed at the comedian Jerry Seinfeld in a commercial and called him a fag. He said that such “sick” people needed to be “put into institutions.” Another uncle laughed. Corey's mother, unaware at the time of Corey's orientation, chided her brothers and asked them not to use such language.

Corey went into the bathroom and cried. A month later, he told his guidance counselor and biology teacher that he was bisexual. He was a virgin at the time. Later, he told his lacrosse coach that he was gay. All three were supportive. They also began to understand his moodiness and mediocre grades.

He told no one else during that summer and the football season of his junior year. He joined the school's Gay Straight Alliance, which was made up mostly of straight girls. Since he was known for defending kids who were being hazed or bullied, no one found this remarkable. The team voted him cocaptain.

After Christmas vacation, he decided to tell his parents.

His father already knew. He had read an e-mail exchange. For months he had held the secret; he didn't want to burden his wife, who was absorbed in ministering to her dying mother.

“I dropped the ball,” he told me. “What if Corey had done something to himself?”

Corey told his teammates that he was gay, that he hoped for their support, and not to worry: “I didn't come on to you last year in the locker room, and I'm not going to do it now. Who says you're good enough, anyhow?”

That lightly dropped remark had been scripted in the preliminary meetings with his teachers and the state's Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.

Corey remembered, “At first the team was meek about it, people didn't talk to me, and when they saw it was still just me they asked all kinds of questions. They wanted intimate details. They thought it would be cool to know more about the subculture. When they heard about a gay bar called the Ramrod, they asked me to get them T-shirts.”

There were incidents, quickly shut down. The president of the school's booster club, the father of four past, present, and future players, demanded that Corey be removed as captain to preserve “unit cohesiveness.” Coach Jim Pugh told him that he was the divisive one and that it was not an issue. When younger players complained to another cocaptain about having to shower with a gay teammate, he would growl, as he would to most complainants, “You're a football player, toughen up.” But then Masconomet football players traditionally never showered at school; they went home from games and practices filthy and smelly. I couldn't figure out how much of that was teenage self-consciousness and how much the nasty condition of a rusty old high school locker room.

After the story ran, Ed Gallagher called me, ecstatic. “This Corey is a pioneer, a leader, but he's up against the hypocritical right-wing hate mongers who want to punish people for being human. I say there are no straights or gays, just ‘strays.'”

We both thought the dialogue would begin now. This one was the Big Story, a high school football captain rallying the jocks, smashing the stereotypes. High school was the heart and soul of Jock Culture; it was where the values and definitions of American manhood were imprinted. Sports columnists, talk radio hosts, the latest phenomenon of Internet chatterers (this was 2000) would be all over this story.

It never happened. They didn't want to hear about gay players. It was off message, it complicated the mainstream fantasy. Rumors of gay stars tended to be floated by gay fans who wanted to claim them and antigay fans who wanted to put them down.

My third and final Big Story about an athlete coming out was again about a popular hard worker who tried to fit in, but this time it was a 300-pound NFL defensive lineman, a veteran of nine years in the trench warfare zone of sports. How could you discount this symbolism? Pro football players have been promoted as supermasculine warriors, no women or sissies allowed. So how do you explain Esera Tuaolo living in a suburban house with his adopted twenty-three-month-old twins and the man he described as his husband?

Tuaolo had been a star at high schools in Hawaii and California, and at Oregon State. He'd had a successful rookie year with the Green Bay Packers in 1991 that included thirty solo tackles and the singing of the national anthem at Lambeau Field before a game.

“I knew when I was young that I was attracted to men,” Tuaolo told me. “But once I could give a name to it, I backed off. I had girlfriends as a cover-up, and I made sure I was seen leaving strip clubs. I drank a lot. I was always anxious, always in pain. I was afraid if I was too much of a star I'd be exposed. Once you learn the system, you can play just hard enough to make the team. That's pretty sad. I didn't want to call attention to myself. If I had a sack I'd have a sleepless night, wondering if now they would catch me.”

In the locker room he was the jolly “Mr. Aloha.” He says he never suspected that there were other gay football players. (“His gaydar must have gone dead,” says Dave Kopay.) Tuaolo's social life playing for Green Bay, Minneapolis, and Jacksonville was limited except during the off-seasons, when he returned to Hawaii and to friends who knew he was gay. In 1997, concerned about Tuaolo's suicidal depression, a friend gave him a copy of
The Dave Kopay Story
. The book had just been reissued. It was the first book he'd read since college.

“It confirmed everything, it was eye-opening, I wasn't alone,” he said. “It forced me to make choices. I decided I was going to be open to a real relationship.”

A segment about Tuaolo on the HBO show
Real Sports
underscored the rationale for his secrecy. A former teammate and current ESPN broadcaster, Sterling Sharpe, said that any player who declared himself gay would be driven off the team. Sharpe implied that players would feel threatened; a gay teammate would cast doubts in fans' minds about all players' masculinity and sexual orientation. Sharpe's hostility extended the shelf life of the Tuaolo story, giving commentators a chance to expound on the unit cohesiveness theory used to discriminate against gays in the military.

My story ran in the back of the sports section. Old news. I was disgusted by Sharpe and by the mainstream sports media's refusal to take these stories seriously. Maybe they too were afraid of being called fags.

Once again, I wanted too much. Kopay was thrilled. He said that Tuaolo's coming out had an enormous impact on him. The two men hugged and cried when they met at our “Brokeback Locker Room” panel at the 2006 Chicago Gay Games. By that time, Bean was heading into a big-league real estate career (Alex Rodriguez was a client), Tuaolo was a successful singer, and Corey Johnson was a political operative in New York. They were all out in the world with thousands of Facebook friends.