Billy Bean's Pitch

Billy Bean is
having a wardrobe crisis. In three hours he’s due on
the Twentieth Century Fox studio lot for an interview
with Tom Arnold on the Best Damn Sports Show
Period. Bean will be talking about his new book,

Going the Other Way

, a memoir of his years as a closeted major
league baseball player and of his experience coming out. And
although he’s hoping that Arnold will treat him
with respect (“I know that he has a gay
brother, so that might help”), he also knows that the
audience for the Best Damn Sports Show Period
is not, let’s say, batting for his team.

“It’s the straightest TV show ever,”
Bean says, casting his big brown eyes around the back
room of the Abbey, a West Hollywood, Calif., gay bar
where we’re having lunch. It’s the kind of
show, he says, where a gay baseball player could well
get “kicked around, beat up, chewed up, spit
out.” But maybe, he figures, they’ll be nicer
to him if he wears the right
shirt—“something classic and all-American, not
too stylish, you know -- just plain. Kind
of…not too…”

“Gay?” I offer.

“You get
it,” he says. “You know where I’m
coming from.”

Whether
we’re comfortable admitting it or not, most of us
know where Bean is coming from. This summer’s
gay pride celebrations will prove it again and again.
At most pride parades the marchers who get the most applause
will not be the ones who end up on the evening news -- drag
queens, leathermen, and twinks on nightclub floats.
The biggest cheers will go up for the men and women
who break stereotypes to work and play in worlds that
aren’t predominantly gay: people like veterans,
firefighters, cops, and jocks.

Public
fascination with such characters has been a boon for Bean.
“I think I’m just a regular joe,”
he says. “And I feel like that’s
comfortable for a lot of people.” Jim Buzinski, the
founder of Outsports.com, a Web community of
gay sports fans and athletes, agrees: “His story
resonates because he seems like the nicest guy in the
world. Why would someone have a problem with him if he
came out?” Perhaps the catchiest observation of
Bean’s winsomeness, however, comes from his old boss,
Los Angeles Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda, who used to
tease him: “Billy Bean, Billy Bean, the boy of
every girl’s dream.”

Bean, now 39,
became an instant media star in 1999, when he came out
after retiring from 10 seasons as a player for the Detroit
Tigers, the Dodgers, and the San Diego Padres. The
New York Times ran a front-page feature. Diane
Sawyer interviewed Bean at his home in Miami Beach,
Fla., where he runs a real estate business with his
partner, Efraín Veiga. More recently Bean showed up on
HBO’s sports comedy Arli$$, where he
played himself—and caught flak from gay
activists for coaching a gay ballplayer on the show to
stay in the closet. (Bean is only the second major leaguer
ever to come out. The first, Glenn Burke, who played
outfield for the Dodgers and Oakland A’s, died
of AIDS complications in 1995. And Bean was the third
athlete in an American professional team sport to come out
since Dave Kopay, a National Football League all-pro,
went public about his sexual orientation in 1975. All
were retired at the time they came out.)

Bean’s
media presence got another boost this spring with the
publication of his memoir (cowritten with The
Advocate’s Chris Bull). The book quickly
became Amazon’s best-selling gay title, and its
publisher ordered a second printing within two weeks of the
book’s release.

On June 29,
toward the end of his 14-city book tour, Bean will be the
grand marshal of Chicago’s pride parade.
“There’s going to be 375,000 people
there,” he says. “It gives me goose
bumps.” He can’t wait “just to
run around and high-five guys and say hello and have a beer
with them.”