By Michael Joseph Gross

Originally published on Advocate.com June 10 2003 12:00 AM ET

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.”

His enthusiasm is
infectious, if a little goofy. On the one hand, his
Iron John envisioning of Chicago’s pride celebration
almost makes you want to go out and hoist a beer in
the city of big shoulders. On the other, it makes you
wonder, what’s the force behind those high fives?
What’s the root of Bean’s appeal?

Some would argue,
not without reason, that admiring jocks such as Billy
Bean signals some discomfort with the essential queerness of
gay life. But maybe we also fetishize characters like
him because they symbolize possibility. Having a
professional ballplayer as grand marshal of a pride
parade is a way of showing the world -- and reassuring
ourselves -- that there’s no contradiction
between being gay and being a man.

Remember the
first time you heard the word “faggot”?
Practically every gay man alive today grew up in a
culture that equated gayness with weakness. In the
past 30 years, people like Bean have helped change that.
The fact that they have come out has broadened popular
understanding of what it means to be gay. And today,
with increasing numbers of gay men and women in most
professions living openly, professional team sports may
be the only job category in America -- aside from the
military -- where the closet remains sealed.

That’s
disappointing to many gay sports fans. “It’s
hard to see pride in someone who denies a crucial part
of his existence,” Buzinski says. But Bean, who
calls his book “an explanation of why [pro athletes]
have not been able to come out,” says the
closet is an unfortunate necessity in major league
baseball today.

He wants to be
clear: The one thing he won’t do is tell other
athletes they have to come out. “I took a lot
of heat [after Arli$$] for saying that I was telling
people to stay in the closet. That couldn’t be
further from the truth,” he says. “But
athletes need to know the truth. They need to be aware. If
your livelihood was specifically contingent upon your
ability to work among people who might persecute you,
then it’s a fair decision to keep your life
private -- in my world and from my experience. And I think
if we are judging, as a gay and lesbian community,
people who don’t have [the ability to come out]
yet, I don’t think it’s fair.”

Asked whether
he’s setting the bar impossibly high -- no one ever
comes out with any guarantee that he or she
won’t be persecuted for that decision -- Bean
conjectures that the first active male team-sports pro
to come out will be the center of a “media
frenzy,” causing the player’s life to
“disintegrate in chaos.” The result, he
suggests, could be one massive step backward for gay
rights: “All these kids in high school and
college who are so proud of who they are and have gay
friends and straight friends, it’s going to
send such a negative message. You know what I
mean?”

Then he grounds
himself with an aphorism that he often invokes when the
argument starts getting messy: “It’s like
we’re letting perfect get in the way of
good.”

Although Bean
says he believes in the power of cultural symbols to
advance political causes -- “Look at Christina
Aguilera,” he says. “She’s done
as much as anybody has. It gives me goose bumps. It makes me
so excited. My little niece loves that song
‘Beautiful,’ and she has no issues with
gay people now” -- he doesn’t believe that
fans should expect a pro ballplayer to be our Jackie
Robinson anytime soon.

Instead, he says,
gay fans should push for reforms in the major leagues.
For that movement, he says, “I’m ready to be
the face” -- to get out front and
“demand the most simple thing. To educate athletes,
when they enter the minor leagues, NCAA, on basic
Title 7 antiharassment [laws]. Sensitivity training.
What’s the risk of implementing same-sex partner
health benefits on a pro baseball contract?” (At
least two pro franchises—the Cubs and the
Braves, owned by Tribune Co. and AOL Time Warner
respectively -- are owned by corporations that already offer
these benefits and include nondiscrimination clauses
in their standard contracts.) He sent a copy of his
book to baseball commissioner Bud Selig and requested
a meeting to discuss these matters but has received no
response to date.

Historically,
civil rights advance through cultural movements helmed by
strong leaders, not through the kinds of legal and
bureaucratic reforms that Bean advocates. He admits as
much when he says, “If we never had
African-American images in sports, the human rights crusade
of Martin Luther King, and all those things, it would
have taken so much longer. Because [pro athletes are]
in our home. And we’re watching for them and
we’re rooting for them.”

Is he
contradicting himself? Bean says no. “I think we just
need to get the dialogue out there and not limit it
only to the playing field but also open up the front
office, the stadium workers, the scouts, the umpires
-- and then, soon, the baseball players,” he says.
“In my mind there’s really nothing else
we can do. It’s not like we can tap [someone]
on the shoulder and say, ‘Get ready; it’s time
to take that step.’ ”

Even if we could,
the obstacles to getting there are immense. The average
pro baseball player’s career begins when he’s
21 and lasts about 10 years. Given that a lot of
athletes are naturally more instinctive than
introspective, and keeping in mind that many men -- even in
professions where being out is socially acceptable --
don’t figure out that they’re gay until
they’re at least 25, it’s really not
surprising that no active male pro team-sports athlete
has come out. Furthermore, team athletes are taught to
be conformists, to view the world in a way that divides
insiders from outsiders with uncommon clarity, which makes
the boundary-crossing act of coming out all the more
fraught with fear and anxiety. Finally, pro athletes
are consumed by their careers to a degree that few
outsiders can imagine.

During the
afternoon we spend together, the only one of these factors
that Bean mentions is the last one. When he describes this
aspect of a ballplayer’s life, he raises his
voice to a tone that’s almost angry. “If
you had $30 million coming, don’t you think
it’s fair that someone thinks about
that?” he asks, letting the question hang in the air.
“Athletes become consumed. You have to, to
succeed. I don’t think it’s selfish of
somebody to say, ‘My career is the most important
thing in my life.’ ”

In the end, Billy
Bean resolves his wardrobe crisis at A|X Armani
Exchange, where a helpful gay salesclerk steers him toward a
short-sleeved collared shirt in powder blue. Before he takes
the hot seat on the Best Damn Sports Show
Period, Bean changes in the bathroom at the
studio, checks himself out in the mirror, and says,
“This works, right?”

It works fine. If
he’d worn a pink polo shirt, Billy Bean probably
still would have been fine. The questions are
respectful; the applause light flashes after he says,
“We can’t let the perfect get in the way of
the good,” and the live audience nods with
approval.

Leaving the
studio, Bean is kind of amazed. “Maybe we’re
the ones that learned something today,” he
says. What’s that? I ask. “That the image is
out there,” he replies. “The idea is out there
already.”

That night, at A
Different Light bookstore in the heart of West
Hollywood, Bean reads from his book for a crowd of about
100. Wearing the same blue shirt, but with one more
button unbuttoned, he reads the story of the first
time he ever heard the word “faggot,” when his
Little League coach yelled at him,
“Don’t run like a faggot, boy.” Many in
the crowd chuckle ruefully, as Bean reads:

“What,
exactly, was a faggot? How did faggots run? Clearly, it
wasn’t a good thing. It was probably the worst
thing imaginable. It equaled weakness and timidity,
everything a budding, insecure jock wanted to avoid.
We were only kids. How were we supposed to know the
truth?”

We
couldn’t know. Even now that we’re adults, the
shame that surrounded our identity from the moment we
first knew it never completely leaves. But it does
fade with the incremental steps we take -- the knowledge
that we can be strong, bold, happy, and yes,
Christina, beautiful. For many, seeing Billy Bean come
out strengthens that knowledge. And at the same time,
it strengthens our connection to the rest of the world.

In Richard
Greenberg’s Broadway play Take Me Out, a
gay accountant named Mason Marzac, who has the clipped
mannerisms and fastidious speech patterns of a lifelong
loner, turns into a baseball fan when pro player
Darren Lemming comes out of the closet. For the first
time, Mason feels like he’s part of a community.
Disoriented but exhilarated, he tells Darren, “I
don’t know why I feel exalted when we win. I
don’t know why I feel diminished when we lose. I
don’t know why I’m saying
‘we’…! Life is so…tiny, so
daily. This…you…take me out of
it.”

At
Chicago’s pride parade, when Billy Bean climbs into
the 1965 Vanden Plas Princess Bentley open-top touring
car and begins his ride up Halsted Street,
he’ll be taking us out. He will show the world
something new about what a gay person can be, and he
will show gay people something new about what we can
be in the world. It probably won’t be the most
comfortable place for him. “I don’t think
I’ll ever get used to being in front of
people,” he says. “Definitely I would prefer
to be part of the crowd.” But in that setting,
if only for a day, Billy Bean will be able to wear
whatever he damn well pleases.