Documentary delves into the life and death of Glenn Burke (first openly gay MLB player)

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'Out: Glenn Burke Story' review: Tragedy hits home

Peter Hartlaub, Chronicle Pop Culture Critic

Monday, November 8, 2010


It's a baffling and depressing thought. Even with thousands of professional athletes competing in baseball, basketball, football and hockey over the past several years - many of whom are almost undoubtedly homosexual - not a single one has played a single game as an openly gay man.

"Out: The Glenn Burke Story," premiering Wednesday night on Comcast SportsNet Bay Area, delves deeply into one local gay athlete's meteoric rise to the pros, and the tragic ramifications when he stopped being guarded about his private life.

No punches are pulled by producers Doug Harris and Sean Maddison, local filmmakers who uses their contacts to tell a broad life story of the man they call the first openly gay Major League Baseball player. But there's a reflective quality to the hourlong movie, which features more than two dozen of the player's friends and teammates, many of whom speak very candidly about homophobic locker room attitudes and even their own prejudices.

Burke was a basketball and baseball star at Berkeley High in the late 1960s and 1970, remembered by locals mostly for his phenomenal hoops skills. The big money was on the baseball field, and he quickly rose through the Los Angeles Dodgers ranks, starting a World Series game in 1977.

But his increasing openness about liking men - one story involves Tommy Lasorda's son - apparently got him bounced from the Dodgers to the Oakland A's. Burke found new friends in the Castro district, and yet felt out of place with the A's. He retired for good at age 27 in 1980, and publicly came out two years later in a magazine article and on the "Today" show. He was diagnosed with AIDS and died of complications related to the disease in 1995.



Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/11/08/DD5K1G7C3A.DTL#ixzz14kBkoQQi