The Forgotten History of the First Openly Gay Man to Play Major League Baseball - Forty years after Glenn Burke was chased from the game, Singled Out finally tells his story.
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In 1974, The Advocate wrote letters to Major League Baseball teams asking to interview players “living a gay lifestyle.” The request “was meant to jolt the baseball establishment into acknowledging that there were indeed gay men playing the game,” Andrew Maraniss writes in his new book, Singled Out: The True Story of Glenn Burke. Instead, the handful of responses the LGBTQ+ magazine received were downright hostile.
“The cop-out, immoral lifestyle of the tragic misfits espoused by your publication has no place in organized athletics at any level,” longtime Minnesota Twins PR director Tom Gee wrote back. “Your colossal gall in attempting to extend your perversion to an area of total manhood is just simply unthinkable.”
It was into this landscape that Glenn Burke entered the sport of professional baseball in the 1970s. Along with being the first openly gay man to have played in the MLB — he came out in 1982, after leaving the league — Burke and his teammate Dusty Baker are often credited with inventing the high five. Yet his accomplishments were largely forgotten or intentionally obscured, whether by a homophobic society that had no use for a gay athlete or by a baseball franchise that wanted to claim credit for the things Burke had done for the team without acknowledging the presence of an out gay man in their clubhouse.
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Burke and Dusty Baker are largely credited with inventing the High Five: https://www.reddit.com/r/baseball/co...sty_baker_and/
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https://www.them.us/story/singled-ou...ign=pockethits