A Compelling Tale
of Life in Baseball's Closet
Billy
Bean's "Going the Other Way" Scores With Its Unflinching
Portrayal
By
Jim Buzinski
Outsports.com
The number of books written by gay
male professional team athletes can easily fit in the glove
compartment of a Miata. There’s the classic and important
“David Kopay Story,” published in 1977. And then there was the
… never mind ... the list ends there. Until now.
Billy Bean’s “Going the Other Way,” co-written by Chris Bull,
is a valuable addition in helping us to understand what life
is like for a gay jock. In this straightforward yet compelling
narrative, Bean details his life from that of a scrappy
kid in Southern California to life in the major leagues and
his eventual coming out. It’s a story that will resonate with
many who will relate to its universal themes of seeking love,
acceptance and validation, dealing with tragedy and finding a
place in this world.
Bean
was by all accounts the All-American boy—good-looking, polite,
athletic, a model student. The kind of man mothers dream of
their daughters marrying. Yet this seemingly perfect man, as
we all now know, had a secret, one that he himself was only
dimly aware of until his ‘20s.
To illustrate his general cluelessness about his sexuality,
Bean recounts an incident with a massage therapist while
playing college baseball at Loyola Marymount.
“As he massaged the kinks in my hamstring, I felt his hands
inch toward my inner thigh. … Closing my eyes, I pretended
nothing was happening. But the furtiveness of this spontaneous
act was intoxicating. The hidden, physical evidence of my
excitement made it clear I wasn’t objecting.
“I walked back to the locker room in a daze. Had I really just
allowed a strange man to touch me, in public no less? … I
blamed him and went running back to [his eventual wife] Anna.
I made love to her with special vigor the next time we were
together, then fell into a postcoital slumber, reassured of my
normalcy.”
This desire to be “normal” and to keep up appearances
dominates the first two-thirds of the book. Bean was good at
being one of the guys, while at the same time begging off when
it came time to act like one with women. He was someone afraid
of his own desires yet terrified to act upon them.
Bean dutifully details his rise up the professional baseball
ranks, from his days riding buses in the minors, to playing
winter baseball in Venezuela to finally arriving in the big
leagues in 1987. It’s a familiar tale but still a treat for
baseball fans.
Bean’s story
gets engaging as he becomes more and more aware of his
homosexuality. He writes of asking a cab driver in San
Francisco to take him to the Castro in 1989 and how he was too
terrified to get out and walk around for fear he would be
recognized or bump into a teammate. The idea that the denizens
of the Castro would recognize a journeyman barely hitting his
weight seems the ultimate in paranoia, but Bean accurately
conveys the feeling closeted people have that every move they
make is being watched.
His one-year stint with the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1989
brought Bean under the tutelage of manager Tom Lasorda,
buddies with politicians and Hollywood celebrities, who
happened to have a gay son, Tommy Jr., aka Spunky. Lasorda has
always denied his son — who lived a gay life in West Hollywood
and died of AIDS — was gay or died from the disease.
Bean shows surprising sympathy for Lasorda, who could have
done a lot of good at the time by telling the world the truth
about his son and standing besides him proudly. “Having spent
most of his adult life in the world of gladiators,” Bean
writes, “Tommy must have found it difficult to deal with the
truth about his son. It must have been equally hard for
Spunky, having spent his youth in this same world, to accept
himself.”
First True Love
The heart of
the book is Bean’s love affair with Sam Madani, an Iranian who
fled the downfall of the Shah and settled in the U.S. The two
met in a standard 1990’s style--cruising each other at a gym.
It was lust at first sight. But, as in most things in Bean’s
life, nothing was simple. He was still married and played for
the San Diego Padres while Sam lived in Maryland. Sam helped
him clarify things with a simple question — “Do you want to
live honestly or live a lie? Do you really want to be happy?”
Bean chose happiness.
The couple settled in to a life of domestic bliss, as Bean
describes it — romantic meals, intense love and great sex in a
condo near the beach in San Diego County. However, Bean still
lived very much a double life, keeping his relationship
totally separate from his baseball world. In a humorous yet
ultimately pathetic episode, he describes the panic he felt
when two Padre teammates, Brad Ausmus and Trevor Hoffman, came
over unannounced and Sam was forced to hide in the garage
while Bean played straight with his buds. “ ‘When in doubt,
lie’ became the sad mantra of my double life,” he writes.
His life took a tragic turn when Sam was diagnosed as
HIV-positive (Bean consistently tested negative) and
eventually came down with an AIDS-related illness. Bean
describes the stark terror he faced when he came home one day
and found Sam fevered and barely coherent. He rushed him to
the hospital where Sam later died. Numb with grief, but still
hiding his private life, Bean honored a team commitment later
that day. “Once in a while, the team issues a statement that a
player is excused … to attend to family matters,” he recounts.
“This had to be one of those situations. There was only one
problem: How could I explain that my ‘family matter’ was the
AIDS-related death of my male lover with whom I’d been living
secretly?”
Bean’s eventual coming out occupies the latter part of the
book. There’s the disappointment of seeing his major league
career end and the excitement of a new life in Miami with
Efrain Veiga, a restaurateur and now also his business
partner. He details his now-well known “outing” by the Miami
Herald that led to a 1999 front-page story in the New York
Times and appearances on ABC’s 20/20 and countless other media
outlets. Billy Bean the baseball player was no more and Billy
Bean, the proud gay man, activist and role model was born.
“Going the Other Way” is not great literature, but these kinds
of books seldom are. Its strength lies in Bean’s honesty. The
man we see in much of the book is all too human and not very
heroic. He writes movingly of how his self-enforced isolation
hurt his wife, distanced him from his mother and forced him to
miss the funeral of a longtime friend.
It’s a vivid
recitation of how the closet ultimately punishes not just the
person hiding but also those around him. It makes us cheer
even more the admirable and honorable man Bean would become.
Buy "Going the Other Way" for 30% off.
Outsports will publish an
exclusive excerpt from "Going the Other Way" on April 29.
Check out
Bean's schedule of public events and media
appearances.
April 21, 2003
