Posted on 07/15/2014 9:56:17 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Burke, who came out to team-mates in the 1970s and to the public in 1982, died of AIDS in 1995 aged just 42.
More than two decades after Glenn Burke abruptly retired from Major League Baseball, the former LA Dodgers outfielder will be honored at Tuesday nights all-star game as one of the few professional athletes to have come out.
Burke's four-and-a-half year career is remembered for his charismatic attitude and the pressures he faced as a gay athlete in the late 1970s.
Burke, who played for the Dodgers and the Oakland A's, was the first professional ball player to come out to his team-mates and team owners, although he didn't announce it publicly until 1982, two years after his career was over. He died of Aids-related complications in 1995, aged 42.
Burke said he was "sure his team-mates didn't care" but admitted he faced problems with management. "Prejudice drove me out of baseball sooner than it should have," Burke told the New York Times in 1994. "But I wasn't changing."
The Dodgers general manager Al Campanis reportedly pressured him to get married. "I guess you mean to a woman," Burke replied. Campanis denied the claims....
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
It’s bad enough in sports to be sleeping with the coach’s daughter, quite another thing to be sleeping with the coach’s son.
Yes, let’s honor a man who’s mental disorder drove him to have unprotected sodomy with perfect strangers at highway rest stops. An illness that cot him his life.
Good Choice. How brave he was.
Not even a mid-level utility player.
Of all the known deviant sexual behaviors (disorders), what gives homosexuality its special, protected status?
Of all the known deviant sexual behaviors (disorders), what gives homosexuality its special, protected status?
Revolutionary political usefulness.
It isn't exclusively the "gays" themselves driving this thing.
Liberals and other deviants of all stripes?
And that is the money sentence- “died of Aids at 42”
When will baseball honor the first player to “come out” as a beasti?
Does that player have to die from a disease he got from that type of sex? Would he have to beceom “friends” with his coaches dog?
looks like i won’t be going to nor watching any major league games from now on
oh well.
they want to promote fags and the fag culture, then they won’t be doing it to anyone in my family
Sign of our sick times.
That's what I was wondering...
Not televised (wisely so, imo; ratings have been falling fast enough already): just like the ‘gay wedding’ wasn’t televised during the Rose Bowl Parade this past year.
Another once-great American institution bows down to the great god of political correctness.
Why is someone honored for getting a preventable disease?
Soon there will be a celebration honoring Sandusky.
MLB “honours” homosexual based on nothing other than he was homo.
Where’s the muslim baseball news?
Goodbye, America.
Glad I knew you when you were good, healthy and sane.
Let’s hope they can find a transgender player to honor at the 2015 game.
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