Going the Other Way: Lessons from a Life In and Out of Major-League Baseball - Hardcover

Bean, Billy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1569244863 ISBN 13: 9781569244869

Publisher: Marlowe & Company, 2003

Synopsis

Billy Bean is the first major league baseball player to publicly discuss his homosexuality and the first athlete in a professional American team sport to do so since all-pro football player Dave Kopay came out in 1975. By 1996, when Bean retired at age thirty-two from the game he loved after ten years as a pro ballplayer for the Tigers, Dodgers, and Padres, he had become disillusioned by the sport that had defined his life. Bean found himself forced to choose between his love of baseball and the man he loved. It was an agonizing end to a career in which he struggled to make the most of his role as a utility player in America’s most physically and emotionally demanding sport. But out of the premature demise of his career, Bean came to see what the game had taught him and helped him to understand what could be done to improve the major leagues for the next generation of young athletes, so they can navigate the challenges and rewards of the game on their own terms. Bean recently starred as himself on HBO’s popular Arli$$ and appears frequently as a commentator on sports and politics on national TV.

About this title

About the Author

BILLY BEAN played major-league baseball from 1987 to 1995 for the Detroit Tigers, Los Angeles Dodgers, and San Diego Padres. Born in Santa Ana, California, in 1964, Bean was a multi-sport star at Santa Ana High School, where he was selected valedictorian of his graduating class and went on to become an All-America outfielder twice before graduating from Loyola Marymount University in 1986. He now lives in Miami Beach with his partner Efrain Veiga, with whom he shares a business redeveloping residential properties. Billy’s passion for competitive sports remains as strong as ever. Among his many athletic interests, he competes daily in tennis and basketball and often travels around the country playing in organized tournaments, in hopes of raising the visibility for athletes of diversity.

As a slick-fielding Little Leaguer in Marin County, California, CHRIS BULL dreamed of being a baseball player until he realized about the time this photo was taken that he couldn’t get around on a good fastball. Trading his bat for a pen, he became a journalist, so he could instead cover the game—as well as many of his other interests. Washington correspondent for The Advocate, Bull is co-author of The Accidental Activist and Perfect Enemies. He is editor of the nonfiction anthologies Come Out Fighting, Witness to Revolution, While the World Sleeps, and co-editor of At Ground Zero. An Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellow, he lives in Washington, D.C., where he roots for his beloved San Francisco Giants from the other side of the country.

Reviews

Bean, who was an outfielder for teams including the Detroit Tigers and San Diego Padres from 1987 to 1995, was the antithesis of the stereotypical jock: he was valedictorian of his high school; he went to a Catholic university; talk of sexual exploits made him uncomfortable; and he became involved with a woman who "fit the image he created" about the proper partner for a "baseball star." Though he was happy with Anna, "it dawned on me that I didn't share my teammates' intense attraction to the opposite sex. There was always something missing, and I felt a restlessness I couldn't quite define or shake. At the same time, I couldn't fathom the alternative." Bean went on to play in the major leagues, although, after modest initial successes, he drifted in and out of the minors. Along the way, he married Anna, in spite of his concerns about his sexual identity: "I hoped that by making my marriage a priority, I could get beyond the 'gay thing.'" He didn't. He and Anna divorced, and Bean set up house with his first companion until the man died of AIDS. Bean didn't attend the funeral because he didn't want to miss a game or explain his relationship. Not long after, Bean was called back to the major leagues. It was only then, as he prepared to retire from baseball, that he told his parents that he was gay. With relatively few coming-out tales from the baseball world, this book's novelty will attract some readers. It is intelligently written and Bean's concerns about his sexuality are well conveyed. On the other hand, Bean, who is now happily living and working with his partner in Miami Beach, hasn't played for nearly eight years; the sex lives of other more prominent players have been widely discussed in the press; and Bean's revelations are not nearly as controversial as they might have been some years ago. While the book does offer an interesting portrait of the less glamorous side of baseball, particularly the humiliation of being sent to the minor leagues, its appeal may be somewhat limited.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

During 10 years with the Tigers, Dodgers, and Padres, Bean was a good player but no star. He would have faded into obscurity except for his casual disclosure three years after retirement that he is gay. Especially because the ill-starred Glenn Burke died in 1995, the revelation made Bean the out baseball player. How he, the only child of an abandoned working-class mom, arrived at that status is the story he tells with oral immediacy and winning personality in this memoir. Sports claimed him long before homosexuality did, and his love of baseball gives the book its powerful charm. He realized his homosexuality in adulthood and came to see baseball's milieu as oppressive only after his first lover died and he felt obliged not to talk about his loss. If he now advocates dispelling homophobia in baseball and athletics generally, he doesn't rail against old teammates and managers. His testimony is as much a tribute to baseball as it is an argument for accepting gays, and better for that. Ray Olson
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

"My story is about feeling alone in a crowded room. It s about embracing the notion that our lives don t always turn out the way we thought they would. It s about realizing that while we may not all be alike, or come from the same place, we can survive and thrive as long as we learn to play together as a team."

Billy Bean, from Going the Other Way

Edition details

• Publisher: Marlowe & Company
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1569244863
• ISBN 13: 9781569244869
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 280