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.
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.
