DR: That was the end of it.
CR: That was the end of that. I got thrown out in the first inning, and so I’m waiting inside the clubhouse. I decided that I was still too mad, I didn’t really want to talk to the media.
The umpires never get interviewed. They never accept any interviews, but he decided he wanted to talk to the media that time. There was a big headline in the paper the next day that says, “It was the worst night of my life throwing Cal Ripken out. I got yelled at. It was like throwing God out of Sunday school.”
DR: Presumably he’s not going to heaven.
Who was the greatest player you ever played against? During the time you were playing, was there some player you really admired?
CR: The guy I thought was the most talented I played against was Ken Griffey Jr. There was nothing on the baseball field that he couldn’t do. He was fast, he could throw, he could hit, he could hit in the clutch. He could make the big play in any part of the game.
DR: Who was the toughest pitcher? Did you ever have any pitchers you thought were throwing spitballs?
CR: Oh yes. I read Gaylord Perry’s book when I was a kid—it’s called Me and the Spitter—where he acknowledged that he was throwing spitballs, and how he did it, and how he practiced it, and how he put Vaseline on different parts of his body.
Then I get to the big leagues and I’m facing him. I asked everybody, “Does he still throw grease balls or spitballs?” Everybody says, “Yeah, he still does it.”
But the first two times I faced him, I think I got a hit off him the first time. I went, “Well, that’s not that great of a pitch.” Then I came up with bases loaded, and he threw three pitches that just dropped out. I struck out and I looked at him in disbelief, and he kind of looked over at me and went like this [puts hand behind his ear].
DR: For a while, the [Orioles] manager was your father. Is it awkward to have the manager be your father? What do you call him?
CR: I called him “Forty-Seven,” his number at the time. I got to the big leagues about a month before my twenty-first birthday. I was still used to calling him Dad. I felt like I had to call him something else.
DR: You played before the steroid era. Were there steroids being used by players then?
CR: I didn’t see any of that. There were some players that all of a sudden they’d be thirty-five pounds heavier and you’d be a little suspicious, but it’s not like they wanted you to know they were doing it. It was more of a secret society.
DR: You retired at the age of forty-one. You were voted into the Hall of Fame five years later. Do you think that people who are thought to have used steroids should be allowed to get into the Hall of Fame?
CR: Obviously, the steroids work, and the numbers go up. The hard part, if you’re voting for the Hall of Fame, is “What am I voting for?” Is it the player that did it himself, or was he enhanced to do it?
The worst thing you can do is put a blanket over it and say, “Okay, that was the steroid era. We don’t know who did what, so we’re just going to judge them for their numbers.” I think that’s unfair to those of us who didn’t.
DR: Baseball used to be called the American pastime. But attendance is down and TV viewership is down. The average viewer now is about fifty-three years old, which seems to me young—
CR: That’s young to me too.
DR: Right. Do you think that baseball has passed its prime, in that pro basketball, college basketball, pro football are now in the ascendancy?
CR: I don’t know. I think it’s as popular. I’m in the kids business, and we’re trying to get kids to play more baseball, and play longer. Maybe they’re not all going to be big-league players, but they’re going to become baseball fans.
Baseball does face an older demographic. I think kids, and people in general, have more things to do. More things compete for their time.
If you understand baseball, it’s a really cerebral game. The more you understand, the more you don’t mind the pace of the game. Sometimes you’re focusing too much on the pace. Maybe we need to do a better job of explaining what’s happening.
DR: You retired, it’s hard to believe, twenty years ago. When you retire from baseball, you can, as some famous baseball players do, just do nothing but sign autographs the rest of your life. You decided to do something more than that. Can you explain what you decided to do after you retired?
CR: I was worried that when you retire at forty-one, you’re really young for retirement. I remember sitting in the back of the bus early in my career and people like Jim Palmer, Ken Singleton, and Al Bumbry, they were contemplating retirement at that time. They were thirty-five, thirty-six. I kept thinking, “What are you going to do now?” They didn’t really have an answer.
Ken Singleton, in his last couple of years, started to become a broadcaster. He worked at Channel 13 in the off-season because he knew he wanted to do something beyond that. I kept thinking, “While you’re in baseball, and you’re meeting everybody and you’re making contacts, why don’t you start to prepare for life after baseball?”
I started to think of what I might want to do. Toward the end of my career, I thought that I wanted to use my influence to help kids. Dad was a teacher. I wanted to help kids learn the game. There was an opportunity to expand his baseball school, build some complexes and do it that way.
I didn’t want to sit around doing nothing. You could play golf, you could take golf lessons, you could stay around in your pajamas, but that doesn’t do anything for you.
DR: Trust me, golf lessons don’t work.
You have created a foundation, the Ripken Foundation. What does that do?
CR: When my dad died, he died of lung cancer. You would think that maybe our cause would be to go help find a cure for cancer, or help people not smoke. We started to think about what Dad’s legacy was. My brother Billy and I, we got to witness how he used baseball to get in front of kids that didn’t have all the same advantages. He did free clinics in all the areas that he managed in the minor leagues.
I would go along with him sometimes to those free clinics. I never really got it. I kept thinking, “You have a choice where you could spend time with me, or our family, or you’re going to go do this,” but it was important for him to try to use his position to help other kids that didn’t have all the same support structures at home that we did. He lost his dad to a car accident, I think when he was ten, and he had to become the man of the family.
He always had a fatherly sort of feeling toward his team, and also out there. Billy and I started to think, “We’ll use baseball the way he did—to capture kids, to be an icebreaker of sorts, and start to talk to them.”
We’re trying to give them an opportunity and a direction in life. In the very beginning, Dad would say, “You’re getting too big for your britches,” if we started to do something too fast. We were very content helping one kid at a time.
We started getting some more influence, and now we’re a national organization. Last year, I think we affected a million and a half kids.
DR: Are any of them Jewish? There’re not that many Jewish major leaguers. Can you get more Jewish major leaguers? Sandy Koufax was the last famous one.
CR: Sandy is probably the most well-respected guy in the Hall of Fame. When he speaks, everybody listens. He handles himself marvelously and with a lot of respect. Whatever he’s done, he’s done it really right.
DR: I would say the same about you. Everybody listens to you, and I want to congratulate you on what you’ve done, being a great baseball player, a great role model for youth, and giving back to society as you are now.
CR: Thank you.
6
Becoming and Belonging
“It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people–women as well as men.�
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—Susan B. Anthony, “Women’s Rights to the Suffrage,” 1873
LILLIAN FADERMAN on the Struggle for Gay Rights
Historian; author of The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle and other books
“How we went from being pariahs, to being invited to the White House, to being able to serve openly in the military—that’s what I asked myself when I was writing the book. What had to happen before we could achieve the successes that we finally achieved?”
For much of American history, there has been tension between those who felt the American Experiment was “their” experiment and those who felt excluded from it. Those who most visibly felt excluded were slaves, and later their freed descendants. But among those who felt shut out for most of American history but whose exclusion was in some ways less visible and less public—until about fifty years ago—were Americans who were not heterosexual.
While the efforts to expand basic rights to all Americans in the United States started at least a century ago, if not two centuries ago, the effort to ensure that gay people have equal protections and rights is a comparatively recent phenomenon. (Gay is used in this context as the historical umbrella term, as Lillian Faderman has done in her book, to refer to the LGBTQ community.)
The effort to seek these rights did not surface publicly until the late 1960s. Prior to that time, because of prejudice and laws against homosexuality, gay people were generally more focused on not being publicly identified. Those so identified were often arrested or fired from their jobs, or both. Often they accepted that fate, recognizing that American society seemed completely against any effort to legalize gay activity.
That changed in a very public way in late June of 1969 in New York City when the police, in an otherwise routine raid of a gay bar—the Stonewall Inn—met physical resistance from bar patrons to the effort to place them under arrest. For several of the following nights, at Stonewall and in the surrounding neighborhood, there were demonstrations against the arrests and physical resistance to further arrests.
The gay revolution in America might be said to have been born from these events. Gay people organized to seek not only protection from arrests, but also rights that they had long been denied. The effort took many forms—legal challenges, legislative efforts, marches and protests, and public education.
Progress was slower than might have been expected. Not until 2003 did the Supreme Court invalidate state sodomy laws, which had often prohibited any form of gay sexual activity; not until 2015 did the Supreme Court legalize same-sex marriage, long seen by many in the gay community as a basic human right denied to them; and not until 2020 did the Supreme Court state that the protections of the 1964 Civil Rights Act applied to gay people. These Supreme Court decisions did not resolve all legal issues affecting the gay community, but the progress seen in this century likely could not have been anticipated in the latter years of the previous century.
The effort to describe the fight for gay rights over the past seventy-plus years was tackled quite well by Lillian Faderman in her epic book The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle. As a participant in many of the episodes that were part of this revolution, she has firsthand knowledge of many of the critical events described in the book. I had the opportunity to interview her about her book as part of a virtual New-York Historical Society program on September 25, 2020.
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DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): What prompted you to write this book? This is a fairly definitive history of the gay revolution. We’ll talk about that phrase, gay revolution, in a moment. You didn’t feel there was enough literature on this already?
LILLIAN FADERMAN (LF): All of my books come out of a personal desire to know something. I came out in the 1950s, into the gay-girls, working-class bar culture. Things were absolutely awful. We were victimized by the police, we were crazies to the mental health profession, we were subversives to the government.
I wanted to know how we got from 1956, when I came out as a teenager, to what was happening in the Obama administration, when one of my great heroes, Frank Kameny—who had been fired from his government job in the late 1950s because he was a homosexual—had been invited to the White House no less than eight times. How did that happen?
Just about the time I was ready to write the book, when I was putting together a proposal, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was finally repealed. It was such an incredible evolution. How we went from being pariahs, to being invited to the White House, to being able to serve openly in the military—that’s what I asked myself when I was writing the book. What had to happen before we could achieve the successes we finally achieved?
DR: You call your book The Gay Revolution. Why do you use the word gay, not gay and lesbian?
LF: My original title was Our America Too: A Gay and Lesbian History. I realized I wanted to add bisexual, and then I wanted to add transgender. But by the time I finished the book, the alphabetism was LGBTQQIAAPP. There wasn’t enough room on the cover for all of that to describe our entire community.
When I came out, gay was the umbrella term for all of us in the 1950s. The straight world really didn’t know that gay meant homosexual. It had been an underground term, at least since the beginning of the twentieth century.
DR: Your book mostly is from the 1940s and ’50s forward. In the beginning of our country, I assume there were gay and lesbian people, but there was no mention of it. What was going on the 1700s and 1800s?
LF: They wouldn’t have called themselves gay or lesbian. Homosexual was a term that was coined in the nineteenth century. In the course of my research for other books, I discovered a very interesting case of a woman in 1642, who was sentenced to be “severely whipped and fined” for being caught on a bed with another woman.
Of course there were women who had relationships with other women. There was evidence of men who were whipped and, in one case, even hanged for having committed sodomy, but it was thought that anyone could commit an “immoral act” of that nature.
It wasn’t an identity. There was no such thing as “the homosexual”—no such thing as a person who declared, “This is my identity.” There were certainly sodomites, there were women who committed “unnatural acts,” but identity began to develop in the nineteenth century.
DR: In ancient Greece and Rome, it was fairly common to have homosexual relationships, and it wasn’t looked upon with great horror. Why do you think, as civilization advanced for several thousand years, that changed? Was it religion?
LF: It was the Judeo-Christian religion. Same-sex relationships, or sodomy as we came to call it, became a sin. Western culture inherited that notion. It was considered sinful, men who had sex with men and women who had sex with women. The sexologists who emerged in the later nineteenth century also pathologized homosexuality. So it became a sin on the one hand and a pathology on the other hand.
DR: Let’s go to the 1940s and 1950s. In the United States, you didn’t need to be caught doing something that was a homosexual act. If you were just thought to have engaged in this practice, you could be arrested. Isn’t that right?
LF: You could be arrested if you were caught in a gay bar. Gay men were very often entrapped by vice-squad officers. In the 1950s, if you were thought to be homosexual, if you worked for the government, even if you worked in a private business, if you were thought to be homosexual, you could be fired. And many homosexuals were.
There was a real witch hunt of homosexuals, beginning in the State Department, and it filtered down to homosexuals in all government, a witch hunt that fired numerous gay men and lesbians. Businesses emerged such as Fidelifacts that offered private companies a thorough investigation of employees or potential employees to see if they were homosexuals. If you were a known homosexual in the 1950s, it was very hard to be employed.
DR: The gay community organized a bit in the 1950s. Gays had the Mattachine Society, and lesbians organized the Daughters of Bilitis. Those organizations weren’t saying, “Let’s go lobby for our ri
ghts, let’s go to the Supreme Court.” They were saying, “Let’s just talk about our challenges and how we can help each other.” Is that more or less right?
LF: The founders of the Daughters of Bilitis, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, wanted to be a little more political than the women who joined were interested in being. And so it became primarily an organization, and a fairly small one, that offered an alternative to the very dangerous lesbian bars.
Mattachine wanted to get rid of the sodomy laws. They were a little more political, but they started small. A huge victory for them was a case in Los Angeles with a man by the name of Dale Jennings, who was entrapped by an undercover officer. The Mattachine Society decided that they would fight that. They sponsored Dale Jennings going to court. He said, “Yes, I’m a homosexual, but just because I’m a homosexual does not mean I’m guilty of what I was charged with.”
And they won the case. It was that kind of very small victory, usually local victories, in the 1950s.
DR: In the 1950s and 1960s, there was an organization in Congress called the House Un-American Activities Committee. They interested themselves in homosexual activities. Were they trying to get people to admit that they were homosexual and get them out of government?
LF: Beginning in the late 1940s, a man by the name of John Peurifoy, who was the undersecretary of state, decided that would be a good thing to do. It would give him a major role to play in government. He announced that he had identified ninety-one homosexuals who were working in the State Department and fired them.
This was the beginning of a witch hunt of homosexuals at all levels of government, not only the State Department. Homosexuals simply could not work in government. The original idea was that it was so terrible to be a homosexual, if the Soviets found out about it, they could easily blackmail the person into giving away state secrets. But people were fired who had jobs that had nothing to do with the nation’s security, and it ballooned from there. Hundreds of people were fired from federal employment and then state employment and private businesses as well.
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