Queer, There, and Everywhere

by Sarah Prager

  Though Glenn’s sexual orientation wasn’t a secret to those inside baseball by 1978, it wasn’t until three years after his retirement that the public learned Glenn was gay. But just like his outing to the A’s, the confession wasn’t on Glenn’s terms. And this time, the betrayal was far worse.

  The most serious romantic relationship in Glenn’s life was with Michael Smith, a controlling man who ultimately took advantage of him. Michael wrote an article for Inside Sports magazine called “The Double Life of a Gay Dodger” that went to print in 1982 without Glenn’s permission. After its publication, Bryant Gumbel interviewed Glenn on the Today show, marking the first time an out gay sports player was seen on TV sets across the United States. At the end of the interview, Glenn gave Gumbel a hat from Glenn’s gay softball team, astonishing Gumbel and his viewers.

  The High Five

  * * *

  With all the focus on Glenn’s sexual orientation, it’s easy to forget the man’s legacy extends well beyond a short baseball career and coming out. On October 2, 1977, Glenn Burke co-invented the high five.

  It was a home game for the Dodgers, the last of the regular season. Glenn’s teammate Dusty Baker had just hit in a home run in front of forty-six thousand cheering fans. Glenn was next up to the plate and put his hand up to greet Dusty coming into home plate. Dusty recalled: “His hand was up in the air, and he was arching way back, so I reached up and hit his hand. It seemed like the thing to do.”

  Glenn then hit his first home run in the majors, and Dusty high-fived him on his return. The practice took off in the following years, first within baseball and then in all sports. By 1980, the Dodgers were selling trademarked “High Five” T-shirts. Glenn’s ex, Michael, asserted that it was a gay pride symbol, “a legacy of two men’s hands touching.”

  A Downward Spiral

  * * *

  Unfortunately, there was no happy ending to Glenn’s story. He became addicted to cocaine, and his only breaks from living on the streets were spent in jail. He was diagnosed with AIDS in 1993, after which one of his sisters took him in and cared for him until he died of the disease.

  On his deathbed, Glenn dictated his memoir to a ghostwriter:

  As I reach my final days, I’d like to be remembered as just a down-to-earth good person. A man that tried to never have a bad thought in his mind. A man who really tried to get along with everybody at all times, no matter what the situation. A man who will always love his friends and family. Despite what people are going to say or write about me after I die, I want it to be known that I have no regrets about how I lived my life. I did the best I could.

  MYCHAL JUDGE

  1933–2001

  tl;dr “The Saint of 9/11” defines American heroism as a queer, celibate Franciscan friar

  The morning of September 11, 2001, dawned sunny and beautiful. Mychal Judge, better known as Father Mike, was in his room in the friary at West Thirty-First Street in Manhattan when a fellow priest who had just watched an airplane crash into the north tower of the World Trade Center burst in to tell him the news.

  Father Mike had been serving as chaplain to New York City firefighters for almost a decade when he arrived at the chaotic, tragic scene that morning. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was one of the first to speak to him: “Mychal, please pray for us.” “I always do,” Father Mike replied as he ran into the lobby of the north tower with the firefighters. His white FDNY-issued helmet bobbed along in the crowd; Father Mike was no stranger to fires.

  But while Father Mike was normally a reassuring presence at the site of a fire, that day he was pale and withdrawn, not making eye contact with anyone. He just paced back and forth, praying. The smell of smoke filled his nose. Every few seconds he could hear a sickeningly loud boom—another person who had jumped from the burning floors above and landed on the entrance canopy, covering the lobby windows in blood. First responders wondered if they might be safer inside the north tower than outside it; at least one firefighter had already been killed by a jumper landing on him.

  The mayor and others were evacuating the area. “You should go, Padre,” a firefighter told Father Mike. “I’m not finished” came the reply. Father Mike climbed the stopped escalator to the top of the mezzanine, where he’d been told he was needed to provide comfort. Out the windows he could see the plaza completely covered in clumps that had once been people. Some scraps of clothing, some body parts, and maybe a shoe were all that could still be identified.

  Father Mike closed his eyes and called out, “Jesus, please end this right now!” The plate-glass window next to him was sprayed with blood from yet another falling body hitting the pavement as he pleaded again, “Jesus, please end this right now!”

  They were the last words Father Mike would ever say.

  Following in the Steps of Saint Francis

  * * *

  Father Mike’s death certificate was number DM00001-01, the first official casualty of 9/11. No one witnessed his death in the moment after he called out for Jesus at 9:59 a.m., and his body didn’t show any physical trauma from falling debris. It’s possible that, witnessing such unstoppable horror, he was scared to death.

  Father Mike had always wanted to grow up to be a priest, or as he said it as a child, a “peest.” He was raised in Brooklyn, the son of Irish immigrants, with the name Robert Emmett Judge. He’d later choose the priest name Michael and then change the spelling to Mychal to differentiate himself from all the other Father Michaels.

  Becoming a Franciscan friar wasn’t easy. It took years and years of study, dedication, and isolation before they’d let you in, but Father Mike made it to ordination. Throughout this process—and really, throughout most of his life—Father Mike knew he was attracted to other men. But choosing a celibate life meant he would never act on his feelings, which he thought was best—Father Mike believed personal attachments would keep him from fulfilling his calling to help those in need. He developed passionate crushes on his classmates, but as far as he knew, he was the only one with those feelings. Father Mike didn’t see denying his desires as a sacrifice but as a way to be more available to do God’s work; unlike some who pledged to serve others but eventually made spouses or children a priority instead, Father Mike was devoted to “welcoming the stranger” as Christians are called to do.

  Life as a friar meant taking a vow of poverty, and Father Mike embraced it. If you gifted him a sweater, you’d see it the next day on a homeless man. But even as a man of the cloth, his life was far from quiet. Ministering to New Jersey and New York meant his days were filled more with the sounds of sirens than church bells; he followed first responders to wherever he might be needed in and around the city.

  One time he showed up on the scene of a man threatening his wife and children at gunpoint on the second floor of a building. Father Mike hung on to a ladder outside the window with one hand while holding his brown Franciscan robes with the other, trying not to slip. Onlookers were sure someone was going to end up dead, either by fall or by gunshot. The calm friar kept telling the man that they could find another way to work this out, that he didn’t really want to do this, that he was a good man. Why didn’t he just come downstairs for some coffee? It worked. The man lowered his gun and no one was hurt.

  Omnisexual

  * * *

  Father Mike once told a friend that maybe he was omnisexual, drawn to all of God’s adult human creations. Gay people who spent time with him thought he was gay, and straight people who spent time with him thought he was straight. Throughout the 1990s, he had a close relationship with Al Alvarado, a nurse from the Philippines. Father Mike was clear with Al from the beginning that he was a groom of Christ, so their relationship would never progress physically. Even emotionally, Father Mike made sure to keep a certain distance from Al so his focus was always on those he served. Al couldn’t bring himself to walk away from the relationship, even though he knew he would never be the number one love of Father Mike’s life. He once commented that “my rival was God.”


  The relationship between queer people and the Catholic church was . . . um, strained during Father Mike’s life, to say the least. The church’s view was that homosexuals were sinners and that was the end of it. In the aftermath of the Stonewall Riot in the 1970s, Father Mike joined the effort to create Dignity, a national group of queer Catholics focused on prayer and advocacy. He ministered to queer people at a time when many priests wouldn’t. But his calling was also to the general public, and he especially served the homeless faithfully.

  In 1986, the Vatican issued a statement calling homosexuality “an intrinsic moral evil” (yikes!) and the strain got worse. Dignity groups were no longer allowed to meet in churches. Father Mike once comforted a fellow gay priest who had tried to stand up for gay rights in the church and was being ostracized, reminding him, “They did the same to Jesus.”

  “Gay-Related Immune Deficiency”

  * * *

  In the 1980s, Father Mike was led into service of another marginalized group. When the HIV/AIDS epidemic struck the United States, the lack of information led to hysteria. Nurses wouldn’t bring HIV/AIDS patients meals into their hospital rooms for fear of catching it. And almost anywhere that would have performed services for the deceased refused to prepare the bodies of or officiate at funerals for those who had succumbed to the disease. Father Mike started the Saint Francis AIDS ministry on Thirty-First Street and mobilized those willing to help. He physically touched HIV/AIDS patients and talked with them when few others would. Once word got around that he was not only willing but very skilled at leading memorial services for those who had died of HIV/AIDS, he traveled across state lines more than once to answer every request.

  Becoming the fire chaplain for the FDNY was an adjustment. Working with macho guys who he assumed were homophobes was pretty different from cradling dying queer men in his arms. He quickly became beloved in his new environment, showing up at the scenes of fires and in hospital rooms at any hour when spiritual counsel was needed. He stood with the firefighters and marched with them in Saint Patrick’s Day parades, even though the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization was banned from participating and protested the event.

  Waiting on the Other Side

  * * *

  Father Michael Duffy gave the homily at Father Mike’s service. The church was packed with guests, including Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton. Hillary recalled that Father Mike “lit up the White House” when he had led a prayer breakfast there. Father Duffy had a theory about why Mychal had been among the first to perish that day:

  There were between two and three hundred firemen buried there, the commissioner told us that night. Mychal Judge could not have ministered to them all. It was physically impossible in this life but not in the next. And I think that, if he were given his choice, he would prefer to have happened what actually happened. He passed through the other side of life, and now he can continue doing what he wanted to do with all his heart. And the next few weeks we’re going to have names added, name after name of people who are going to be brought out of that rubble. And Mychal Judge is going to be on the other side of death . . . to greet them.

  GEORGE TAKEI

  1937–PRESENT

  tl;dr Social-media sensation Takei (rhymes with “gay,” not “bi”) tests—and exceeds—the limits of the American Dream

  George was used to seeing himself on television, particularly as the honest and honorable Lieutenant Sulu on Star Trek. But watching the protesters on TV that September night in 2005, he knew there was a more important role for him to play. It was a role he’d been subconsciously preparing for his entire life.

  George looked over at the man beside him on the couch, his secret partner of eighteen years, as the ticker rolled across the screen: “Schwarzenegger Vetoes California Gay Marriage Bill.” It was a slap in the face after Ah-nold campaigned saying he had gay friends and would be friendly to gay issues. The state legislature had passed marriage equality, yet the actor-turned-politician unilaterally decided he wouldn’t honor their vote. Same-sex sex had been decriminalized nationally in the United States only two years earlier, and the push for marriage equality was meeting resistance at every turn.

  As George watched the video feed of protesters pouring out into the LA streets, he remembered that feeling from decades ago when he had marched with Martin Luther King Jr. To march freely, demanding equality for all, bravely parading past counterprotesters and police, knowing that justice was on your side: that was what it meant to be American, to be alive.

  George was also taking stock of his own role in the fight for human rights. He’d lived closeted all these years, but he belonged out on that street. At sixty-eight years old, George decided he could no longer be a silent bystander. Schwarzenegger’s veto set his blood boiling. It was time to risk everything he had built and bring all the pieces of his identity into the open. That night, George and his beloved, Brad, planned their public coming out.

  Number 12832-C

  * * *

  The government had hurt George—and his sense of identity—before. When he was only four years old, an American citizen born and living in LA, soldiers came for his family with guns. Let’s repeat that: SOLDIERS with GUNS came for George and his AMERICAN family in the middle of LOS ANGELES. They forced the Takeis to leave everything behind: their home, their money, their possessions. George and his parents, brother, and sister were given numbered ID tags and crowded onto trains with hard wooden seats alongside other Japanese Americans, under the orders of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  There were no charges, no trial; like the other citizens who were rounded up and forced into internment camps, George’s only crime was looking kinda like the Japanese soldiers who had recently bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941. When the United States declared war on Japan in World War II, the government became nervous about the high concentration of people of Japanese descent living on the West Coast and felt the only way to protect national security was to imprison all of them until the war was over. So under an executive order from the White House, they did just that. They actually imprisoned more than one hundred thousand people.

  George’s train took him through hundreds of miles of desert before arriving at the swamps of Arkansas. His parents sold the journey as an adventure for the three kids, a “long vacation in the country.” George and his family spent the next three years in detention camps, eating crappy food at the cafeteria, being followed by a spotlight from a sentry tower when they went to use the communal bathroom at night, and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to a flag waving ever so ironically in front of a barbed-wire fence. The injustice of it all was lost on little George, who adapted to whatever life put in front of him at the time without understanding the bigger picture.

  Getting out of the internment camp at the end of World War II in 1945 was scarier than being in it. Anti-Japanese-American frenzy was at an all-time high. With no home to return to, the Takeis were forced to start from scratch after being dropped off by train at the same station they had been taken from years earlier. They lived on Skid Row, then the barrio of East LA. Only other Asians would hire them, so George’s dad started as a dishwasher in a Chinese restaurant. Eventually the Takeis climbed back up the economic ladder, and George and his siblings were able to go to college.

  Being Japanese American brought enough discrimination into George’s life, so he didn’t want to stand out as different in any other way. He tried to blend in at school, but fate had other plans. A personal history of persecution had taught George the value of being the same—but he was different, and no amount of lying to himself would change that.

  Playing the Part

  * * *

  George made an important discovery about his identity during his freshman year of college in San Francisco—but it’s not the typical coed revelation you might expect. Despite his best effort to walk the traditional line his parents envisioned for him by majoring in architecture, George knew his heart was elsewhere. He realized he wanted to be an actor.


  George came out to his dad about his true ambitions; Mr. Takei took the news better than George expected, though he wasn’t thrilled at the idea of such an unstable career path for his son. Despite the limited on-screen roles for Asian Americans in the 1950s and ’60s, George started booking work right away.

  George had already acted in movies with the likes of Frank Sinatra, but landing Star Trek in 1965 was a major break. A regular TV show meant steady employment. Even more special, the role of Sulu boldly took Asian Americans where they had never gone before. The USS Enterprise was a metaphor for “Starship Earth,” and the crew was multiracial at a time when integration was controversial. Instead of a soldier or a servant, George was playing a pilot, a respected member of an elite team. Three TV seasons and six movies later, George was a true Trekkie hero . . . but still completely closeted.

  The Final Frontier

  * * *

  George had known he felt about boys the way he was “supposed” to feel about girls from an early age. He also knew he had to keep his sexuality hidden if he wanted to continue acting. For much of George’s lifetime, being gay was completely illegal in America and considered perverse by a majority of his fellow citizens (fellow citizens who had also allowed internment camps on American soil). Before the 2010s, George would have risked not only his acting career but possible jail time and other serious consequences for coming out.