The real reason the Dodgers decided to let go of their long investment in the hulking and speedy athlete who had been dubbed “King Kong” by his teammates will likely never be known. Certainly, the Dodgers needed a left-handed bat, and a proven bat—both of which Burke was unable to provide. But Burke’s intangibles—defense, speed, clubhouse cutup—would seem to warrant better treatment, or at the very least an opportunity to finish the full season. However, the team had had several clear concerns about Burke’s behavior. In the Minors Burke fought with managers and kept personal habits that were different from other players—living at the YMCA, for example, rather than in a house with some of his teammates. Dodger upper management worried increasingly about how to “reach” the offbeat young player, and general manager Campanis took two unusual steps with Burke. First, during Burke’s first year as a roster player, Campanis assigned Reggie Smith to room with the younger player and keep an eye on him while the team was on the road. Then, a while later, Campanis called Burke into his office and offered him a bonus of seventy-five thousand dollars if he would settle down and get married.20
So what was the exact nature of Dodger concern about Burke? A lifelong friend of Burke’s, who had played sports with him on the basketball courts of Oakland and at Berkeley High School, spelled it out thusly: “They traded him not for his baseball ability but for his life choice.”21 In fact, if Burke was surly on occasion, or seemed to behave strangely after the games or in his personal life, it could well have been because of a deep secret he was trying to keep from his team. It was a secret that he had come to understand fully only in 1975, while playing in the Minors and still a year away from being called up to the big leagues. “The vast majority of the players and management never really got to know me that well,” Burke said of his Minor League experience, in which he played for six different teams over six seasons. “They never questioned why I didn’t have the outwardly sexual drive of the average ballplayer.” The truth was, as Burke discovered at age twenty-three in 1975, while playing in the team’s AA franchise in Waterbury, Connecticut, he was gay.22
Throughout the beginning of his career, in various small Minor League locations, Burke carefully and tentatively explored local gay nightlife. “I knew I was going to have to make changes in my life to continue my homosexual lifestyle while staying in the closet,” Burke said. “I knew even then that ‘coming out’ would be baseball-suicide.” He had a number of close calls. “I used to go to this bar in Waterbury called the Road House Cafe,” Burke said. “As I was leaving there one night, one of the owners of the Waterbury Dodgers saw me coming out. We didn’t exchange words, but I gave him one of those looks that said, ‘Well, I know you’re not going to tell.’ But he never said a word to anyone. Turns out he was just as ‘guilty’ as I was.”23
The gay lifestyle meant contentment and joy on one hand for Burke, but on the other hand it meant a good deal of extra stress, especially after he attained his ultimate goal of playing in the Major Leagues. He had to deceive the twenty-four teammates and numerous coaches who saw him every day. “When we were on the road,” Burke said, “I would wait until my teammates were either in their rooms for the night or out on the town before heading out to gay bars and parties. I would anxiously flag down a taxicab while practically covering my head so no one would notice me. If someone did, I never acknowledged them. I was even fearful that the cab driver would notice I was a ballplayer, so I would always tell them to pull over a block or two from where I was going. No straight dude will ever know how difficult this charade is to play.” The deception wore on Burke. “I became extremely paranoid. Even though I was very careful about concealing my homosexuality, there were more than a few occasions I thought someone from the front office had someone spying on me. And there were also times I was convinced everybody was whispering about Glenn Burke, the in-hiding Dodger homosexual.”24
“I’m sure he played in fear,” said his Dodger teammate Dave Lopes years later, “the fear of the fact that it’s going to get out that he’s gay and once it comes out, you’re going to take abuse. Face it, society isn’t ready for that. If there are any gay players, even today [in the mid-1990s], and you would think that there probably are, that’s why they choose not to come out, because they know their careers are going to be ruined.” Reggie Smith, another Dodger teammate, agreed with Lopes: “Homosexuality was taboo. I’m not going to sit here and say it was anything different. I’m sure it would have ruined his career. He would have not only been ostracized by his teammates, but management would have looked for ways to get him off the team, and the public would not have tolerated it.”25 In recent years, in fact, Burke’s teammate and friend Dusty Baker has speculated that the Dodger management knew about the young player’s hidden life as a homosexual, and that was a good part of the reason for his dismissal. “I think the Dodgers knew,” said Baker. “I think that was why they traded him.”26
After his playing days Glenn Burke spoke much more bluntly about the prejudices he thought had eventually ruined his playing career. Glenn Burke said of the trade on May 16, 1978:
Little did anyone know why I was really traded by the Los Angeles Dodgers to the Oakland A’s. [What] the Dodgers would receive in exchange was Billy North, a player who had watched his batting average drop 64 points in the previous two years. . . . I, on the other hand, was only 25 years old, had started in two World Series’ games for the Dodgers in ’77, and had proven to the team and fans alike that I was a speed-demon on the base-paths and one of the better defensive outfielders in baseball. And if given the chance to play on a regular basis, I would have been a great hitter too.
The real reason for the trade, according to Burke, was because they knew. “In the Seventies,” Burke said, “the Dodgers were drawing three million fans a year. They had a pristine, clean image. Management was afraid of my sexual orientation, even though I never flaunted it. To this day, the Dodgers deny trading me because I was gay. But it was painfully obvious. . . . The Dodgers just never gave me a chance.”27
As to how the Dodgers knew his secret, Burke, despite the care he took in guarding his secret, probably made one crucial mistake. At the time Tom Lasorda was not only a company man—loyal to the conservative and tradition-minded Dodgers—but also a man of his time, deeply committed to staid, safe, Frank Sinatra–approved heterosexual and male-centered middle-American conventions. Lasorda was also, however, a father in deep denial, at least publicly, of the open homosexuality of his son, Tom Lasorda Jr., whom everyone called “Spunky.” Spunky Lasorda was a thin, sprite-like, sharply handsome young man of just nineteen years in 1977. He wore his blonde hair long, in the fashion of the time; regularly dressed in women’s clothing; and preferred, despite a childhood spent following his father as he worked for Minor League Baseball teams around the country, the dazzling gay nightclubs of Hollywood over the green grass of a baseball park.
Though much divided Tom Lasorda from his son, much also bound them. “They had a great deal in common,” wrote Peter Richmond in a GQ story.
Start with the voice: gravelly, like a car trying to start on a cold morning. The father, of course, spends his life barking and regaling, never stopping; he’s baseball’s oral poet, an anti-Homer. It’s a well-worn voice. Issuing from the son, a man so attractive that men tended to assume he was a woman, it was the most jarring of notes. One of his closest friends compared it to Linda Blair’s in The Exorcist—the scenes in which she was possessed. . . . Then, the most obvious similarity: Both men were so outrageous, so outsized and surreal in their chosen persona, that, when it came down to it, for all of one’s skepticism about their sincerity, it was impossible not to like them.
As described by friends who knew him at Sunny Hills High School in Fullerton, where the Lasordas lived in a middle-class suburban home, Spunky Lasorda moved through school with uncommon “style and self-assurance.” He was “invariably dressed impeccably” and often surrounded by a group of fashionably beautiful young women. “He was as beaut
iful as his friends,” said a high school classmate, filmmaker Cat Gwynn. “He had none of his father’s basset-hound features. . . . [His] bones were carved, gently, from glass. . . . [And while] it was very obvious that he was feminine . . . none of the jocks nailed him to the wall or anything. I was enamored of him because he wasn’t at all uncomfortable with who he was. In this judgmental, narrow-minded high school, he strutted his stuff.”28
That Glenn Burke would befriend the openly gay son of the manager of his baseball team was inevitable. It was also ill-fated. “I have bitter-sweet memories of Spunky,” said Burke years later. “We were great friends. He had a tremendous sense of humor. He was a transvestite some of the time, but not all of the time. And extremely flamboyant. . . . Spunky and I were a lot alike in many ways and very different in others. We were alike in that we both were disappointments in Tom’s homophobia and unwillingness to deal with the whole situation.” Because Spunky could not be completely open and out front with a father unwilling to accept who he was, he had long felt victimized by Lasorda. And so Burke, who was beginning to realize that Lasorda treated him differently from other players and wondered if it was because of his sexuality, shared a bond with Spunky. The two also shared, according to Burke, a sense of humor. Often they talked of dealing with their frustration with Tom Lasorda by staging a Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner sort of moment, in which Spunky would deck himself out in pigtails and “all the female trimmings” and bring Burke to dinner at the Lasorda family home. They, of course, never dared act on their subversive little fantasy. “Tommy would have shot us in the head,” Burke laughed. “Then he would have had a heart attack and died.”29
Despite outward signs that Tom Lasorda was in some denial about his son’s secret life, the father was, as many noted, deeply supportive, even protective, of his son. “He talked lovingly about his father and their relationship—they had a very good relationship,” said another friend of Spunky. “I was surprised. I didn’t think it’d be like that. You’d think it’d be hard on a macho Italian man. This famous American idol. You’d figure it’d be [the father saying] ‘Please don’t let people know you’re my son,’ but it was the opposite. . . . There had to be acceptance from his mom and dad. Tommy had that good self-esteem—where you figure that [his] parents did something right.” Though it’s difficult to know for sure, it appears that Tom Lasorda’s protectiveness led him to take direct action in 1977 to end Burke’s relationship with his son. That is, around the time Spunky had befriended Burke, Lasorda encouraged Spunky to move to West Hollywood to pursue his dream of a fashion career. “[Spunky] couldn’t see me anymore,” Burke said later. “The Dodgers had paid him to stay away from me. Spunky was a real pussy to end our friendship like that. A pure pussy! . . . I guess Tommy just couldn’t stand me being friendly with his son Spunky. . . . But I’m not bitter. Bitterness doesn’t solve shit.”30
Ironically, the Dodgers’ success with Lasorda as their manager in 1977 may have played an additional role in Burke’s trade. Because of the pennant race, the outfielder’s efforts to lead a double life became, in his words, “a little tougher. . . . [I] was suddenly in the limelight because of the team’s success. We were on National television everyday now and, without sounding too bold, I was a big handsome guy with a good sense of humor. Girls suddenly were coming out of the woodwork to hang out with me. . . . They just wanted to be seen with me. If I had been straight, I would’ve had a field day.” By the end of the 1977 season, in fact, as the Dodgers were on their way to taking the Western Division title, Burke guessed that most people on the team knew his sexual orientation because of his reluctance to take up the offers. “The tell-tale signs were beginning to surface,” he said. “Some players would ask with a grin, ‘Is Glenn waiting for his “girlfriend?”’ Or, ‘Don’t bend over in the shower, here comes Glenn.’”31
Considering all that came to pass in 1977, Burke later admitted that he should have seen the trade coming. Once the trade did come, however, Burke quickly became resigned to, even hopeful about, leaving the Dodgers. “I remember thinking that the Dodgers didn’t give me a chance to be the next Willie Mays,” said Burke. “But maybe the A’s would.”32
Considering the fate of both Burke and Lasorda Jr. however, Burke’s later regrets are to be expected. Under the even more intolerant Billy Martin, the ex-Dodger’s playing career with the A’s ended quickly—a little more than a year after the trade. (Martin had taken to taunting the young player with homophobic epithets even as he gave the outfielder scant regular playing time.) At the time that he recounted this story, in the mid-1990s, Burke was to that point the only baseball player who had ever come out as gay. He was also in hospice care, his health long ruined from AIDS-related complications that came from a life of drug abuse and other misbehavior.
“The point I’m trying to make here,” he said from his hospital bed, “is that the Dodgers are arguably the sharpest organization in all of sports. They knew I was gay, and were worried about how the average father would feel about taking his son to a baseball game to see some fag shagging fly balls in centerfield. . . . A great part of society still doesn’t know how to deal with homosexuality. And there is no sport that accepts gays less than baseball.”33
That’s not to say that Burke forgave anyone for their insensitive and hurtful behavior. “Spunky died of AIDS-related complications a couple of years ago [in June 1991, at the age of thirty-three],” Burke said. “It’s somewhat tragic, but Tommy is still in denial about Spunky’s sexual orientation and how he died. He tells his friends Spunky died of pneumonia only, not AIDS complications. I feel bad for Tommy that he lost his son. It must be very painful to bury your child. But he should stop being a jerk and accept Spunky for who he really was.”34
21
Ain’t Talkin’ ’bout Love
It’s very romantic. It gets a hold on you. You love it and you hate it. It’s a whore, but it’s a fertile mother: L.A., to me, is what America is all about.
—Don Henley
Though it wasn’t exactly television history, on March 15, 1977, a new situation comedy debuted on ABC TV. Set in an apartment building in Santa Monica, the show distinguished itself from the usual television fare of the time by the contemporariness of its situations, humor, and characters. In the first episode of Three’s Company, for instance, two young female roommates, one dressed in a short dressing gown with slit leg and the other wearing a loose robe, gather in the living room of their apartment to relive the events of a wild party the night before.1 One of them, named Janet, is hung over and embarrassed over her behavior at her former (third) roommate’s nuptials the night before. “Eleanor must hate me,” said Janet. “It was her wedding reception and I ruined it.” To which the second roommate, Chrissy, replies: “She didn’t even notice. Her labor pains started, and they rushed her off to the hospital.” In the first two minutes of the program, then, we encounter two semiscantily clad young women talking casually about their single lifestyle, and we hear about a third roommate who gave birth to a child at her wedding reception. This was not your grandmother’s situation comedy.
While much about the basic premise and content of Three’s Company was typical of commercial entertainment through the ages, based as it was on farcical misunderstandings, broad physical humor, and other comedy-of-error tropes, what was new here was the show’s relaxed standard for language and more mature sexual content. After the opening scene of the pilot, Chrissy goes into the bathroom to take a shower and discovers a man sleeping off the party in the bathtub. The girls take the surprise in stride—a telling bit of detail for a generation that has come to expect casual sex as part of the youthful dating life. According to one study, for example, between 1972 and 1982 the proportion of American women who endorsed premarital sex jumped by 20 percentage points to become the norm (58 percent).2 Further, when the surprise visitor turns out to need a place to live, the two girls extend an invitation without much question. Janet even hatches a sexually charged plan to assuage
their landlords, the Ropers, whose older values make them suspicious of such an arrangement. The plan is this: Jack will pretend to be gay and therefore, strangely, now acceptable to the landlords.
Three’s Company, despite being dismissed by critics as “fluff,” was an almost immediate success. ABC gladly renewed the show for the next season, and ratings grew. Eventually, Three’s Company became a number one–rated show, and it reached syndication after completing a seven-year run. What struck a chord in audiences about Three’s Company had something to do with the changing zeitgeist of the 1970s. Between 1948 and 1970 American television networks generally avoided any hint of sexual content, relying mostly on bland, more universally palatable entertainment. “They saturated the airwaves,” wrote social historian Edward Berkowitz, “with variety shows, westerns, and situation comedies that featured suburban households confronting the problems of a prosperous society.” It was only in the 1970s that the television networks finally realized they could appeal to a wider audience by catering to the younger generation whose values, interests, and sense of humor were markedly different from the generation before. The saucy do-it-if-it-feels-right escapism of Three’s Company was in keeping with other hit programs of the era—most notably the “Jiggle TV” vehicle Charlie’s Angels, which was a hit for ABC starting in late 1976. Charlie’s Angels featured three beautiful young women who, while undertaking dangerous missions for an off-camera character named Charlie, never seemed to lack opportunity to wear skinny bikinis or other revealing clothing. While critics excoriated the show, audiences “loved it,” according to critic Edward Berkowitz, “and Farrah Fawcett-Majors became a breakout star. Men worshipped her as a sex symbol . . . [and] women found her adorable and imitated her hair style.”3
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