 Tonight's topic goes very far beyond competitive games or sexual orientation. We cherish sports for offering health and entertainment, but it has also been given a very dangerous power in our society of defining masculinity and femininity, of values and sensibilities, of courage, of tragedy, of victory. That starts in childhood when we are the most vulnerable, when our only identities are the worthiness of our bodies. Some years ago, Nora Sayer, the author, wrote about a gay rights meeting that she was attending, a lesbian was making a point by banging a bat on the floor and a gay man objected, asked her to stop. She explained that the bat symbolized to him the oppression of sports in his boyhood, how it was used to make him feel unworthy and unmanly. She wouldn't stop because the bat symbolized to her liberation. Sports had enabled her to break the restraints of her girlhood to become strong and assertive and not ladylike. We're going to talk about how far we have come in the last 30 years. I don't know that we have come all that far. The Times has come very far. Don't stroke me, it's come further than you think. When David Co-Pay's wonderful book came out 25 years ago? Thanks, Bob. Not only didn't we review it, but New York Times sports columnist Dave Anderson, Pulitzer Prize winning Dave Anderson, probably the only column of his that was ever spiked was a very fair, kind of by today's standards, bland, even-handed report about David's book, which we think within the next year or so will be reissued with an update. We're really looking forward to that. Again, in your programs are biographies of all the panelists. You're in the library. You should be able to read. I'm not going to read them to you. I will give you my own personal highlight reel about them. I'm going to introduce them all at once. And then in that order, they will talk briefly, except probably for Co-Pay. For those of you who remember the four years that he spent with the 49ers, he was slow, but he was hard to stop. After that, I'll have questions for them. The panelists may have questions for each other. And then, of course, it will be open to your comments and questions that we hope you will share the evening with us. A lot of people think that Diana Nyad is not a real person. I don't think she's a real person. I think she's a creature of bullfinches mythology, a Greek water goddess. This woman is too perfect. Phi Beta Kappa, swam around Manhattan Island in 1975, breaking the speed record, and a few years later, swam 102.5 miles from Bimini to Florida, which is still the longest swim on record. I have also never believed her name. Diana Nyad, right? She's been an amazing athlete in many sports. In the 70s, she very casually picked up squash, and she went through veteran male players like a thresher. And then she has gone on now far more importantly as a very important, remarkable broadcaster, insightful, investigative. These days, she's at the two ends of the spectrum, Fox and National Public Radio. And now she's a long-distance bike rider. God help Lance Armstrong. Copay, who thinks that I pick on him all the time. Before he became the first major American team athlete to come out publicly, he was known as psych. As in psychotic? Because he was one of those mad dog football players, so beloved by fans and coaches. Dave was also beloved by his teammates because he was a very rare running back. He was willing to run without the ball. He was a running back who would block. He played nine years in the pros, which is considerably longer, as you know, than the average career, and then went on to a very successful business career. Dave's courage in standing up, in running without the ball, in blocking for so many people in our society, is matched only by his strength and his steadfastness. He's continuing to stand up and never giving up. He's got enough of a swelled head. Our next panelist, Helen Carroll, is a new hero of mine, a 21st century role model, because she's making connections in sports world that have never actually been made before. She's the athletic director of Mills College, making waves across the bay. I've always kind of wanted to say that. And even beyond an extraordinary event in which she hired a black male to coach the predominantly white women's rowing team. Just think about a black male rowing coach, male or female, in America today. Talk about the waves at Henley Regatta. Helen's approach to homophobia, which I think is so important, is that she is showing in workshops and by example that it can be as great a problem for heterosexual women as for lesbians, that it is a way for bigots and for greed heads to attack all women. Often not out of hatred, which we can understand, but out of pure evil greed. This is all an enormous step forward in bringing all athletes and fans together. And we're very happy that she has joined our traveling All-Star team. When people used to ask me in the old days, six months ago, what Billy Bean was really like. And in my career, that has been basically limited to Mickey Mantle, Muhammad Ali, and Michael Jordan. Those are the people that people are asking what they really like. I used to say that Billy Bean, this was six months ago, was kind of Billy Budd. And I would be perfectly happy if he married my son or my daughter. But I don't say that anymore. In the last six months, he's become, if he was ever Billy Budd, Billy Budd with smarts. And after that picture that appeared on the front page of the advocate, I'm not introducing him to anybody. But he's also become an extraordinary role model and that is just beginning. Six months ago, the first time, the only other time that we did this panel was, in a sense, Billy's coming out party. The first time that he really spoke to the gay and lesbian community. His coming out itself was extraordinary. It was the first time a bench player ever jumped into the All-Star game. He came out on the front page of the New York Times and on 2020. And all those people who had never seen him play suddenly remembered every hit that he had ever gotten. Billy Bean was a high school quarterback, a point guard, a center fielder, and he was the valedictorian. The perfect mate for Diana Nye. He was a college All-America. He spent parts of six seasons in the major leagues a spy in his own life. And in retrospect, what he did was the right thing to do. It was the only way he could have conducted his life. The day after the Times story, there was a story in which his teammates were asked their reaction to a man. They all talked about how much they liked Billy Bean and how comfortable they would have been if he had come out at the time. They were that comfortable with him. But he was obviously clearly prudent because the executives of that team admit that they probably would not have brought him up from the minors in the first place had they known he was gay. Billy has gripped the torch that Dave Coppe has carried alone for a quarter of a century. And in so doing, he joins a Hall of Fame that includes Greg and Martina Orles, one-name people. And Billy Jean, now Helen, Syke, and Diana, who if indeed that's your name, will open our panel. Good evening. You know, we found out in New York, which I suppose all of us could have guessed, is that unlike the umbrella of gay issues in general, which would be just to fall under the umbrella of human rights and get what we deserve by law and in the political arena and in the moral ethical arena, in the world of sports, oddly enough, it seems that men and women, for the most part, have very different issues. And I think what we're going to try to get at tonight is that each of the four of us have very distinct life histories. And like any life history, they're very complicated and there isn't just one issue that comes out when we tell our life stories and evoke the experiences of our lives. And once we throw out some of the details, we'll turn it back around and when all of you get involved and we become interactive in about half hour, I think that we'll see once again that the men's and women's issues within homosexuality and sports seem to have a dividing line. Neither good nor bad. It just seems to be true. So I'm going to throw you out a few details from my life in sports, which evoke a few of these issues for women in sports. And the first thing is that you don't have to be gay to still... I grew up in the 60s, but still, even in this new century, you don't have to be gay to be a young girl, a young woman in this society, and still feel that it is not going to be entirely your right to become everything you want to be. We throw that out. We throw out the words, and those of you with daughters, I'm sure, will agree with me that you worry that we throw out the words, but is the integration of that really there? I grew up in a household where I had two foreign parents who, when you tell funny stories about them, sound like a couple of eccentric characters that you'd love to get to know at a dinner party were absolutely horrendous parents who didn't know where we were or what we were doing, and it was at a very early age that I saw their dynamic, and my mother being the, shall we say, lesser, certainly the submissive one, the one who wasn't going after the gusto in life that my father was, and that's what I saw everywhere I went, and sports, eventually swimming, to me became the venue where I could feel my oats and I could feel proud of myself, and I'm sort of a classic case as we begin the probably never-ending debate of where sexuality begins, is it nature and nurture? I'm kind of a classic case of someone in a schism of both, and that is that from very early memory, especially now in retrospect, I was gay. I had crushes on all the girl teachers and felt in awe of women I would read about in history, and this isn't something that I share with most groups, but even in New York I didn't tell this story. But I never had a doll, very taboo, but my little sister had dolls, and when she threw out her favorite doll because one of its legs was missing, I went and got it out of the garbage, and I took it in my room and I hid it in the closet, and on special nights I would lock the door and stand the doll up, had gorgeous blue eyes, and stand it up and it would just be as tall as me, and I would take a big wand of socks and stuck it in my sweatpants, and I'd put on my Roy Orbison records, and we'd be at a party, and we'd make eye contact across the room, and then over, you know, I am an endurance type, over two or three hour period, we'd pass each other at the cocktail stand and get to know each other a little bit, and then we'd start dancing, and I was in third grade. And as puberty approached, and you know, all my friends were talking about boys, and I was feeling very strange and left out, and we were in an era where the words gay and homosexual and lesbian weren't thrown around every day, we should say never were thrown around, I didn't know about these possibilities, and I was feeling very different, and sports were my place to shine, so I had these two parents who didn't know who I was in life, we didn't eat dinner together, they had no idea what my dreams were, what my personality was, no earthly idea, and I found a coach, I was ten years of age, and this coach had been an ex-Olympic swimmer, and he, the first time he saw me swim, he said, you are going to be the best swimmer in the world, and a number of things happened at that very moment, I found a parent, and he started looking at my report card, and he started telling me what a leader I was, and what an intellect I was, and what a great sense of humor I was, and asked me what I wanted to be, where I might want to go to college, and I had a parent, someone I could trust, and someone who could mentor me, because as puberty was coming on strong, and you were sported swimming, you were in a skimpy little bathing suit every day, and all your friends are getting into the whole boy action, I thrived in the pool, this is where I could feel independent, muscular, strong, this is where I could succeed, I was going to be the best swimmer in the world. On the afternoon of the state meet for our high school, when I was 14, so now I'm four years into getting up at 4.30 every morning, 365 days a year, Christmas included, we didn't even use goggles at that time, the eyes were ice red and swollen every night, had to be packed in ice, there was a level of dedication that no coach or parent can put on a kid, it comes from inside, and every athlete on the stage knows what I'm talking about, and that afternoon at the state meet, I virtually had not lost a race in four years, I was a winner, I went over to my coach's house, my parents, my dad, to rest for the afternoon, a lot of the kids on our team were part of his family, we used to play football with the guys on Sunday morning on the beach, we used to play poker on Friday nights over at his house, we all babysat his kids, it was a very comfortable place to be, his house was closer to the meet than mine, and I was resting over there, I was sleeping in one of the bedrooms, not really sleeping but getting some rest, thinking about the race that night, I was excited, top of the world, and in a short, five, six minutes, and a violent, unforgettable, flurry, I suffered a rape by this beloved coach, who is my parent, and I, I got through it, and I think by absolute, pure medical definition, I was in shock, I was stiff, and couldn't breathe, and was bleeding, and he left, and I got myself cleaned up, because I'm a winner, and I went to the pool, and I think all the other kids knew something was wrong, I think they thought I had the flu, I wasn't myself, and I lost, it was the first time, since I was such a little kid, and all the other kids at the end of the meet were on the other side of the pool, getting on their sweats, our team had won, we were going to go out and celebrate and have pizza and coax, and I went into the diving well, there was a defiance that was bubbling up, and instead of a poor me victim shriveling down, there was a bold defiance, bubbling and bursting out, and I went into the diving well, and I went to the bottom of the pool, and I yelled, no! This is not going to ruin my great life. I'm 50 years old, I'm pretty great 50, stay fit, I'm pretty happy, pretty together, but I will tell you I messed up like that by a person you hold so dear and many of us, every one of us will tell you what a coach is to you. He's on a pedestal up in the clouds, and when you abuse that privilege and take the trust away from a child, I'm here to say it's a lifetime of struggle to straighten it all out, and luckily for me, I have now had a lifetime of meeting decent men like Bob Lipsight to change some of that internal mechanism and come back around to know that all of us on the planet start out sweet and honorable. Ironically the exposure to sports and this coach led to a dramatic and life-changing episode, but ironically it was because of the sport that had built my confidence and allowed me to feel strong and independent and to feel some sort of very, very unshakable self-esteem that I got past it. I still deal with it, but honestly in the bigger sense of the word to still embrace life and still go out and look at every sunset every day and thank God I'm alive it was because of sports and to be an athlete a female athlete in this society is one of the few areas where women can truly be all they can be. So I have so much else to tell you but my esteemed colleagues do too so I'm going to leave and we'll pick up I'm sure with questions and where some of these statements have led to when we get into the panel discussion. So it's David Cope, right? Imagine following someone, you're going to see someone who doesn't make their living giving speeches or I'm always nervous doing these things so I hope you all bear with me. Bob, thank you very much for having me here again tonight and being part of the Times Talk. I was especially excited in New York and now coming back home practically to San Francisco it's a really meaningful thing for me. I did make some notes and I'm going to try to follow along here being a rookie I came from the University of Washington in Seattle and was a rookie free agent in 1964 with the 49ers. But at that point never in my wildest dreams would I could have imagined that the circumstances would have taken place for me to be here tonight and to do some of the things that I've done over the years. I know a whole lot about the floors if anybody's interested for the last 20 years the floor, like for example the floor out there was floorable from Amsterdam that's what I've been doing I've been selling floors at the Lanolin City in Hollywood. We've been we've been we call it a salesman to the stars. This week of course we've been dealing a lot with the Academy Awards and I had a 600 yard order for a yellow canary carpet and big party and anyhow all the TV all the shows that you see on TV most of them have come out of Lanolin City so it's been quite and for all those naysayers out there I wish that I would have fall flat on my face well I haven't and I've done fairly well at Lanolin City and have a substantial pension built up and hopefully in another maybe a year and a half I can retire and go from there. I am getting my NFL retirement and it's funny I used to complain too about having always to speak about my personal life and my friends, my dearest friends who have Dharma and Greg and friends in Drew Carey and all those shows I was complaining one day and they said oh just shut up have you been doing any volunteer work at the AIDS Hospice House or you've been doing this or you've been doing that? No, keep talking that's what you can do so I have been doing that I don't know, I know there's a few sports fans out here that know what a free agent is anybody here know what a free agent is? when I joined the 49ers I mean I was full of piss and vinegar and hope there was 40 or probably 50 rookie free agents there was 40 veteran players there was 20 draft choices I wasn't a draft choice and for me to get to first base was next to impossible but as soon as I got to training camp and saw what I had to deal with and saw that everybody puts their pants on the same way and probably the fact that I was queer motivated me even further and I'll explain that later and it was really difficult and if I had a sprained ankle or if I had any kind of sickness in training camp or anything had gone wrong I would have been history because they had no investment in me at all and that's what happens to free agents they used to bring in a ton of women you know fall by the wayside but I persevered and stayed with the team and wound up doing things my rookie year that never did again I played 100 yards against the Bears at Wrigley Field I went out of bounds in a wrong time didn't stop the clock they went down and kicked the field we lost the game I never got the game ball but but it certainly was exciting and I loved it I mean I really craved it but you can imagine if anybody had known that I was gay I would have been history for sure as a rookie a free agent with the 49ers I brought some pictures of tonight I hope to give out some tonight if anybody cares there seem to be a few fans or followers out there but as a rookie free agent when I look at this picture it's like who the hell is this guy I mean Gnarly I was 6'1 or Bearly I used to have to fudge on that I was 225 I mean a romp and stomping driven I mean really driven athlete and yes Bob I did earn the name Psyche but not psych or not psycho Psyche was an enduring quality or enduring name given to me by John Brody because I was so enthused and so aggressive and really loved playing the game and felt it was so important it was really a big big thing for me I can't imagine if anybody had used those wonderful terms homo or sissy or faggot or fairy and referring to me what I might have done at that time which isn't, I'm not bragging about that at all in fact I'm kind of shameful about it but I do know and I did know then too believe me that the biggest fag haters I know are the ones who are most confused about their sexuality I know because I was one of them and it was really a difficult time I was really running away from myself let's kind of fast forward here to 1978 a whole bunch of years go by nine years in the national football league and out of the national football league and the world football league and then I bagged that and then I spoke out in an article in The Washington Star by Lynn Rosalini and set the record straight so to speak and decided to move to San Francisco well doesn't everybody when they move to San Francisco move in with Armstead Moppin and he's doing a column for the San Francisco examiner Tales of the City that became, you know, Tales of the City and Randy Schultz was in the crowd and was one of the crowd and got to know him and Ken Maley and it was just a wonderful time George Mascone and Harvey Milk that eventually wasn't so wonderful but everything was going along great until an old teammate called me Bob Sinclair Bob Sinclair is in the Hall of Fame he was an offensive tackle with the 49ers they used to call him geek I mean he's a 6 foot 9, 275 pounds which was really big then and really a great football player and a really decent guy he was the supervisor or mayor of Daly City when I was with the 49ers when he was playing he calls me and he says Dave would you support me I'm running for supervisor in the Castro district I said sure an old teammate, old buddy he's totally supportive of me I've already spoken out working on the book tour everything and I I said no problem well all hell broke loose Bob was in the Castro and Harvey was running for supporting Harvey Milken for supervisor in the Castro but you know me supporting Bob really didn't do Harvey any harm and he knew that and and I went and talked to him about it and he's no problem with him but there was a real conservative man named David Goodstein who owned the advocate and he was back in a conservative politician and he didn't want anything to do with Harvey it was too down to earth and too real and so the election happens and of course we know what happened Harvey became the first supervisor gay supervisor in San Francisco so I go down to his office there on that Castro street and I can congratulate and we're talking and um shooting the breeze and he puts his arm around me and he says he starts talking about the party David Goodstein is going to thrill for him for for him when in the election and Harvey looks at me and he says he says Dave we're the two biggest queens in town and they still need our ass David needs our ass too and I go oh my god you know of course years ago I probably would have freaked out and he hugs me and at that point I felt I guess I'm making some progress because I certainly I felt great I mean he was very warm and it was a really loving experience Harvey always spoke about hope and last night I got in and checked in and asked the concierge where we were going to go for a suggest a good restaurant and he looked at me and then he said well this place would be great and he says um and what name should I give and I said and he says as in Dave and I said I said yeah and he said I read your book a long time ago and it gave me a lot of it meant something to me and I interpreted that as it gave him some hope and a number of y'all tonight have shared that experience or first reading the David Cope story and what it meant to y'all and believe me I never tire of hearing how wonderful it is to hear some of the stories one time I was um I was on a cruise to RSVP cruise and a big heavy set guy came up to me and we started talking and he says Dave he says you know your book changed my life and I says what are you talking about and he says well I was um involved in government here in Santa Clara and um I was offered the administrative position the top position in the lawyer's office or there or the municipal judge office or whatever and I said oh and he said yeah he said um um I wasn't going to take it I was afraid I was really closeted I was nervous I was very anxious and then I came to work one day a little ban on paperback was in my my um mailbox and I read it and he said you know today we have about 15 gay employees in the municipal court and we're all out and a number of us are on the trip together and I can't tell you um and I'm telling you what a wonderful thing your book has meant to me and of course I especially appreciated that I would um I change and maybe um people say well would you do it again would you speak out and I or actually when people ask me that question I wonder what do they really mean would I play football again from the um problems I've had with herniated disc and arthritis and things like I don't know whether I really play football again but then I couldn't I couldn't have done what I have done if I didn't play football again but I certainly um um yes I probably would play football again as crazy as that sounds from all of them because I can't compete now I can't run I can't do those things but I certainly loved the initial um experience that being on edge and being so totally consumed and so totally involved and really so totally relaxed if I may later on in the evening tonight if um people have other questions um I'd be glad to answer them there's certainly some things I would do differently and I'd like to talk about that later too if um if we can so with that help is it Helen? it's a great day to be a lesbian in sport in San Francisco you know what a friendly audience um I myself have a new approach in speaking with athletes and with young people now when I talk to them and the first thing I say is it's great to be a lesbian in sport and the reason is is that if we didn't have lesbians in sport for women we wouldn't have sport for women this thing is now straight women have joined us and there are lots of women in sport and I think that uh that one of the things I do as an educator is I try to talk to people a little bit about the degree of what that means and how now we have the opportunity as straight women bisexual women, transgendered people lesbians to really take sport to a new height and we can do that together if we can figure out how to do it together if we don't figure out how to do it together we can not combat sexism in sport and that's what it really comes down to so I'll talk a couple of minutes about that today I'll talk a little bit about my life in sport you won't hear a lot of professional tales though I do hold the junior high high jump record in Rutherford County in Tennessee so so actually it really is such a thrill to be here with my esteemed colleagues especially to be able to bring words, experiences as reality to a population that so needs two things and Bob I really appreciate you and Tom putting this together for us number one we really need validation and acknowledgement in sport for the role models are the sport heroes that we are able to have in the lesbian and gay world such as the people up here right now these people deserve to be acknowledged and validated and the more it happens for them the more it's going to happen for other people secondly the really big need is that the sports world wake up and listen to us we are here it's the 21st century and we're not going away you're going to hear from more of us you're going to hear more and more junior high college students who do become pro athletes be able to find the courage to speak part of my job is helping those people helping those young people figure out how to do that so a little bit about my life I started college in 1970 and I never left I've been there for 30 years a lot of campuses across the country I did play basketball in tennis at middle Tennessee State University we had a different coach every semester in 74 I got my master's degree in the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina assistant coached every sport there was to coach had a great time doing that and then at 24 I took my first head coaching job at University of Tennessee in Martin coaching basketball teaching classes doing what teachers do which is about a 14 hour day every day most weekends most nights from there I went to Nebraska Wayne State College in Nebraska now that was an experience I went on cattle drives with my basketball players I had a great time up there I had the Helen Carroll television show again I coached basketball I coached track and field I taught graduate classes I did a little bit of all of it and then I was there for a couple of years and then I went to the University of North Carolina in Asheville and then I was there for 7 or 8 years and that was a very important place for me to be because I left Nebraska and I decided that I needed to be who I was going to be who Helen Carroll is and I needed to really figure that out I was hired to coach basketball there we had a great team they'd never had a winning season so I was excited to be there and I was excited to be there because we had to go up so I was there for 3 years and what I did with a group of 9 or 10 young athletes at that University I believed to this day was because I was honest with them and we actually figured out what the word respect meant behind closed doors with 10 of us now I had never said the word lesbian at that time so I certainly didn't talk about it with the athletes but what we did talk about is I had a 6 foot 3 African American woman who nobody would recruit because she was too heavy and too slow and I had a 5 foot 1 point guard from Florida who nobody would recruit because she was too small and couldn't shoot well enough there were some self esteem things going on so in that room we decided that no matter what anybody said we would stick up for each other now what did that mean and this is really the crux of what we're trying to do what does it mean stick up for each other it means you have to name it and you have to tell each other what it is in other words we had to be able to say in the south the race card was really tough for Sheila we had to be able to say that there are women on the team who are seeing each other and the men's tennis team thinks that's really funny what are we going to do about that so in 1984 we decided to stick together and we had a really miraculous journey in 3 years we ended up winning the national championship and the NAI finals it was spectacular because Sheila led the nation in rebounding for division one, two and three NAI and men's pro little Julie who nobody would recruit led the nation in assist she still couldn't shoot but that didn't matter she gave the ball to Sheila so Sheila was able to score as much as she needed to and what happened with that team even when we were at nationals it wasn't as much let's bring home all the trophies it was let's keep playing the game let's play each time and so that was really what that meant for me was that we need to be more honest with each other with our teams and then we can see those little miracle threads happen that we're always looking for when we coach a team now from North Carolina I was hired at Mills College and that was about 12 years ago at the time I was looking for a job as an athletic director there were about 20 in the nation 20 women who were athletic directors in the nation so it was a tough job it was a tough field to be in and I came out here and interviewed and went right back to North Carolina saying that I would never live in California of course I mean it is a state that's going to drop off in the ocean and all those things that southern people have to say about what's going to happen in California so here I am 12 years later very happy to be here I think a couple of minutes of what it was like before I found it was really important to be honest with yourself and be out a couple of minutes of how and when did that change take place and what's it like now what it was before was that I think that I was able to do what most coaches do today in the NCAA and I am talking women's athletics and that was I was able to say it absolutely makes no difference if I'm lesbian or not no one needs to know that it doesn't make any difference to the athletes and nobody knows so I was able to play that game with myself as well and then when I had the North Carolina team that really changed so then I came to Mills College I interviewed at Mills College what an interesting interview I had on my business suit my skirt, my jacket I had my hair permed I had on my little heels I practiced walking before I got on campus lines down just perfect and the questions they asked me was how would you treat lesbian athletes and I thought it was all over then it's the first time I had ever heard the word in a professional context now this was 89 I think you can tell I was really with it and and I stuttered through a respect thing and did a pretty good answer and ended up getting the job at Mills so then a few years later we ended up hiring a president Janet Holmgren who we have now and I wanted to do a fundraiser for Lion Martin as the athletic director there and the president said oh that's a great idea let's do that so I met with D. Mosbecker and then at Gartrell and we got all that set up and we did that and I drove in campus the day of the fundraiser and I saw these huge signs of butch film tennis tournament so I figured well the college is going to have to either get with this or we see what's going to happen with it and it went well and the fact that the president came, welcomed the group said that it's just what we should be doing as a community service and so that really ended up giving a lot of support for Mills College to be able to do the work that I've done so what's it like now you know when I played the game as a coach the game of it doesn't matter and no one really notices I realized after I did really come out and become vocal that I did play a lot of games I mean I had a different girlfriend every basketball season through the season it was really really great the season was over then I needed to do something else and there was another relationship the next year I laugh about that a little now but it was really pretty hard so what's happened for me now since I really am out in what I term as feeling very comfortable with myself is I actually have a family a family a family I never thought could happen even at 40 41 years old I was thinking no this you know this just isn't in the cards for lesbian or gay people to be actually able to have a partner for a long time kids a home life support somewhere besides maybe the little group that's around you when you're coaching so that has been a huge revelation for me I have twin girls that are 18 months old I have a very special young man Brian who's 13 who's in my life I have close friends that live downstairs and I have a wonderful partner and to be able to just get that gift from being able to be open and be who you are I'm able to look at social injustices in sport in a very different way than anybody else can there might be one or two other women athletic directors who are out in the country in small colleges there is one man at Oberlin college who is out who is an athletic director so what's going on now with the NCAA with the NAI with junior colleges a little a little is going on there's some workshops the NCAA has put the word sexual orientation in their diversity statement that may seem small but it's actually really very very large what do we have to do now there's a lot that has to be done and it's not happening quick enough and that's where I am now I'm kind of through with oh should we be here kind of thing I'm more into the let's celebrate it and let's get it out there how do we teach young people as we teach sports administration we have a whole group of new students who may not even be athletes but that are going into the business part of sport so you have all these classes for sports administration so you have a chance to really sit and talk with young people about what matters how do we overcome fears the fears of if anybody knows there's a lesbian in the program then we will no longer have a program well that's not really happening anymore because there are lesbians in the programs but the toughest one the very toughest things is how to teach coaches to talk to their athletes and I don't care if you're talking top 20 basketball NCAA D1 or if you're talking Mills College with 800 students and the coaches they work with the students there because as coaches we are never taught to delve into these kinds of topics and so you're not going to just expect a coach to be able to go out and do that they have to be worked with on how to do that and that's one of the things that I've been doing in workshops and with different teams one of the things that I always tell coaches is if you can just do this one thing each year it would make a huge difference on your team if at the very first meeting that you have with your team where everybody's sitting there on women's teams thinking oh is she isn't she is the coach is she not that's what goes on at those first meetings at the very first meeting if you will just make the statement that says on this team we will learn to respect each other including our differences racial, ethnic, religion sexual orientations understanding these differences will give us the edge as we work to be our best as individuals and as a team if you would make that one statement then you would have all those athletes just taking a breath saying yes they know we're here and then after that you can work with it more but that's always the very first thing I ask coaches could you possibly be able to do that so to wrap it up just a couple of questions that are up now is what is the most positive approach and I think it is what I said when I first stood up here it's time to celebrate it's time to celebrate what these people are doing and what we are all doing in sport today how do we systematically teach all girls and boys respect for each other you know I listened to Brian he's 13 years old he comes home he talks about what's happening in school and what's important about respect in school and certainly sexual orientation goes in there but it's a big concept and we have to make sure that sexual orientation is not left out of that concept and then the big question that I always have is how do we do it a lot faster than we're doing it and I actually think that's important now but I'm actually I'm tired of debating whether we should talk about it or not you know I'm really ready to get moving faster and on that note you know what I'll say to you all is though I've been at Mills College for 12 years I really am planning on taking time and putting a lot more effort into doing this and working with people that are interested in actually coming up with a five year strategy for our college students and those younger athletes because those are going to be the people who are going to be out when they hit those professional teams and if they're already out and they're the best athlete in the country maybe some team will take that person to play for and then we'll see some things changing a little bit faster so I'll stop there and get Billy up here so he can talk to you thank you very much thank you Helen can you guys hear me six years ago I was playing for San Diego Potters we had a day game in Candlestick Park and as the case was for my entire unheralded six year career in the big leagues I went to the park that day having no idea if I was going to play and the odds were pretty good that I wasn't but that happened to be in the lineup that day and long story short I got a couple hits game was over about four o'clock and I was feeling really good about myself for a backup player in the big leagues a hit is like a hit of oxygen in your playing career so a little bit of success means another day and that's the way you play it it's a day to day sport anyways we went home we were staying in Nob Hill area in the hotel over there and usually it was a case when I started to feel good about my career about myself I started to get all my feelings creeping up on me and I took a long walk down the hill I thought well maybe 15-20 blocks as far enough for no one will recognize me as no one ever did in the first place so I jumped in a cab and I think and I tell the cab driver took me about three blocks to get the courage to tell some guy who could care less who I was I wanted to go to the Castro district heard about it I was in San Francisco the place was as far as I was concerned so he takes me on a little drive I said do you know where that is and he goes oh yeah it'll take us a few minutes but I'll get you there so I'm sitting in the backseat my own naive way lo and behold about a half an hour later we arrived in Castro on Market Street so we do about two stops and it's not even quite dark yet and I'm afraid that my parents are going to be standing on the corner and my head coach and I tell him to send me home and when I got back it was about a $75 cab ride and then today to show you the whole growth process of coming out I had a very good friend today and Bill Clark who took F Ryan my partner and I out today to lunch to show us a town he's a native San Francisco and we made it to Castro district in about four minutes from downtown it's a learning experience and I had to laugh everybody I want to thank New York Times Tom Kulaga for getting this event together and Bob Lipsight was definitely major part in the first event and for Tom to get us all out here it's not an easy thing to do I think everyone in this room should feel very privileged to have experienced what Diane and I had shared with us today it takes a lot of guts and it's not easy one of the best things that came about from that first event as I met her and we have become very very close friends and I asked her to write the book about my life story and she agreed and I'm very excited about that Helen it's a wonderful experience to sit and see someone on the other side because as Diana said that the coaches truly are what at least for me and I think that was the only way I could process my feelings of why I was so enamored with these these gods of knowledge and I was from 7 years old in Little League to varsity quarterback in high school you know tears of of every failure or mistake and looking at them and thinking you know I have to be perfect because there's something wrong with me and I got to get past that so I'm going to translate it through touchdowns and passes and home runs and baskets and games that we've won whenever we lost the game it had to be my fault and the part of translating that message as a coach administrators and giving these kids an understanding whether it's private because it's not going to be public overnight and we're all crazy we think it's going to be but it starts from inside and that's what I've learned in the last few months that we give them a foundation to understand you are not different this is just a part of you this is your personality similar to mine or yours or someone else's and then they go back to square one and go back and jump in the rest of the pool with the rest of the world because it's sports the beauty of sports and competition is that you cannot purchase it you can't be born into it you earn it and hard work I know that a part of my personality was the only reason that I was able to make it to the major leagues was because I felt there was such a perfectionist feeling of every hit I would get three hits in the minor leagues and I'd make one out and I would go home and be upset about it because I thought I had to be the best player on the team to just keep playing not even to succeed or to move ahead and I don't know if part of that is being homosexual or not understanding it at that time in my life but it definitely shaped the way I thought and for Dave now it's funny you know six months ago I probably had heard his name twice in my life and now we're being linked together and it's a privilege and I'm glad he was able to make it today six months ago I know a lot of people have read the story Bob Lipside did a wonderful piece about me that I was very very proud of I was extremely nervous about the whole situation I was walking into had no idea first of all I thought it was going to be about page seven of the sports page it was there you know I mean it was something my career was unheralded only in the fact that I played a long time but he did I think such an elegant piece and was able to translate it that it wasn't a horse and pony show and he didn't ask me stupid questions that only silly people want to know it was about a life experience and holding a secret for 11 years while I was playing professionally after the story came out there was a lot of the fears and one of the things that I truly am understanding is that coming out is the first day of a journey not the culmination of that journey and I was nervous I was comfortable with all my friends I've been in South Beach running a restaurant with my partner for four years everyone forgot about me as a baseball player very easily and I didn't think that this would pull me back into the interest on the sports level but it wasn't until just this past winter a couple months that I was able to go back home meet all my college teammates through alumni games you know little things that come about I had a chance to sit down and spend a couple days with some ex teammates of mine and I was extremely scared I mean I it was I know we all have this the one or two people or environment whether it's work or parents your brother whoever that it's easy to get the message across to a few but for that last segment it really really touches that final nerve of how comfortable am I with myself and for me it was the baseball world you know I've been able to hide it exclusively I mean almost to a double life I lived three years with the man while I was playing baseball was for the San Diego Padres and even my parents didn't know and I only lived about 40 miles away from them and you know we had some horrible experiences that I put on myself making him leave out the back door when someone would show up and it really really made me have to look at myself in the mirror and it was just a hard period to get through after he passed away about four or five years ago the whole I think for me the the coming out process is more it's not about sexuality it's about understanding and respecting yourself coming to terms kind of it's just an overall acceptance because that's the part when you meet the other people that if you're not comfortable with yourself you're not going to be comfortable in front of them and it's really pushing it and it's a lesson something that I think we identify and with this whole kind of experience now that the mainstream you know the word gay and lesbian it's not so offensive to people anymore and we see it on TV actors and prominent people are starting to come forward slowly that I think kids are going to come they're going to understand their sexuality maybe a little bit sooner than maybe a lot of us did so they're going to need more guidance and maybe a safe place to hold that secret in a safe environment not an environment where a coach would take advantage of your vulnerability or your parents would push you out the door something that's just going to take a while to happen the power of television I don't know if any of you got to see the piece that Diane and I did about me on Fox sports and it was wonderful I was really really wonderful Diane Sawyer did a great piece it's given me a chance to have a lot of letters in my restaurant a lot of people come by and just today the reception with all of you guys I didn't get a chance to say hello to everybody but the warmth and the enthusiasm it just really makes you kind of want to embrace the opportunity to do something and a lot of times at the first one I was talking to Bob I said you know who's going to want to listen to me or why what have I done to make this fact about my private life important to everyone else and I think that it's not so much about Billy Bean or Diane and I it's about it's about us it's about my story is your story and the problems that you experience are the same or very similar to ones that I did and then we have to from that bridge that connection we got to try to make it a little bit easier for for the people down the road I met I didn't meet yet but I received a letter from a young man named Ronnie in North Carolina about I'd say two weeks after my story was on the 2020 on TV the first time and Ronnie is 16 years old he has a degenerative nerve disease in his spine and he's been in a wheelchair for about three years and he does not expect to live to be 20 years old he wrote me a letter that was a watershed experience for me he told me that he is gay he says I've never touched another man sexually in my life and I know I never will his image of himself was very very bad and he's losing you know the use of his hands and he's he cannot walk at all he told me his main goal in his life was to find a way to commit suicide but his mother is very very protective and keeps him monitored and he has no chance or has not found a chance to find a means to reach that goal he also told me that he loves baseball and he's a big baseball fan and he said when he saw me on television that night that he decided that he wanted to live instead of kill himself he even had one of my baseball cards which makes him a more extreme of a commodity so now Ronnie and I email each other two or three times a week and I'm going to try to see I had an event that we were trying to put together in North Carolina and he lives about 40 miles from there and we were going to try to meet in a better place now and for someone like me who thought my only destiny like was to be a marginal outfielder in the major leagues and try to make enough money to figure out what am I going to do with the rest of my life I feel like something was thrust upon me and that's an opportunity to make a difference in people's lives when I was growing up I used to say two prayers every night I wanted to be a big league baseball player and I did not want to be gay and it's the truth it's incredible I mean just to look back and think and not have ever acted out on it or understood it because I was 28 years old the first time I ever reached out and touched a man in my life now I just try to say I'd like to fulfill the opportunity to do something good and these events and your guys participation these are the kind of things that help us and the people that we reach to not make the same mistakes and it's not so much mistakes in a naive way but it's mistakes based on us living with the decisions that we made out of fear of telling the truth if I would have had somebody talk to me show me that a guy can be an athlete and be gay I know I wouldn't have ran out and told anybody but I certainly wouldn't have quit in the prime of my career at 31 years old because I didn't think it was possible only 4 years ago I'm going to kick myself the rest of my life for that decision I love my partner dearly and I'm very very very lucky to have found somebody but what we're dealing with in the sports world is a very short window of time Mr. Diana Right Dave the back and the knees they don't hold up very well but a short window of time and dealing with your adolescence being in your 20s all those irrational decisions and you need someone to be in your life to help you say whatever place you're in because I know we're all different we come from a different place we meet together but we process it all in our own individual way the story that that Bob wrote about me it shared the fact that I was with my partner Sam for almost 3 years and the day he died I went to play in my baseball game at Anaheim Stadium instead of go to follow up and wonder what they were doing with him and they left an open chair for me at his funeral and I didn't even go I couldn't think of a reason to explain why my life was important enough to miss a stupid baseball game and those are mistakes that none of us should keep making that has nothing to do with putting your job on the line sacrificing your career alienating someone else it's about respecting ourselves enough and the fact that every kid is going to go through the same things we did unless we pitch in and give them a chance to have a coach I would have never thought I would see an openly gay coach in my high school I know I would not have made the mistake of marrying a very sweet innocent woman who I spent 9 years with if I would have seen that because I would have addressed it instead of pushed it down and hit it until it just had to come up what we have to kind of strive for my own humble opinion is that our differences with the so-called straight world or gays and lesbians or different races or whatever we should be defined by what our actions are those are the only differences that we have are we teachers or lawyers or doctors or rent a library or writers TV commentators that I played in NFL I played Major League Baseball those are the kind of things that should only be the defining difference I feel like if we could just kind of erase the stigma and just go on and be what we are that means we have to be better athletes better teachers better doctors, better parents if we want to adopt because you have to push ahead of the game to settle back into the mainstream to change for the people in here it doesn't seem so far fetched but to change the mentality of thousands of years of thinking because we are all just products of their own environment and what we are taught and nobody was more homophobic than me and I am gay so I don't know what is a better example I was raised in an environment that it was just not I believe our community is strong I have seen it Efrain and I have people come in all the time to my restaurant, Maya in South Beach where people say we saw your story I just wanted to come by and say hello and thank you for making me feel like they saw the difficulty I had with my parents and it kind of it identifies and it defines and it dignifies the struggle because I am sure it was hard for everybody it was everybody I think the idea that if we make a mentality of being better than the rest it is going to develop into a place where I don't know if in the team sport environment we are going to make an impact right away but maybe if that is the only athletic environment and we are everywhere else and everyone else is comfortable with us being there and I feel like the ones who are being different instead of us and I don't want anyone else to quit or be afraid to follow the dream that they have for their whole life just because they are gay and I don't think you guys should either thanks I have questions for the panel but I am sure yours are better is there somebody here with a handheld microphone here he comes Robert would anybody in the audience like to start off any questions over there my name is Gene Dermady I am a 15 year veteran high school wrestling coach I think this is a wonderful thing you are doing but I want to just direct a question to both Helen and Robert based on breaking the silence and how to enhance the activism faster which I believe in very much and it is title 9 because I coach wrestling I have seen that title line has done incredible things for women in the high schools and the college and opening opportunities but it has systematically closed the door for many many gay men and minority men to the same opportunities by cutting systematically destroying wrestling, gymnastics diving programs throughout the country I see an opportunity here to build a coalition with those people face and face the real enemy instead of just ignoring the whole issue because it is politically the third rail to even talk about title 9 we all in this room here vote democrat we all know we can't talk about it because we don't even want to go near it because they are liable to do something to it yet by having this standoff we are doing ourselves a disservice we should be reaching out to the very people who could be on our side and make a difference for us I know what sports can do for kids in high school and I see that those opportunities are being closed off for gay men in diving and gymnastics and wrestling I cannot sit still let's let Helen tell us what to do thank you for that question actually I love talking about title 9 and that could be another whole panel and I agree with you that it has been tough because it has to do with more opportunity for all people men or women and I think that one of the things we all agree on with title 9 is we really don't want to take anything away from people however the bottom line is reallocation of funds so the tough decisions that need to be made have to do with how are we funding all sports diversity or each school is there a particular sport that is getting a lot more money than other sports is there a way to put all the money on the table all the sports on the table not cut anything and get back down to a reasonable level of what we are trying to do with athletics in the world today is a very idealistic answer and I know that because in the world the money doesn't go like that but what I want to say is that I do agree with you that we need to be allies in this because none of us want to see wrestling gone or swimming or diving or any opportunities for young men in the world to change or to be gone or to see a fairness so that it can happen for all people and I think that's what we strive for and sometimes I think it's really misinterpreted when we get pitched against each other as men and women it's that's not really what it is Diane did you want to dive in on this? You don't have to be afraid we're past that the most ardent feminists young women can admit that Title IX needs some revisions it was a great concept in 1972, 1973 that women are being left out we've got to do something radical and it's been done so bravo but now we are seeing men swimming at University of Miami how many Olympians have they produced is now no longer existing Cal State Northridge baseball was dropped it's back in but we women in general want to see young boys and young women all of them get treated equally and all have their opportunities to create human beings so don't be afraid if you're a feminist get up and criticize Title IX we won't doubt that you want what's right for young girls but let's not be afraid to talk about football I happen to love football and we don't need to go through all the statistics tonight but most colleges division one down in the industry have a bigger roster than the NFL teams there's no need for that and you could have men's wrestling teams with half the football team playing out there so just throw that out grabbing yourself in baseball I don't know when you wear an athletic cup and you're on the field you get a little warm down there it's a good thing basketball players don't spend on gymnasium floor Robert Lipside before I start a story I spent in how do you feel about John Rocker getting a standing ovation in Florida um well let's not forget what a lot of people love about John Rocker is that he stood up for something in a very self destructive sort of a way there is something kind of wildly heroic about John Rocker to an awful lot of people what he did was so against the grain and mold of a basically conformist athletic community the fact that he's also probably mentally ill yeah not for being a bigot necessarily but for being self destructive about his career but the same way that people bunch at turns in auto races hoping to see the crash or go to world wrestling federation matches but the only way to see blood is to see John Rocker and he's the future of American sport this is probably directed mostly to Bob Lipside but anyone else please I'm looking here kind of stepping back because we're looking here at the intersection of sports and politics if you will in the sense of a struggle a lot of discourse in metaphors for politics use sports and combat metaphors which both degrade and sully sports and trivializes war and it distorts and sets a counterproductive level of discourse about our political and social process in our society since at the end of a game of sports we can all go home in our own lives but in politics the issues that are affected you can't just shut the door about your colleagues in the journalism field maybe you have some thoughts or anything else? I would like to come to your college course and discuss this at length but anybody else want to talk about that? I'll tell you one thing in working for national public radio for 10 years as a columnist Bob joked in the beginning that it's the antithesis of working for Fox and it is in many ways one of which is that in 10 years except for really engaging sort of intellectual discussion with my editor there where we really get down to the root of a word and is that really the word we want to use? I have total freedom I have total creative freedom to say anything I want the only mandate ever there in the sports department or in the sport or myself or anybody who's working for NPR is we may not make the metaphor of sport as war and I totally agree with that every football piece I've done it's so tempting the soldiers are marching out on the field and Jim Otto with his double zero the soldier is going to sacrifice for his but if you know and I wasn't there but I went to Vietnam two years ago and rode bikes down the Ho Chi Minh trail with vets who hadn't been back for 30 years and watched them cry and shake and vomit and war is not sport and can never be analogized in the same sentence so I wasn't sure what the rest of the mumbo jumbo you were talking about with politics but that's the war part don't go together sometimes you're all wet Diana I don't think that was mumbo jumbo at all I think that the point is that in many ways sport was created as specifically as either metaphors for politics and war or as preparation for politics and war you know what was the English expression the wars are one on the battlefields of Eaton the playing fields of Eaton see there you go so I think that the idea that then again sports is then sold as a metaphor for these things that's what they were that's what we created for sports was getting boys ready for corporations, for warfare for politics, for capitalism for American life so it makes absolute sense but Billy should really talk about it because both presidential candidates are recording you right now, is that true? I don't know if it's for actually I was asked to speak on the Millennium March in Washington and it wasn't both presidential candidates it was Bill Clinton Al Gore that I'm going to meet so the democratic vote as you say is strong are you going to do it? we know who we're going to vote for back here two more, we have time for two more questions Tom Calaga do we still raffle the panel off at the end of this? I wasn't kidding yeah, okay alright I'm sorry, go ahead this is either for Billy maybe or for Dave just a what if so what if an MVP player on a baseball team today or a first draft choice let's say comes out and says I'm gay what would be the response what is the response to that what happens from the baseball community or the football community? well that's certainly an interesting thought I think for a player to survive Jerry Smith was an all pro football player with the Washington Redskins and if anybody had known that he was gay and spent 14 years with the Redskins a tough overachiever that he was he would have been history for sure it would take a superstar to survive but I think there might be a superstar out there that just could do that there's a lady friend of mine Pat Griffin and a teacher at University of Massachusetts and she knows of a young boy that's the most valuable player on his high school team in the area of there in Massachusetts and the star player and he's totally out I mean that's never happened when I was a young man and it's like maybe the first that it's happening now so if a player like him continued to move on up the ladder and come out I think it would just dissipate people's fears and anxieties about what it means to be gay or what you are being gay I know one of the first things a big barrier that I had to get over was being naked like after a pickup basketball game in the locker room with all the straight guys it was like this thing that I had to go through but it was no big deal I was still the same player I was before they knew I was gay so I think it would really really expedite the the continuance growth of all of us and really dissipate so much bigotry that exists today well from the baseball side I think baseball is different than a lot of sports and one of the reasons from my experience that it would seem so impossible is that baseball is like a marathon and there's so much time that you are not playing the offensive star is never in control of the ball so you have to rely on a lot of different factors to be great and that person's life would change overnight and not about playing he would be under the microscope as a his sexuality in question everything that he did in the past it would take a player like I would think on the scope of like Shaquille O'Neal in the NBA who was seemingly untouchable and nobody's going to mess with someone with that success and baseball I think that part of being a superstar is mental strength and concentration and I don't think a superstar who knows how hard it is to be good in baseball would put that variable in his life I just don't think he'd do it Billy I wonder if I could ask you to talk to the audience a little bit because when you and I sit down and talk I'm just so eye-opening to hear what the world sports is like compared to all the rest of the world we all talk about actors the leading ladies and gentlemen of the big screen are not out but within the acting community at least among their friends and their parties in Hollywood they know who's out and there's a little bit of a code of honor at least you can be out somewhere and go to restaurants where you can be trusted and we can go on down the line in every field where people are out but the only world where you cannot be gay is men's team sports I think it's so interesting when you paint the picture of what's like the virility the masculinity you've got to prove it it's part of the game isn't it? What John Rocker said in Sports Illustrated Bob's right his mistake is he's self-destructive and he's a bigot a bigot is a bigot you can't change people he was raised in that environment he's a hero probably in his hometown but that conversation happens in every hotel room every night when guys are playing cards because the rednecks go and play cards in one room the Latin players go in another the black players or the California player I mean it's just something that it's segmented because you're with each other so much time that the I mean I remember I had a black roommate my first two years in baseball and there was three other black guys on the team and they called him a sellout because he roomed with me and that's just because I was white and he was one of my best friends and I could see the torture in him he had to go home and be around his family and his group and it was so unfair because we were just buddies and we liked each other and we decided to be roommates and we stayed roommates for a couple years but the pressure and the microscope of what your actions are and that whole fiber of masculinity and being tough and not letting them down what are they saying about that roommate of yours now yeah I'm sure right so you know and then in the fact in team sports too that you are subject to a window upstairs with state guys in suits and a corporate attitude on who they want on the field so there's a lot of pressure that's behind the scenes and you don't know about and I just don't think it's going to take coming up through the ranks but the corporate level if you look at the LA Dodgers now that is not even a team it's like a corporation the fox animal behind it and the money and the salaries and these guys they don't have a choice I fell in a major league baseball it's still very rarefied atmospheres we're talking about Diana how many mainstream journalists are out in sports you know it's not a matter of your right it's not a matter of being out but at least as I said before there's a clubby sort of thing we could talk about like I'm not going to out people now but I know you know the journalists who are out you know we could talk to each other no no but they're not in these sports they don't even know each other there's at least one guy probably on every NBA team every NBA team of course there is you know we all know that just by statistics but they don't even know among each other they can't even share those are the last people you want to know it's a totally clandestine society whereas the rest of us at least have someone you can tell look at Billy he lived for like a decade without telling anybody I think we're going to raffle the panel now sadly we have to bring this evening to a conclusion but I want to thank you all for joining us and I want to thank our panel