Singled Out

Starred review from October 15, 2020
Grades 9-12 *Starred Review* Ever high-fived anyone? If so, you have former Major League baseball player Glenn Burke to thank, for he invented the gesture in 1977. His invention might be considered a footnote to history, but a more enduring contribution is Burke's having become the first Major League baseball player to come out as gay. Maraniss' excellent exercise in narrative nonfiction tells Burke's dramatic and ultimately tragic story. At age 19, the preternaturally gifted teen signed a contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers and spent the next 6 seasons working his way up through the ranks, debuting as a Major League player in 1976. Highly extroverted, funny, and charismatic, Burke was a favorite with his teammates, who had no idea that, when away from the team, he was leading the life of an openly gay man. As this gradually became an open secret among his teammates, however, rampantly homophobic management essentially drove Burke out of baseball and into an early grave. Maraniss does an extraordinary job of recording this memorable life in black-and-white photographs and fluid, compelling writing that is both biography and de facto history of gay rights and the depredations of homophobia. This valuable resource is further strengthened by generous back matter, which includes carefully detailed notes, a list of sources, a bibliography, baseball statistics and charts, and a gay-rights time line.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

February 1, 2021
The story of a baseball player whose life serves as testimony to where we've come from and how far we still have to go. In 1977, Burke was a gay Black man playing center field for the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series; by 1995, he would be dead at 42 due to complications of AIDS. Maraniss meticulously charts a path from Burke's Berkeley, California, upbringing as an all-around athlete through his relatively brief but significant MLB stint to San Francisco's Tenderloin District, where he struggled through addiction, incarceration, poverty, housing insecurity, and sickness in the final chapters of his life. The author presents a critical interpretation of Burke's life, juxtaposing interviews with contemporaries with accounts of 1969's Stonewall uprising, Anita Bryant's anti-gay rights campaign, and Magic Johnson's 1991 HIV announcement. This creates a compelling narrative, offering helpful context for young readers in a complicated account of race, sexuality, and a dream deferred, yet it pushes Burke from the foreground, centering the national media and sports establishments that used and critiqued Burke's body and what he did with it. Not exactly a biography, this is a meticulously researched history of the ways queer culture in the '70s intersected with baseball, Blackness, and larger culture wars, with one man at their center. Burke was so impressive a figure, his story so gripping, that this book holds unquestionable merit. (notes, interviews, bibliography, baseball statistics, timeline, Black LGBTQ+ individuals, index) (Nonfiction. 12-18)

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