The play’s nude shower scenes are at first just a titillation, but later the crucial context for the play’s penultimate confrontation – and it is motivated not by the redneck but the superstar. When Mungitt complains to a reporter about “havin’ to take a shower every night with a faggot,” Lemming confronts him in the shower, and humiliates him by angrily kissing him.
What happens next is dramatic but problematic from both a baseball and a theater point of view. The debased pitcher exacts his revenge by firing a lethal beanball at the head of Lemming’s best friend, who is conveniently a member of the opposing team and (to beanball the message home) a religious guy who approves of Lemming’s homosexuality about as much as Mungitt does.
Scared little boys
The likelihood of the friendship or the killer accuracy of the beanball are debatable, but the very idea of a gay player – or worse, a rumor that you might be a gay player, can turn players and their agents into scared little boys.
Last May, when a tabloid gossip column hinted an unnamed New York Mets superstar might be gay, Mike Piazza was so threatened that he called a press conference the next day in Philadelphia. Flanked by beautiful women on both sides, he announced famously, “I’m not gay.” The tabloid reprinted the quote in 600-point type.
The subject is so raw, none of the four major-league agents contacted by The Denver Post for this story would even comment on what advice they might give a hypothetical client who said he was gay. They wanted nothing to do with having their names attached to the subject. But Greenberg said any agent worth his 10 percent “would stop him every step of the way.”
“And if the agent is looking out for the best interest of his client both financially and physically, he’s right (to stop him),” he said. “But if he’s looking after the best interests of his client spiritually, he’d have to reconsider.”
What is the source of all this fear in the usually fearless arena of pro sports? For players, Grace said, “most of it is because your manhood is such an important thing to athletes.” For fans, the idea disrupts not only perceptions of the game and its history but its iconography, such as fathers and sons worshipping stars together.
“It’s a question of one’s nostalgia being troubled, because for all the differences in salaries, and the introduction of designated hitters, there is a continuity in American life between baseball as it was played originally, and baseball as it continues to be played,” Greenberg said. “Baseball is a place where you just don’t want things to be different. For most guys, baseball is a place where they can put the complexities of sexuality aside, where everything was assumed and everything was safe. And now suddenly there’s nuances and threats and dangers.”
Male athletes, the actor Sunjata said, symbolize to the American consciousness what it means to be male in a traditional sense. “And because of that fact, a lot of dated notions about masculinity that seem to be breaking down in society at large are crystallized in these institutions, because this machismo is what it means to be a man.”
But it is a selective distinction, because from David Bowie to Mick Jagger to Michael Stipe, Greenberg said, “America has had a lot less trouble accepting the omnisexuality of rock stars.”
Barrier in baseball
The gay barrier will one day be broken in baseball, but not likely for a very long time. Glenn Burke (who died of AIDS), and Billy Bean (a formerly married man who led a double life as an active ballplayer) were outed in retirement. Greenberg took part of his inspiration for “Take Me Out” from Bean’s story, which was released last week in the book, “Going the Other Way.” Bean said given today’s climate, he does not expect it to happen anytime
soon.
Whenever it does, how may be more important than who. There are three possible scenarios, all resulting in some form of public mayhem.
The first would involve an established, Lemming-like superstar. “The guy in my play has a really misguided sense of self-knowledge,” Greenberg said. “He really, startlingly, thinks he will get away with it because he looks at his remarkably approved life and figures that somehow it’s not going to be a big deal.”
Jones agreed that “if the guy’s a gay, he’d better be a really, really good player. Because if (the team) thinks for one minute he’s disrupting the clubhouse – if he doesn’t hit 50 homers or win 20 games – they’re not going to put up with that.”
The second scenario would involve a retiring star who already has made his money in baseball and simply wants to break the barrier.
More likely, however, it will happen in a third, much uglier way, with a player being outed by a teammate, opponent or the media. And should that player have HIV or AIDS, like Burke, it will be far worse. Fan violence would almost be a given.
“There’s a lot of free-floating violence in this country, and what a perfect target, because (if you’re the instigator), you’ll have a lot of people supporting you,” Greenberg said. “That’s why it can’t be someone else’s decision. There is just something profoundly wrong about that.”
It can’t happen soon enough for Greenberg.
“There will be a tension in baseball until it happens, because the subject keeps coming up,” he said.
“I love the game, and I’m not interested in the private lives of any of the players. I want to know that they are not abusing their families because I can’t root for them if they are. But other than that, I don’t care. It’s the game that matters. But it has to be gotten through, so that it can be seen in its ultimate irrelevance.”
The most daring and lasting legacy of “Take Me Out” is the fact that it does not end sentimentally but badly. And for better or worse, depending on the aftermath of a gay player coming out, it may be looked back upon as prescient.
“Richard’s play is an interesting commentary on the ideals that are put forth in terms of what a democracy should be and how far we have to go yet to match our present reality with those ideals,” Sunjata said. “Sometimes a play, a book or a song comes out that is a little bit ahead of its time, and being ahead of its time, it encourages the times to catch up a little bit.”
Denver Post sports writer John Henderson contributed to this report.
Click here to subscribe to the CultureWest.org Monthly E-Newsletter
