Well boys and girls, visitors of all ages and sexual identity, if you got sucked in by the headline as PT Barnum once "said" there's a sucker born every minute.
Too bad the sucker in this case is MSNBC's Thomas Roberts one of our two Rainbow anchors at the peacock subsidiary.
Hasn't been a good couple of weeks for Mr. Roberts as last week he called out Maggie Gallagher of NOM for not showing up for an interview .... OOPS ... she was in the wrong studio and now MSNBC's gay blade (as opposed to lesbian blade and yours truly favorite the Maddow of Rachel) got sucked in by a story about Microsoft and Apple teaming up, or marrying as the story goes, to have NOM boycott their companies. WTF !!
Whether Roberts or his staff or both is responsible for this boner, it's getting to be like the Elite bloggers copy/pasting from one to the other and then finding out they have gotten wrong or incomplete information which they pose as news .
While its been great to have Roberts on for his hour show and who by in large does a good job, too many screw ups and there may be an opening during the 11 AM to Noon (ET) programming slot at MSNBC. Credibility in newscasting is everything and tolerance for errors only lasts so long.
Oh hell do what we use to do at CBS and blame the interns.
LGBT advocates who were looking to have Prop 5 which would have prevented discrimination based on sexual orientation for a variety of things from housing to employment have been given a big moose pie instead.
58 percent of voters said NO to de gay in what appears to be a very high voter turnout such that they ran out of ballots and had to use sample ballots as replacements.
In 2009 a similar ordinance for the city was knocked down and has been an on going battle since 1976.
It seems wildlife has more advocates than de gay in the state Sarah Palin made infamous.
Everyone has a passion. Mine is baseball. It's a long dry spell from the end of the World Series to MLB opening day and thankfully today the dry spell is over with the first regular season game tonight.
With that in mind and as I have on the previous versions of FOTR since 2009 including at Hearst Newspapers, today is dedicated to the baseball player, high school, college, minor league and pro who feel because of the sport itself, the fans, educational institutions and MLB executives, they need to stay in the closet.
So far as we know there has been only one baseball player who was "out" while still playing and that was Glenn Burke. Burke who played for both the LA Dodgers and Oakland Athletics was out to both teammates and management during his run as a pro player from 1976 to 1979.
During three of those years I was a radio sportscaster and while he may have been "out" to the aforementioned it wasn't, as least as I can remember from those days, public knowledge as that certainly would have stuck with me both at the time and through today.
In his autobiography Burke wrote that prejudice drove him out, prejudice of not being black but gay. He left baseball at the young age of 27. Burke who died of AIDS in 1995 said in an interview with People magazine in 1994 "My mission as a gay baseball player was to break a stereotype ... I think it worked." In 2010 a documentary (trailer below) about Burke was made titled Out: The Glenn Burke Story and was aired on the Comcast Sportsnet Bay Area channel.
While Burke may have broken the stereotype unfortunately his out and proud status did little both then and through today for baseball players to be out and proud while active.
In 2001 on ESPN.com's Page 2 Jim Caple wrote a response to a Letter To The Editor at OUT magazine by Brendan Lemon who claimed he was having an affair with a MLB player which reads in part, Playing in the majors is difficult enough, it will be grueling for a player who endures the constant ugly jeers from fans, the hate mail, the physical threats, the animosity from teammates and the resentment of management.
There is a reason, after all, that Billy Bean waited until after his career to acknowledge his homosexuality. Bean told the New York Daily News it would be "professional suicide" for a gay player to come out during his career.
In an interview on Page 2 sometime back, former player and author of the book Ball Four:The Final Pitch, Jim Bouton was asked among other questions "Do you think baseball players are ready to accept gay players ? " and he answered, I think they are ready, as ready as players were for Jackie Robinson. Enough players will accept him at first, and those that don't accept him, if he's good enough, will eventually have to. You can't wait for every single player to accept a gay player.
The first gay player is going to have to be a pretty good ballplayer. I think it will be healthy for the country for a good player to come out. Then, instead of the question being who is gay or not, the focus will be on the person who asks the question.
Last season some teams participated in the "It Gets Better" video campaign and some organizations are doing their best to halt anti-gay sentiments coming from fans during game play, at this time for a player to be out and open while active is still a hope and a prayer.
In early September 1991 Brad Davis gave up his battle with AIDS. The handsome actor who came to prominence in the 1978 film Midnight Express had been keeping a career ending secret for by then almost six years. He was 41 years young when he died.
In 1985 Davis had been diagnosed with being HIV-positive which according to his wife Susan Bluestein, a casting director in Hollywood, was caused from his use of drugs after his career started to take off with his Golden Globe award winning portrayal of Billy Hayes in Midnight Express. After several years of drug use and excessive drinking Davis cleaned up and got sober in 1981.
1985 was the same year that legendary actor Rock Hudson died of AIDS which brought HIV/AIDS to the forefront in news coverage and put a familiar face on the "gay plague" which then caused Hollywood to become a champion of the HIV/AIDS cause with fundraising efforts spearhead by many but in particular Elizabeth Taylor.
But that notoriety of the disease also came at a cost for actors and actresses, as while Hollywood became a champion it also became a devastator of careers if it were found out members of the acting community were diagnosed HIV-positive or had full blown AIDS.
In true Hollywood fashion, the studios and executives who held actors' careers in their hands, Hollywood went beyond the old studio days of hiding ones sexual preference or identity through its PR department to flat out turning their back on their own which caused those who were gay, lesbian or bisexual to stay further in the closet and those who, whether straight or LGB, suffered from HIV or AIDS to not only get in the closet but lock it and hope no one would ever find the key.
"We do give money to AIDS and the homeless and the blind. But we're not obligated to hire the victims of the various diseases or causes we support. It all boils down to business . . . dollars and cents . . . and those with an illness or the potential for becoming ill are an economic risk." a quote from a well known but "anonymous" Hollywood producer in an article the LA Times published in 1991 two weeks after Davis passed.
In a 1997 interview with New York Times writer Alex Witchel, Davis' wife described the great pains he went to seeking medical help only allowing doctors to visit him at home, ''Without the secrecy he may not have gotten better medical care, but earlier medical care,'' she said. ''It might have given him a little longer time and better quality of life. We became so isolated. He let a lot of friendships go. He was afraid certain people would pick up on some things. Our world shrank to the bare bones." In order to hide his illness Witchel wrote that Davis didn't buy prescriptions in his name but was supplied with prescription "leftovers" from others after they died.
Davis was going to write a book about his ordeal of working in Hollywood and having to keep secret his illness. While he died before he could accomplish that his wife did write a book using Davis' book proposal as the basis for her book, After Midnight: The Life and Death of Brad Davis.
In the proposal Davis wrote the following which speaks volumes of how Hollywood was then and some might ask "still is ?"
''I make my money in an industry that professes to care very much about the fight against AIDS -- that gives umpteem benefits and charity affairs with proceeds going to research and care -- but in actual fact, if an actor is even rumored to have H.I.V., he gets no support on an individual basis. He does not work.''
Well boys and girls, visitors of all ages and sexual identity, if you got sucked in by the headline as PT Barnum once "said" there's a sucker born every minute.
